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Not Just Newspapers, TV Suffering, Too

Elliot Silver
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Most of the stories I’ve heard about the standard mainstream outlets losing ad revenue to the Internet seem to be focused on newspapers. An article in the Boston Globe this morning would indicate that television stations, even beloved and trusted stations, are losing out to the Internet as well.
To most Boston sports fans, the name Bob Lobel strikes a cord. I haven’t watched Boston news frequently over the past couple of years, but I can still hear Lobel’s voice in the back of my head, either doing to pre/post game for the Pats or Sox. Today’s Globe article announces that Lobel, who has been with arguably the most popular and well-known television station in Boston (WBZ TV 4), will be leaving as a result of a “workforce reduction.”
According to the article in the Boston Globe:

“The station, like other media outlets across the country, is facing increasing pressure to cut costs as it grapples with declining ad revenues and viewership. On Monday, the station announced plans to reduce its overall workforce of 220 by 10 percent.“

While I am sure Lobel will be scooped up by another local network because of his well-liked persona, his leaving WBZ shows that newspapers aren’t the only media outlet affected by the dominance of the Internet.

Owning a Celebrity Domain Name

Elliot Silver
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I have seen many people selling the domain names of celebrities, athletes, politicians and other famous people. These people typically sell the names under the guise that they can be built into fan sites. Since fan sites may not generate revenue, it’s a form of expressing freedom of speech and protected under the First Amendment. While it may be true that owning a fan site on a domain name that uses the celebrity’s name is perfectly legal, by selling the name (or even buying it), the burden of bad faith may may be met, as the seller is profiting from the celebrity whose name made that domain name worth something.
If someone sells the domain name of a well-known person, they are presumably profiting from that person’s good name. By this virtue, bad faith may be claimed by the celebrity, putting the domain name in peril. As some WIPO panels have recently ruled, a change in ownership can be likened to a new registration. Because of this, buying the domain name of a famous person could be the precurser to a UDRP ruling.
Of course I am not an attorney, so this isn’t legal advice, but just my opinion and general domain advice.

Lowell Project: Finding Website Advertisers

Elliot Silver
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Finding advertisers will probably be the most difficult task for me once Lowell.com is softly launched sometime next week. It is difficult to convince someone to spend money advertising with an unproven business, especially considering the current economic situation. As bad as it is around the country, Lowell, Massachusetts has a fairly high unemployment rate and business is suffering in the city. However, because of rejuvenation efforts taken on by the city, there are some positive signs, and I want to do what I can to improve the economy and drive tourism (as much as a website can).
Because I changed my revenue generation strategy for Lowell.com from the directory model to a guide model, there is going to be a greater emphasis on acquiring individual business clients to advertise. On the Lowell.com blog, I discuss my strategy for acquiring advertisers. I am planning to get in touch with businesses in several less invasive ways. Based on my experience working in my father’s retail store, I am going to avoid the most common (and easiest) way to communicate with a business.
If you have time today, check out the Lowell.com blog for more information about my strategy to acquire customers.

5 With… Jeff Reynolds, AmericanFlags.com

Elliot Silver
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Jeff Reynolds, AmericanFlags.comJeffrey Reynolds is the President/CEO of Precision Marketing Solutions, Inc., a privately held communications and ecommerce company based on Long Island. The company’s portfolio includes about 3,000 domain names and websites in a dozen markets, the most prominent of which is AmericanFlags.com.
Since purchasing that domain a month after 9/11 on eBay for $2,650, Reynolds has turned the once vacant URL into one of the nation’s top flag retailers, with revenues doubling annually since that time. Other websites in the company’s portfolio include JackOLantern.com, SantasMailbox.com, Discrimination.com, DivorceDirectory.com, BestPsychics.com, PetSitter.com and BlackBikeWeek.com.
Precision Marketing offers a wide range of marketing, public relations and communications services on a flat fee or monthly retainer basis, as well as strategic business consulting services with an emphasis on ecommerce.
Dr. Reynolds holds a Master’s Degree in Public Administration and a Ph.D. in social policy from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he is a member of the adjunct faculty. In addition to his business endeavors, Dr. Reynolds provides strategic marketing, government relations, fund development and program evaluation services to health and human service organizations on Long Island including a youth violence prevention program and the region’s largest HIV/AIDS care agency.
1.) EJS: How did you acquire AmericanFlags.com, and when you were bidding on it, did you plan to build a website/business using the name?
JR: “I acquired the name in October of 2001 – about a month after 9/11 –via an eBay auction with no specific plan in mind. The second-highest bidder emailed me a note of congratulations and told me that his interest in the name was related to the fact that he had a warehouse full of American flags he was looking to peddle. It was an instant match as I didn’t have a single flag to sell and probably wouldn’t have been able to find inventory at any price given that most major suppliers were sold out within days after 9/11. In a few emails, we worked out a simple dropshipping arrangement.
I fired up my brand new copy of Microsoft Frontpage and threw together a single page website. Orders began coming in literally within seconds of the site going live and I re-couped my whopping $2,650 domain investment almost immediately. Once we had depleted the original inventory, I spent the next couple years building a base of major suppliers, expanding the product line to include US flags of different weights and sizes, world flags, state flags, military flags, residential/commercial flagpoles and more.
I never imagined the business would be where it is today, and it’s been an educational, occasionally overwhelming (think July 4th of every year) and dare I say – even fun – ride. My wife Maureen has become a vital part of the business and with infinitely more patience and tact is far better than I am at things like customer service.”
2.) EJS: Do you think a domainer/domain investor can also be a domain developer without losing his identity?
JR: “Absolutely and having a foot in both worlds has helped diversify both my skills and my business portfolio. The trend among domain investors is development and shifts in the PPC market, along with some other dynamics will likely accelerate the convergence of domain investing and development. Having said all that and getting back to the identity question, most people know me as the “AmericanFlags.com guy,” which I’ve perpetuated by speaking at TRAFFIC and doing interviews such as this one.
The flag business overshadows some of my other projects, but not to the point of great detriment. Frankly, I’ve always seen my experience in developing AmericanFlags.com as a great narrative for helping to reframe the public perception of domain name investors. It’s an all-American success story and at the end of the day, we’ve created something of real value. Done right, development can put a positive, constructive face on domaining and help us shed the misplaced “cybersquatter” label that’s been wrongly assigned by some special interest groups and media sources.”
3.) EJS: Can you give some advice to people who own domain names that they would like to develop, but have no experience with web development?
JR: “Start today. Bounce some ideas off a few friends and family members. Do some market research and talk to folks who have done it. Map out timeframes and then get to work. Good design doesn’t cost what it once did, nor does coding or content development. You can do it in small steps and scale things up as you go. And development doesn’t necessarily mean handling products, it can mean creating a directory with paid listings, a forum or some other service.”
4.) EJS: Would you have had the same success if you had simply registered a name like eAmericanFlags.com, or is owning the premier domain name essential to your business?
JR: “The domain name is absolutely essential to the business. Having a category-killer domain means having the wind at your back as you develop, test and market your product line. It means instant high-quality type-in traffic that increases almost daily. It means better deals with suppliers, more credibility with consumers and a better response from the media. The strength of our name has opened the door to significant military and corporate sales with folks who otherwise probably wouldn’t take our calls and put us at the top of a space formally dominated by multigenerational businesses within just a few years.”
5.) EJS: Do you think you could replicate the business model for AmericanFlags.com in another vertical, and what challenges would need to be overcome?
JR: “Sure, we could replicate the model, though I’m not that hot on creating more work. Running a full-fledged site with more than 2,000 SKUs is an immense task just in terms of order processing, customer service, purchasing, inventory management, shipping and receiving and accounting. I’m content to build out some smaller properties that reflect personal interests or work with the seasonality of the flag business, but am not looking to start a new endeavor of the same magnitude right now.”
BONUS!
6.) EJS: What other projects are you working on at the moment?
JR: “We just launched PetSitter.com, a directory of professional pet sitters and our third new project so far this year. We’ve got two other projects on the drawing board for the Summer/Fall, though I’ve been focusing a large amount of my time on increasing our PR/marketing client base. We’re really good at helping folks attract free media attention through press releases, direct pitches and promotions.
We’ve also taken on some clients and helped them increase their sales conversions by refining the checkout process, boosting product descriptions and making some other minor changes that can have a huge impact on shopping cart abandonment. It’s been rewarding to take some of the lessons we’ve learned and help others scale new heights in terms of visitors, revenues and their own expectations.”

Steve Morsa Guest Post: When City.orgs Make Perfect Sense

Elliot Silver
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While the debate over whether building city/community sites (at least in the US) should only ever be built on .coms might continue for some years to come, let me share one particular situation–though very rare it be—where doing so on an extension other than .com (and more particularly, on a .org) makes perfect sense:
Earlier this year, I picked up a city.org (San Marcos; just north of San Diego) for a 75,000 population city in California with excellent demographics, an extensive and broad-based commercial/ business community; and not one, but two top-rated colleges; including one of the highly desired Cal-State campus’.
In my pre-purchase analysis, I discovered via search on the city name that there were not one, but in fact no fewer than two of these identically-names cities in the US (plus a number in other countries); and that the .com version was already an operating city site for the Texas city with this same name.
What I realized is that it would be not just O.K. to build out such a .org, but actually smart to do so; for no less than these four reasons:
#1: Anyone visiting the .com Texas city site looking for information concerning the CA city; regardless of how they got there (type in or search engine); would quickly realize that the .com was clearly not the place they were looking for; leading them to click away and keep looking (this is where good SEO comes in) for the correct city (once I begin build-out; probably in 2009; I’ll request reciprocal homepage button/ links; me to the Texas version; Texas version to me; to further insure that any confused visitors will quickly find their way to the city they were looking for; whether CA or Texas).
#2: Relatedly; since this is not a big-name “touristy/vacation-type” city, most of the site visitors (who will be seeing the local/ area businesses’ ads) will be the actual residents of this California city, and not vacationers from outside the area. Because this is so, remembering that the “official” (it’s official if you make it so) city site is located at city.org and not city.com will not be anywhere near the problem it is/ would be with well-known, high-visibility cities like Palm Springs, Chicago, and San Diego.
#3: As others have pointed out as well, the .org is well-known (at least in the US) as the extension where you can expect to find usually useful, valuable, unbiased facts, information, and other content from government and (non-profit) organizations.
Additionally, many 100’s (1000’s?) of city/ town/ county governments throughout the US already use .org as their official “city hall” address.
These two deeply ingrained perceptions of .org sites fits right in with what you may/ likely want your city site to “feel” like to Internet visitors anyway; they already come with built-in trust and authority.
#4: While “experts” debate on whether this is true or not; and/or how much difference it makes in the search engine positions if it is; the .org sites may be receiving a greater weight than .com due to their “unbiased/ government” reality/ perception.
And while the .com version of this city could have cost perhaps as much as $30,000-50,000 or more even if they’d sell it to me (no; I didn’t ask), I was able to negotiate the .org down to less than $1,600 due to its–mistaken in this rare case—perceived great inferiority to the .com.
This approach can also work for popularly-named communities/ “area designators” like Apple Valley, Happy Valley, and Sun Valley (it’s a real eye opener how many valleys there are in the US with the same name); each of which valley (name) are readily able to support multiple extension city/ community sites, since each are in different states.
So; while in the overwhelming majority of cases the .com is clearly the way to go assuming one can afford it (though I agree that those that say that a successful, “can make a very nice living from it” city/ community site can be created on probably most any extension [ though I’d personally only use a .com or .org in the US ] ); a .org can still be a great, more affordable way to create something worth having…and someday selling.
Bottom line? If you can’t afford the cost of a city.com (or even if you can but want to buy cheap/ risk less), see if you can find yourself a nice (I’d recommend 25,000+ population; especially if it’s not a resort-type city) city.org where the city.com is a built out, in-use site…in some other state/ area/ community.
So; while they certainly remain the first choice if money is no object; expensive city.com sites are not the only path to successful city/ community website businesses.
Happy hunting.

Registrars Should Help Prevent Cybersquatting

Elliot Silver
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In the United States, smoking is perfectly legal for people who are 18 years of age or older. Likewise, it is perfectly legal to consume alcohol if you are 21 years of age or older. Corner stores and supermarkets are required to check the identification of anyone trying to buy one of these products if they look younger than a certain age. There are also notices on the packaging explaining the health risks of consuming these products. Of course people still do consume the products after reading the warning labels, but the government lets them know the risk and gives them something to think about.
As it stands right now, knowingly profiting off of the trademark and goodwill of a company via domain name is against the Lanham Act and can lead to penalties of up to $100,000 per domain name. Also as it stands right now, this fact may not be known by thousands of domain registrants who knowingly register infringing domain names each day, but unknowingly break the law.
When I first entered the domain business, I frequently heard stories about the Internet pioneers who registered domain names of major brands before those brands thought to register them on their own. They were frequently rewarded with large sums of money from the brand owner, as Internet law was still fuzzy, and owning a generic domain name like Apple.com, Bud.com or McDonalds.com wasn’t against any laws. If a person does not know that they aren’t permitted to sell a domain name that includes the word Microsoft to the company named Microsoft, they may register the domain name with that intent. While seasoned domain investors know the law, unseasoned buyers may think what they are doing is legitimate.
I will be the first to admit that I registered a few domain names that may have infringed on brands while I was in graduate school when I first started out investing in domain names. Little did I know, there were laws against doing this – and this was in 2003! I am very fortunate that I never faced any penalties for doing this, and since learning about the Lanham Act, I haven’t knowingly registered an infringing domain name because I don’t have the stomach to worry about potential legal issues. No, I am not better than anyone else, but the knowledge of the law and knowledge of the stiff penalties encouraged me to stick to very defensible generic domain names.
With cybersquatting continuing to grow and be reported in the mainstream press, I think we need to begin to hold the registrars somewhat accountable. Sure it would be impossible to completely prohibit people from registering infringing domain names because who is to say what is infringing or not. However, I think the registrars should provide a notice at the checkout stage of domain registration if a person is about to buy a domain name that probably contains a famous mark. I said this same thing back in July, but as cybersquatting continues to grow, now is the time to reiterate it.
I don’t think registrars should disallow someone from registering a domain name with a famous mark as that would be utterly subjective. But I do think they should put a notice about the Lanham Act, in case a person is unaware of the ramifications of owning an infringing domain name. It is scary to think that a $7.00 domain registration can cause a $100,000 lawsuit.
Registrars should at least give notice to their customers. At a time when the domain industry is facing tumult from outsiders, domain registrars should at least do something to help protect and inform their registrants, rather than simply take their money and not care what happens after. I know this is a stretch, as we have seen some registrars automatically offer up advertising on domain names that are simply parked on their servers, and they don’t seem to pay attention to whether they are monetizing a trademarked domain name or not. It’s a stretch, but it’s time domain registrars become more accountable.

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