A short guide to ownership of digital assets

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. Everything we would tell a client about ownership of digital assets in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The reason this keeps coming up

Domains and accounts should be registered to you. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The practical version

Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Where it usually goes wrong

Get it in writing before work starts. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

In practice

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Three things worth confirming about ownership of digital assets before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Losing control of a domain is a genuine emergency — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.