NBC Universal and Microsoft, the parents of msnbc.com, are holding high-level talks about changing its name, an unusual and potentially risky endeavor for the third-most popular news website in the United States.

The two parents have not yet agreed on what to call the site. But according to internal memorandums obtained by The New York Times this week, the parents have concluded that the brand known as msnbc.com, a strictly objective news site, is widely confused with MSNBC, the cable television channel that has taken a strongly liberal bent in recent years.

Charlie Tillinghast, the president of msnbc.com, wrote in one of the memos, “Both strategies are fine, but naming them the same thing is brand insanity.” The channel and website are already separate companies.

Under the current plan, the msnbc.com Web address would become a site exclusively for the cable channel, fulfilling the channel’s desire to have an independent site to promote its TV programs.

The existing news site, called the “blue site” internally, would move to a new and as-yet-undetermined Web address. There is a subsection on msnbc.com for the cable channel.

The websites under the msnbc.com umbrella are visited by almost 50 million Internet users each month, according to the measurement firm comScore.Only two news brands, Yahoo and CNN.com, are bigger.

Andrew Heyward, a former CBS News president and an adviser to media companies on digital strategy, said the renaming idea had merit.

“It’s incredibly important in this media cacophony for brands to be consistent, for brands to stand for something,” said Heyward, who has advised NBC in the past. “And those two brands, each strong in their respective areas, are increasingly standing for different things.”

Corporations change their names from time to time (Andersen Consulting became Accenture, Philip Morris became Altria, Blackwater became Xe) but giving up a Web address as popular as msnbc.com is highly unusual. It is akin to a business closing a bustling storefront and posting a sign that asks customers to visit its new location.

For a website, at least, the new location is only a click away.

“You can quickly redirect people who might be confused,” Heyward said.

Nonetheless, msnbc.com risks sacrificing years of brand loyalty by coining a new Web address.