Following up on a post from a few days ago, it was revealed that Rick Schwartz sold the name iReport.com to CNN for $750,000. Also included in this price is the hyphenated version, i-Report.com. These great domain names will be used by CNN to supplement their i-Report program.
Founded in August of 2006, i-Report encourages viewers from around the country to send their own videos and photos of breaking news stories in their cities and neighborhoods. This user generated media feature has become popular, and it frequently allows CNN to break news stories before other networks are on the ground.
CNN had to pony up 750K because they didn’t have the foresight to buy it when they launched their i-Report in 2006. Instead, they waited until the show became a hit. Typical corporate myopia. And since Rick bought the name before 2006, there was no way they could accuse him of Bad Faith and just take it from him.
in their defense, rick may have wanted $100k for the name then and when some producer for the show said “lets spend $100k for a name for a program that we haven’t launched yet and that we don’t know will last 8 weeks ” people understandably would have been nervous.
I am amazed some big projects even get launched before securing the domain name for it, especially when the project is so intertwined with the Internet. Excellent for Rick and the industry.
***UPDATED BY ELLIOT***
I tend to agree with Gordon. Knowing Rick, the price for that name was probably mid 6 figures before CNN or anyone every even came to the table. It’s a great generic domain name, and Rick would have no reason to sell unless he received a great offer. However, if a company went to market with a “brandable” name and didn’t buy the corresponding domain name, I would take them to task.
As Gordon said, mid-6 figures is alot to pay for something that was originally just a segment on CNN but grew.
On the other hand, I blogged about Citibank and their “Thank You” Rewards program. I think it was dumb not to purchase ThankYou.com right away, because with that program, they were branding EVERYTHING as “Thank You.” I worked on the retail merchandising team at their direct marketing agency, and everything was associated with Thanking customers. With a branded program that Citi threw millions of dollars behind, they should have bought ThankYou.com before they launched instead of after.
CNN’s plans probably weren’t as ambitious when i-Report came out. Just my opinions.
Nice Sale
and maybe Frank Schilling can sell them ireporter.com for another 750,000k…
j
My theory is that Rick did his homework and saw it had matured into a hit show. The point where the producers really dropped the ball was when the show’s option was picked up. That would have been over a year ago and they would have paid far less than 750K if they went for it then. I don’t agree that it’s a great generic name because I doubt it was doing any intuitive traffic before that show came on the air. No one types in “ireport.com” unless there’s a reason.
Does this have anything to do with the ireporter tool found on moguling.com? Looks like blogs will put your typical domainer out of business. Hats off to people who actually put some work into developing their blog
This is all very, very interesting if true; but you decide.
http://www.we-report.com
or
http://www.wereport.com