"Help! YouTube is killing my business!"

Filed in archive Fun on October 20, 2006

Occasionally we like to share a little Friday fun with our readers so they can enjoy the weekend. Check our past Fun entries, especially Weird Al Yankovic's song and video "Don't Download This Song", the Camp Chaos Napster Bad animated series featuring metallica, and archived DiaRIAA Fun.

One casualty of the YouTube phenomenon is UTube.com, the web domain for Universal Tube and Rollerform Equipment Corp. in Ohio.

"It's killing us," said Ralph Girkins, president and owner of the 22-year-old business. "All my worldwide reps use our Web site. Customers all over the world use it to bring up photos of the machinery, descriptions and specifications there."

The web site received 68 million hits in August. At the time this article was written the web site displays the following message "Bad Request (Invalid Hostname)".

In a Google search for "utube," Universal Tube does show up first. However second is a YouTube listing for "music video lazyboy-underwear goes inside the pants."