18?

I just saw an interesting series of commercials, late night on some disaster show on a bsaic-cable type network. One was the "Dotster Dots," a weird Spice Girl-like group of women and some cheeseball "technical guy" explaining whatever the hell their service was. The basic gist is that they're a domain hosting and Web design thing. And their Web site is www.18.dotsterdots.com (and they're giving away a Corvette).

Then after that is some work-at-home scam. I didn't really see what they were selling. But their site is www.18work.com.

These are both fairly nonsensical URLs. In fact, it's fair to say that they're obfuscated, deliberately chosen to be cryptic and incomprehensible to non-technical audiences. Go Daddy is kinda incomprehensible (what does it have to do with domain hosting?), but it's simple and it's godaddy.com. If you tell someone to go to gogdaddy.com, they're probably not going to screw it up. www.18.dotsterdots.com is an OK URL for an internal corporate address, to support a particular technical structure, or whatever. But as a consumer site?

Basically only someone who sees the commercial would know what the URL is. No word of mouth, basically. 18work.com is just strange.

But they both have "18" in the URL and fairly conspicuously in the Dots URL. I've seen some other late-night commercials with just Web site addresses. So.. is it just obfuscation to prevent people from being able to tell the address where they were scammed? I don't really have any theories besides that, but it doesn't take a total rocket scientist to know that it would be extremely simple to figure that part of the mystery out.

It's late. I wonder about such things.

Update: The Dotster Dots are named Cool Dot, Smooth Dot, Sweet Dot, Sassy Dot, and Mini Dot. The guy is John. All for less than a dollar a day.