Anyone here had media interest for owning a domain name?

[Reppy]

Has anyone here ever had media exposure for owning a domain name that had TM issues?

Did it have a negative or positive effect?

Did you capitalise on it?

A couple of years ago on the front page of an Australian newspaper it exposed a fraudster who owned www.sydneyopera.org who had actually ripped off a few patrons of www.sydneyoperahouse.com

I owned www.sydneyoperahouse.org and as a result got a LOT of type in traffic. In fact I even had one journalist from a rival newspaper ring me to tell me that I had been fingered as the fraudster.

He knew that I wasn't, but I think he was chasing the article from the angle that the rival publication had targeted an innocent person. It was during the course of the conversation that he realised that he had typed in sydneyoperahouse.org and not the sydneyopera.org that they had reported in the newspaper.

I didn't do anything at the time to capitalise on the exposure. The site then merely had a bunch of photos that my dad had taken some 30 years previously. I had originally registered the domain back in 2001 as a 'gift' for my father and put the pics up. He had little experience with the internet back then so it was a bit of 'oooo, look at that!!!'

Anyone else here have similarly themed experiences?

Is anyone else here a media whore who would welcome the attention and a chance to be dragged to court for being a naughty little cyber-squatter? :D

 

[kraam]

really who might that reporter be? im from australia.

 

[RogueWriter]

Is anyone else here a media whore who would welcome the attention and a chance to be dragged to court for being a naughty little cyber-squatter? :D

Absolutely not, I have better things to do with my time than risk my reputation and meager earnings by cyber squatting. And personally, someone squatting on one of my domains will have more than some bad publicity to worry about.

Now, as for general media coverage, I did have one site included in an article. Got a fair bump in traffic for 2-3 days, but it tapered off. Haven't been the topic of a major worldwide story yet, though. :]

 

[Reppy]

really who might that reporter be? im from australia.

Which one? Though I assume that you're referring to the one that contacted me, not the one that wrote the original article.

I can't remember. It was back in mid to late 2002. I have the article on file somewhere. It was either in The Australian and the journo contacting me was from the Sydney Morning Herald, or it was in the SMH and the journo was from The Australian.