The Castello Brothers of the Castello Cities Internet Network (CCIN) have been added as guest speakers at the 2010 Local Interactive Advertising: The ‘Business of Making Money’ Conference to be held February 8th and 9th, 2010 at the Grand Hyatt New York in Manhattan, a conference I plan to attend. With large companies (like ESPN) continuing to focus on hyperlocal media, now is a great time for David and Michael to get in front of this audience and talk about city .com domain names.
“If legacy media companies were conservative parents, Michael and David Castello would be the beguiled rock stars leading the kids astray,” said Gordon Borrell, CEO of Borrell Associates, the producer of the 2010 Local Interactive Advertising: The ‘Business of Making Money’ Conference. “These guys bear watching. One of their sites makes more money than any locally owned media site in that market.”
This is good news for geodomain development companies like mine because David and Michael have a way of energizing people, and they will be speaking directly to other local media companies, including newspapers, television and radio station owners, local magazines, Internet executives, advertising agencies, and a host of other companies that operate within the local media space.
From a pure advertising perspective, I don’t believe CCIN would be as successful in the local markets if they owned names like PalmSpringsCA.com or PalmSprings.info instead of PalmSprings.com. Sure, they could have hired the best journalists, editors, photographers, designers…etc and become a local news organization on a lesser quality domain name and the content would make up for the lesser domain name, but that isn’t their business model.
Owning city .com domain names has opened many doors for David, Michael, and the all-star CCIN marketing team, and they are perfect representatives for the geodomain vertical at this high powered conference.
“From a pure advertising perspective, I don’t believe CCIN would be as successful in the local markets if they owned names like PalmSpringsCA.com or PalmSprings.info instead of PalmSprings.com. ”
100% true, and more importantly, I wouldn’t have bothered to start CCIN or even be in this business if we didn’t own names of that magnitude when I started to monetize them in 1997.
Once small businesses start getting the power of geodomains, they will not just focus more on online local advertising…the ones that really “get it” will see the deep value in owning geodomains themselves.
If your plan is to hold and sell to one of these types of end-users…then guys like David educating small businesses is good stuff.
If you would rather develop and take advantage of the increased level of advertising…now is the time to buy and develop…while you still can.