Seven Mile

Venture capital meets Reality web tv.

http://www.youbethevc.com/

Winners gets funding and support from Google, WPP, GrandCentral, Pownce and Slide, plus others.

   See my post yesterday for my thoughts on how this will play out for name owners

  Quote: “Although he (Simon Fuller) is best known for his association with the Spice Girls and managing David Beckham, Fuller created the Pop Idol format and its hugely successful US spin-off American Idol.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2007/nov/11/mediabusiness.google

Quote: “”When a major network turned down Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick’s pilot, they took “Quarterlife” to the Internet…”"

   Something big happened today while everybody was looking the other way.. http://www.mtv.com/overdrive/?id=1573861&vid=187641 This 3 minute clip is must-see TV for every domainer.. Think about your own shows and your ability to drive traffic to those shows using your “other” names.

Exciting times.

Related:  INTEL chip to speed high-definition video via Internet:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7085480.stm

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071108.wradvertising09/BNStory/Technology/home

excerpt: “”New advertising formats, such as mobile devices, the Internet, in-game ads and interactive TV promotions, are expected to grow at a rate of 22.4 per cent between 2006 and 2010, the report says. Broadcasters must make a series of “no-regret moves” to ensure they can capitalize on future trends in advertising. Those are essentially leaps of faith, trying to guess where advertising trends are headed, without seeing an immediate return on investment, said IBM’s general manager of media and entertainment, Richard Anderson.”"

***FS*** Or they could just reach into their wallet and buy available clusters of type-in traffic domain names, giving them an instant web finger-hold, recurring free-cashflow, burndown value, and millions of disposable eyeballs to write their future with.  The Internet isn’t really that hard..  Some people just seem to want to make it look hard to justify their existence/salary.

http://www.dailydomainer.com/2007172-paraguayan-domainer-chris-chena-acquires-tv-channel.html

From the press release: "One of the primary reasons of this acquisition is to make sure that this important medium of communications and source of work for local media professionals remains in Paraguayan hands, with the goal of improve all parts of the company and increasing its national production."

***FS*** I think its a natural progression..  online and TV.. one playing into the other.  It’s good media diversification. If I could buy a channel somewhere within the realm of affordability, I would too.  TV channels and networks probably cheaper in Paraguay than in the Caymans or USA. 

I had the weirdest dream last night..  weird for several reasons. Firstly, I don’t usually dream about the domain business (that I can remember) and they certainly don’t wake me from my sleep at 4AM.

In this dream I was in New York, during some kind of conference and was meeting with Rupert Murdoch about a strategic merger..  A faceless female assistant or key staff-member (who is a mutual acquaintance in said dream) had arranged to bring Rupert by my hotel suite as he made his way to some other meeting. In the office of the suite we talked about the domain name business, how domain name traffic powers part of Google, Yahoo and drives a significant portion of generic-intenet Internet traffic.. Rupe tried to get his head around the concept that many of the companies he had bought and invested in had domain name underpinnings. He was quite clever, savvy and aware of things in my dream.

As much as I wanted to take this meeting to talk shop with today’s William Randolph Hearst, Rupert had somehow heard of me (and the domain industry) and he wanted to take the meeting as well! It wasn’t a love-fest meeting though. Rupert was the classic 2002 era skeptic.. He wanted to talk about charts and projections through 2012. He seemed hurried, synopsizing the domain industry’s highlights and playing devils advocate, talking about fragmented interests and the difficulty of uniting a scatter-shot domain audience around a cohesive core or brand. It didn’t seem like I was going to sell Mr. Murdoch on the benefits of merging a large domain network with his media content core.

I had several browser windows open during our discussion and suddenly, as we were in the wrap-up phase of our conversation (Rupert had his coat over his arm and umbrella in hand) it occurred to me to resize two of the open browser windows on my laptop…

What would happen if every time somebody typed one of our potent domain names they received a single split-screen of targeted paid search advertising, married to a relevant Newscorp media content page?  Type a cooking name and get a relevant food story from today’s Newscorp newspaper…  Type Sportscores.com and get ads coupled with the sports section of Foxnews..  Type PersonalLoans.com and get a split-screen with related content from the WSJ..   Rupert’s eye’s lit up.  I explained how a mash-up of my traffic with his rotating content could turn the 30 million unique visitors we get each month into 60 or 100 million as people came back for more. Then we could ramp up our own Domain Sponsor style third-party syndication business to augment our own proprietary traffic with other domainer’s traffic; making Newscorp websites the most visited on the Internet in about 6 months.

Rupert started talking about creating his own ad marketplace and the mechanics of our proposed merger when it suddenly occurred to me that I had already signed a deal to be sold to a less strategic company for hundreds of millions of dollars less than Rupert was offering..  Then I woke up… That’s what you call a ‘high-class nightmare’ folks

I jotted down a few notes so I could remember to blog about it then went back to another dream about the playboy mansion.

It was the implementation in the Murdoch dream that still resonated the morning after. The content exists today..  the domain name networks exist today.. They are an invisible traffic source, generating hundreds of millions of unique visits a month globally.  How could Newscorp or another media content house elevate it’s Internet presence and exert control over Google by injecting itself as a domain name network owner/sub-syndicator and marrying content to each and every page load?

Lawrence Ng should have a ‘frank’ conversation with Rupert’s people

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/newstex/AFX-0013-18118282.htm

Leon writes:

"…many people are spurning TV, radio, newspapers and other media
outlets for the Internet." 

***FS*** Ain’t that the truth sir.. I have it on but rarely look at it. A wise man once told me that TV is the "tell me a story box" ..  I can listen to the story without looking.  They call that radio. Not sure where either of these mediums is going long term.. Newspaper is in genuine trouble though.  I hate getting newsprint on my fingers.

http://news.com.com/Media+tremors-the+earth+is+shifting/2010-1025_3-6192734.html?tag=ne.fd.mnbc

Josh sends link..  thanks bro!~

CNET’s Harry Fuller speaks to what we all know and feel.  Had somebody sent this article back in time 10 years ago it would have been decried as ludicrous.  I wonder where the "next" 10 years will take us

http://blogs.business2.com/sloan/2007/05/the_domain_biz_.html

Paul Sloan is on CNBC ‘On the Money’ tonight at 7pm Eastern ..  Looking forward to reading his story on the web tomorrow.

Quote: I just recorded an interview for CNBC about a cover story that I wrote for the June issue of Business2.0, which is now on its way to subscribers… The magazine article, which is about one of the world’s top domainers, is scheduled to be posted tomorrow at Business2.com.

Wow!  Crazy times.  Not about me.

Sahar says: http://www.conceptualist.com/?p=177