AXIOS Media update : How did they come up with the brand and secured the domain Axios.com ?

AXIOS Media is an emerging media company that intends to shift the paradigm of how news and content syndication operates; they acquired the domain Axios.com from a 40 year old software company.

The company is backed by a $10 million dollar fund and has acquired top talent from a variety of tech and media publications.

Roy Schwartz, formerly at Politico, is President and a co-founder of AXIOS Media.

In a recent blog post, Mr. Schwartz describes the process of coming up with the Greek word for “worthy,” Axios, as the name of their new media brand.

“You might think it’s relatively simple to pick a name: find something clever, slap dot-com on it and get to work. It turns out any word, or combo of words, or variants of words, or even clever new spellings of words are either in use, or owned by a motley crew of so-called squatters.

They sit on URLs until some sucker like us rolls around, then try to jack you up for as much as they can get. This can be a few thousand dollars or in the case of something like graph.com, 3 million bucks.”

He also shares the initial branding challenges the company faced, in order to choose a brand that is free of any trademark issues:

“Once you think you’ve found a name, you realize somebody somewhere has apparently trademarked every version of it in the media space. We liked Vital, Think, ReThink, First and many others. Fat chance. All taken. As a start-up, you don’t want to screw around with legal bills and the threat of losing your new brand name, so you move on. We did.”

How did they pick the winner, Axios, and the domain Axios.com ?

“Eventually we did what we SHOULD have done months earlier: stop flirting with words one at a time. (We did this to get what we want AND hold down costs). Instead, we got promiscuous and flirted with a bunch of gettable names all at once: VitalNow, Sync, Level, Frame and our ultimate winner: Axios.

To us, Axios captures the limitless ambition of our journey. It is muscular and memorable, defined yet very definable by us. It’s a name only WE would pick, amplifying how this isn’t a spin-off or upgrade — it’s a brash new category. It’s concise but bold. It flickers with a little mischief, given it sounds like access, of which ours will be superior to most. It’s literal meaning (worthy) fits perfectly with our mission to surface only worthy information.”

What advice does the AXIOS Media President offer to start-ups looking for a domain that matches their brand?

• Make the process a group thing. This is a terrific lens into the creative dimension of peoples’ minds. They love being part of such a big decision. But it’s addictive: so set a TIME LIMIT. Otherwise, it can become a terrific time suck, which it was becoming for us.
• Know you won’t get anything obvious or conventional. Think exotically from the get-go. This includes made-up words and wild combos. The more common the word, the more expensive it will be to buy.
• Pick a few words that speak to your ambitions. Check English, Greek and other variants. Then, look at them solo or slapped together with another word or modifier. Don’t labor too long over this part.
• Find a good name broker (we recommend Mark Daniel at Domain Holdings) and trademark lawyer (The gang at Cooley is strong). Send them a batch of names to check all at once instead of doing one-offs. It takes several days to a week to get full results. Don’t forget to check Europe trademark issues, too, if you have global ambitions. And buy the .eu and other domains country-by-country.
• Keep your focus group diverse but small. Ultimately, trust your gut — and legal adviser. You will know the right one after it soaks in for a few days.

For the full blog post about how AXIOS Media chose their brand name and domain name, click here.

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