Millions of Dollars in Publicity for a $1,000 Reward to Find Tiger Woods Cigar Guy

Elliot Silver
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By now, you have likely seen the famous Tiger Woods Ryder Cup photograph, with the ball in mid-air heading right for the photographer, and an interesting-looking guy smoking a cigar in the background. In case you haven’t seen it, the image is above for your viewing pleasure.

Despite the shot looking cool, as the ball was headed directly for the camera, the real story became the hunt for the guy smoking the cigar. Dubbed “Cigar Guy,” the Be Frugal blog (BeFrugal.com) offered a $1,000 reward to whomever is the first person identify the person smoking the cigar. They are holding a contest because they want this guy to be their next spokesman.

The contest and $1,000 reward have generated millions of dollars in publicity. News outlets including Huffington Post, NBC Sports, ABC, Wall Street Journal, and CNN are covering this special offer with news articles and reports, all linking to the BeFrugal.com website. What would essentially cost the company $1,000 has brought them priceless coverage.

This is great viral marketing!

Boston Globe to Use BostonGlobe.com as Pay Site & Boston.com as Free Site

Elliot Silver
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3

Editors of the Boston Globe announced that they are moving towards the paid subscription model, and they intend to use BostonGlobe.com as the portal for the paid news site, which will contain all of the articles currently found in the print edition. They will keep Boston.com as the free website for visitors who choose not to pay for subscriptions.

From a geodomainer’s perspective, I think it’s nice to see that the Boston Globe is going to reinforce that BostonGlobe.com is one website with paid news and content, while their city.com site, Boston.com, will remain free and presumably the most widely read. Boston.com will have event listings and really be the go to site for information about Boston, notoriety which I believe it’s already achieved.

From a blogger’s perspective, it will be interesting to see how this experiment goes. Rupert Murdoch has been talking about putting up a pay wall as have others, which was previously tried by the NY Times (owners of the Boston Globe) with their Times Select version (no longer running).

If newspapers successfully adopt the paid subscriber model, perhaps bloggers and others will follow suit. In my opinion, it’s unlikely that the paid model will work since there are still plenty of blogs and websites that make enough money from advertisers that a pay wall isn’t necessary. I am an avid Boston Globe reader, but I won’t pay to read it since there are plenty of other sources of free information.

Did Facebook Quietly Acquire FB.com?

Elliot Silver
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I read an interesting “Tweet” on George Kirikos’ Twitter feed this morning. According to Domaintools’ Whois History tool, the domain name FB.com changed hands on September 3, 2010. Prior to this change, the domain name was registered to the American Farm Bureau Federation. The organization owns FB.org, which might explain their willingness to part with FB.com.

FB.com is currently registered to DNStination  Inc., and it is registered at Mark Monitor, the same corporate registrar used by Facebook for their Facebook.com registration. Could Facebook have stealthily acquired FB.com? The domain name does not currently resolve anywhere, but it would seem to be a good domain name for them to own, especially with the popularity of url shorteners.

Ironically enough, there is a page on Facebook called “Petition to make www.fb.com an official link to facebook is on Facebook.” The group currently has 75 members. Perhaps they were on to something.

Research in Motion’s Tablet Named Playbook

Elliot Silver
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2

Research in Motion PlaybookCanada-based Blackberry maker, Research in Motion, announced the name of its highly anticipated tablet computer. Once speculated to be called the Black Pad, RIM’s new tablet will be known as the Playbook. The name of the tablet was revealed today at the BlackBerry Developer conference in San Francisco.

Similar to the web presence for Apple’s iPad tablet computer, Playbook.com is being used by another company. For a number of years, Playbook.com has been operated by Marc Lawrence as a sports wagering odds website. It will be interesting to see if RIM attempts to acquire this domain name, assuming they have not been able to do so already.

Interestingly, it looks like BlackberryPlaybook.com was just registered last week. This privately registered domain name currently resides on CSCDNS.net DNS, which is owned by Corporation Service Company, a company that handles domain registration and other services for large companies such as Research in Motion. The domain name forwards to the Blackberry website. Other Playbook related domain names continue to be registered as I write.

Cybersquatters should beware though. Research in Motion has been known to file UDRPs for domain names it believes it has a right to own. In fact, last year, they filed a UDRP for 111 domain names and won.

Bump.com – VC Funded Startup on DigiMedia Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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3

DigimediaAnyone that’s been around the domain industry for any length of time has almost certainly come across DigiMedia-owned domain names. You’ve probably also heard about Scott Day, the company’s founder whose previous career before domain names was in the farming field (pun intended).

I read an article in Mashable about a new startup called Bump, operating on Bump.com (via Berkens’ Facebook feed). Bump is a unique social networking startup that wants people to be able to connect using license plates as the primary vehicle (pun intended). It’s a unique concept, and upon checking the Whois for Bump.com, I noticed that DigiMedia is the owner.

Although I don’t have any specifics about this deal/venture, there was an article about Bump’s funding, which mentioned DigiMedia. According to the article,

“Thrower’s brand new association so distant has lifted $1 million in seed funding, from Digimedia, Tal Kerret (chairman of Oberon Media), Christophe Vandaele (chairman of Vandaele Holdings), Charlie Baker (partner with DLA Piper), Bill Hein (former SVP during EMI) as well as Bob Ezrin (music producer). It additionally is in talks to lift the $6 million Series B turn as well as has done an merger in the imaging record space.”

I believe the DigiMedia team embraces partnership opportunities with best of breed companies and entrepreneurs on some of their domain names. You can have a look at FantasyFootball.com as another example of a great domain name in use by the company.

Its nice to see good things happening for this company. As anyone who has met Scott Day and Jay Chapman (DigiMedia President) can tell you, the company principals are great guys.

Zoosk or Zooks? Who Cares – The Company Owns Both

Elliot Silver
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2

Zooks

I was watching some late night television the other night when I saw a commercial for Zoosk.com… or was it Zooks.com? It’s actually Zoosk, and the company did two things I consider smart when it comes to domain names and its website.

The company recognized that some consumers confuse Zoosk and Zooks, and both domain names were purchased. It appears that they bought the Zooks.com domain name from a Harley Davidson dealership called Big Barn Harley-Davidson. Interestingly, it was registered to a company called Media Market in Idaho in between the Harley dealership and this dating website, and I previously wrote about Media Market appearing to make domain acquisitions on behalf of large companies.

The second smart move I noticed was that on the typo Zooks.com domain name, they actually have a small portal built to promote the Zoosk brand and to direct visitors to the correct website. In fact, the Zooks.com mini portal mentions, “Zooks is a common misspelling of Zoosk.”

According to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, “Zooks” gets nearly 15,000 exact match searches globally each month. By having a website on Zooks.com, the company is ranked #2 on Google for this search, just behind the correct Zoosk.com website. With the top results known to get the majority of traffic from searchers, owning this position as a result of building the mini portal instead of a 301 redirect was brilliant. The company now owns the top 3 results, and it also has sitelinks on the first.

Smart moves for Zoosk!

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