My Client Is Writing A Book About A Famous Starlet
So how do you get THE name of the Starlet? You Can’t, unless you are Bill Gates, and even then it might be unlikely. But don’t despair, you can still get a name that will work. Here’s one trick I used to get a dot com name that would be picked up by google.
I can’t use the real name of the starlet at the moment, but let’s say it’s Mary Smith. Any Domain guy will tell you forgetaboutit if you think you would like to buy MarySmith.com. My client was going to write a book about Mary Smith, so we had a couple of choices without spending a lot of money. The first obvious choice is to get one of the many Top Level Domains that are available. By the way, a lot of the TLDs are really not available for the average guy, they are owned by big corporations.
However, registrars have a basket of extensions you can use aside from the usual .com or .org, which might already be taken by somebody else. In my client’s case, he could have gotten something like MarySmith.US, or MarySmith.xyz, or MarySmith.world, etc. GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest domain registrars, offers over 500 extensions. These vary in price, with some having pricey renewal fees (watch out for that!), but they work because google searches will offer everything up, although you might not be really high on the list. Other factors can help you here, like having a lot of traffic to your new site, having good SEO (search engine optimization), and a lot of new material all the time.
But there’s another way that works. My client was old school and wanted a dot com. So we simply created the domain MarySmithBook.com. It could also have been MarySmithTheBook.com. Shorter is better, if available. But the point is that google will pick it up, assuming it is an active website and is properly set-up. I just checked google for my client’s site, by typing in “Mary Smith Book dot com” (substituting my client’s Starlet name for Mary Smith. The first page of google had 50 entries, including the ads, the google promos, the “did you mean…” stuff, etc. My client’s website was down the list past #30, but it was on google’s flowing first page.
So we achieved my client’s goal of getting a decent name .com for a major Starlet at a bargain hand-register price that gets decent results in the google search. The domain name tells the searcher what is important. He is looking for Mary Smith. It tells that it is a book. It will appear in the search pretty close to the top, at least not down the list around #40,000! It’s not the best solution, but it is a low-buck solution. Because most of us are not Bill Gates.
The final step for my client is when the book is published he will have to be aggressive with social media postings and publicity in order to drive traffic to his site. It’s sort of a financial inverted pyramid. The less capital you have to invest in that really great domain name, the more time you have to put into social media and publicity to balance things out.
And just in case you want to know, MarySmith.com is a landing page, quite possibly for sale at the right price, if your pockets are deep enough, and you can own the domain even if you aren’t writing a book.
Is There An American Businessman Who Will Step Up?
The drama continues as we discover that a mysterious German, living in Reiden, Switzerland, a small agricultural village in Lucerne Canton, controls the two most valuable domains in Los Angeles, California, and probably among the top 10 most valuable in the nation. Is he (or she) a James Bond/Goldfinger character? An international investor with quite a long reach? A politically astute player who is about ready to enter the political frey in California and change history?
Speculation is burning a hole in my file on the matter. The background is just as fascinating as the possible future outcome. The great domain name, LA.com has been the subject of our articles and tweets for some time. It was originally purchased by the Tribune Tronc boys when they owned the Los Angeles Times empire, before it was dismembered and sold off. They promised a great hub, a portal that was presumably going to connect to the Times, and gather a large presence on the net.
But those promises vanished. The Tronc boys paid about 1.2 million for LA.com A bargain at the time. When they sold the Times to Dr. Soong -Shiong, they didn’t mention the domain, or he forgot to ask. Mr. Shiong was busy. He had paid 500 million for a possibly losing newspaper. He didn’t get the famous iconic building the Times had occupied for about a century, the building had been sold to Canadian developers.
And then there was the printing plant. That property had also been sold, so the Times had to find a new huge warehouse to put their printing presses, as well as find a new home for their staff. That’s how they were run out of L.A., all the way to El Segundo, where their HQ is now. The great L.A. Times, the internationally respected newspaper built by the Chandler family owners, who controlled downtown Los Angeles and its politics for over 100 years, had been sent into exile to a plain beachtown, outside the City Limits.
Looking back to the 1960s, it is worth remembering just how powerful the Chandlers were. Here’s a taste of it. Facing them was a hill, called Bunker Hill. Living on it in the 60s were 20,000 working class Angelenos, the blue collar workers who slaved in low income jobs to keep the great City humming. But Chandler, it was claimed by one historian, did not like all those poor folks living up on the hill, looking down on his City Hall and his L.A. Times building. So he wiped them out.
It sounds harsh, but it’s all true. He pressured for the largest (at that time) Redevelopment Project in the United States. All 20,000 residents were removed from the hill and everything torn down. Then the hill itself was cut down, I think it was 200 feet. Later, a couple museums were built on it, and the Grand Park, a symbolically occult designed arena, surrounded by the Courts and Administrative State, was build to face the City Hall, which had been designed by a 33 degree Mason, complete with a pyramid on top. It was the finishing touch of the symbol and center of power of the ruling class in L.A.
The Chandlers are long gone, a faded memory of their glory days. Their instrument of power, The Los Angeles Times, is a shadow of what it was in the 1960s. It is a new era. The old ruling class of Los Angeles are either dead, residing in assisted living homes in Arizona, or shaking in their mansions waiting for home invasion thugs to break in and rob them. In its place, vying for power, are radical Marxists, wealthy real estate developers, extreme leftists, the remains of black culture split between traditionalists and the BLM movement. It’s quite a tango, with shifting alliances, stealth democrats, and a small but feisty Republican conservative movement who hope to salvage something of civilization before the radical democrats totally bankrupt and destroy the City.
Last year, L.A.com was put up for sale by the Troncs, the price was $5 million. I thought that there was a good chance that Dr. Shiong of the Times would get it. He didn’t, missing his second chance at the gold ring, and it was picked up by an unknown person. The site has the potential to be the killer of not only the Times, but to give some of the leftist cable channels like CNN and MSNBC a run for their money.
Whoever bought it didn’t have any big ideas. The site sat for quite a while, advertising an elitist email address for only $99 per year. At first I thought it was a joke. Who would pay 100 bucks a year for an email address? Those are free from gmail, outlook, yahoo and others. Besides, cel phones are kings. Everyone is texting, instant messaging. Emails are fading in the marketplace.
Now a new landing page is up. The email fun is gone. Today, it’s strictly business. LA.com is for sale. With it is LosAngeles.com, another power name. Both for only 8 million.
Are these two domains worth it? The answer is complicated. Look at inflation, running around 10% It’s bad enough if you are a working class slob like me, but if you have a stack of bills in the bank adding up to millions, better find a safe place to park it. Stock market? Oh sure, that’s smart. There are only a few choices: Gold, silver, good real estate and great domains, meaning a great .com like LA.com.
The goal would be to have something left in a few years after the stagflation has destroyed value in everything else. If you have $100 sitting in the bank, in 10 years of this insane inflation, your buying power will be really low, like a cup of coffee at Starbucks, if they are still in business.
LA.com also has tremendous potential for a political disrupter. Make it a tabloid and go for broke. The Democrats in LA are pathetic, donkeys with no ears. Crime is soaring. The infrastructure in crumbling, the celebrities are banal. There’s a lot of fodder. The Times is finished, propped up by advertising inserts from Communist China. They are so woke that a lot of folks call it the El Segundo Times, or worse. They are way left of center, running dogs of the woke donkeys, and nowhere to go as far as a money making business. The middle and the right don’t read it because of its slant, young people are getting their news on their phones, and small business is looking for more productive venues to put their money.
Running L.A.com as a conservative but feisty tabloid on the web would bring some sanity back to Los Angeles. And running LosAngeles.com as a cultural/event site with a slightly liberal bent would be a perfect match.
It’s a weird turn of events. A mysterious German, living in an apartment or condo in a village in Switzerland controls the two best domains in Los Angeles. Some Canadian developers are tearing up the old L.A. Times iconic building in downtown L.A., and the Times itself has been shoved into a neighboring beach town. Who’s going to step up and kick up a political and cultural dust storm? Who’s going to pull a few mil out of their Swiss bank account and proclaim themselves the new Ruler of Los Angeles? A two-headed Kingdom, LA.com and LosAngeles.com. The beginnings of a new empire. And if it fails in its mission, you still own the domains. And it is Los Angeles, even if it’s over-run by a herd of wild donkeys.
LA.com’s New Owners Ready “Portal” For Los Angeles News and Events, Plus a Pricey email address for only $99.
by Domain Buddha
After years of just sitting in the ownership bin of the Tribune-Tronc crew, LA.com has been sold and is ready to launch under new ownership. The purchase price was not revealed, but it was listed for sale for 5 million. I said at the time that was a fair price, although the head Tronc had paid one million for it a few years before. He was intending to link it to the Los Angeles Times, but things went wild for the Troncs, and they sold the Times and the San Diego Tribune to another rich guy in the Medical business. Only they didn’t mention LA.com, or he didn’t want it. Big mistake.
So now LA.com has a new owner. Who is it? Not announced yet. Elon Musk? Probably not, he’s chasing the little bluebird. I would have guessed Eli Broad, who had at least a passing interest in owning the Los Angeles Times at one point. He passed away last year, so we can rule him out, unless he’s running it from the spirit world. Any clues? Not much. The logo for the new email service looks kind of like a sports patch, like a baseball patch for the St. Louis Cardinals. Hmm, a whole new dimension could be around the corner. Could the new owner be a rich retired sports guy?
The new site is billed as a “Portal”, with a focus on local news and events. That sounds like PR talk for a site that will flood out corporate news releases and put an event calendar full of happy-talk wine and cheese meet-ups and lectures on metaphysics and woke-ism.
The main push right now is for all of Los Angeles elitists and Hollywood high-lifers to pop for the exclusive $99 per year for your new, very “in”, very cool, email address: like “[email protected]” for example. If you act now, you can get it for half price. (Even Hollywood folks like a bargain once in a while).
But who cares that much about email? Everyone is now on their phones, messaging or using signal. Email is fading. Everybody has an address, but so does the post office. Who writes and mails a letter anymore? Not many folks compared to how many are using their iphones for messages. I’m not saying email is dead yet, but it is not what it was. The phone is the thing. Is this a grand old time to launch an elitist email service? G-mail, Outlook, and many others are free. Is it an “ad-free” service? No details were posted on LA.com. With the economy turning down and raging inflation, is the bottom 99% going to blow about a hundred bucks a year for an email address? How does the new owner expect to make back his 5 million purchase price by selling an expensive email service? And then there was the big London email and phone scandal a few years ago, but I digress. The important thing about email is privacy and security, meaning no snooping by anyone.
The big picture is that LA.com could become the go-to site for big news, scandals, Hollywood, entertainment, etc. A big city tabloid on your phone (or ipad or computer). The trend is that the new powerful phones are what folks are using. Even laptop use is somewhat fading.
Stay tuned for more information on LA.com. Hope it’s not going to be a cross between the old L.A. Weakly during it’s last 5 days and Friday’s Calendar section from the El Segundo Woke News. We don’t need that great name to be wasted on a Portal to Ho-Hum land.
Is a Trojan Horse Radical Cadre Violating Basic Business Attitude Regarding Customer Relations? Or is it just stupid management?
It’s hard to find out what is going on inside the deep caverns of Twitter. Employees are secretive, bound by legal chains to keep quiet about what is going on. So, the Twitter watchers can only guess based on what is observed that the social media giant is up to.
One observation is that many social media companies are attacking their own customers. The so-called “censors” have de-platformed millions of their own users. Maybe the censors are all Catholics, and want to excommunicate Twitter users who are drifting to some kind of free speech heresy. Or maybe they are radicals, a cadre of woke ultra-leftists and neo-Marxists who have infiltrated Twitter and are now exercising power by kicking out hundreds of thousands of users who violate some mysterious “rules”, like discussing the covid vaccines and so called “mandates”. Unlikely, their employment apps probably don’t probe political beliefs. So that leaves management as the guilty party. A stunning situation.
One thing is clear, whoever they are, they are destroying Twitter. Think about this, for the last fifty years, one of the most important rules of business is to focus on customer satisfaction. Corporations and businesses have spent millions of dollars training their employees to deal with customer complaints, and try to satisfy the customers and keep them loyal to their brand. Amazon is probably the best example of this, their mantra is “the customer is always right.” Anyone who has dealt with amazon.com knows this. The vendors sure know it, because almost every dispute is settled in favor of a customer. Amazon is wildly successful because of this, among other reasons.
But not Twitter, not Facebook, and not youtube. These three giants have gone the other way. A couple of years ago they declared war on their own customers. Twitter even kicked off a sitting President. Youtube has pulled possibly millions of videos that violate their secret policies. And Facebook, the same belligerent attitude. So, how is that working out for them? Ex-communicating their own customers, the users who have, until recently, no way to fight back.
The bad news for Twitter, the tube, and the facebookers is that everyone on the planet knows about it. Everyone talks about it. People are pissed. I would say millions are pissed. They don’t like the arbitrary censorship, the nasty authoritarian attitude that the faceless facebookers, and possibly super-woke morons inside the other FANGS have behaved. The customers on those platforms are never right. They are preyed upon by the FANGS, de-platformed, suspended, humiliated, shadow-banned. If social media is a new religion, as Zuckerberg would have you believe (Meta), then the censors are the new high priests and are reveling in their power to excommunicate their own flock. Tubers, tweeters, and f-bookers are cast out and damned in a thousand ways. The FANGSTERS may actually now be running Cults.
So what has happened to rectify this bad behavior of the woke FANGSTERS? A lot. Look at the Start-ups. The customers, millions of them, the “deplorables”, the “Army of Apes”, the shadow-banned, the suspended ones, they still have the ultimate power, and they know it. They are leaving the Cults. They are heading to Gettr, Rumble, Odysee, Bitchute, Brighteon, NewTube, Telegram, Parler, Clubhouse, Frankspeech, and many others. They are flocking to new platforms by the millions, hoping to find a home where they can express themselves with something called “Freedom of Speech.”
I recommend that Twitter and the others get rid of their censors and ugly authoritarianism. Join Free Speech. You might yet save your companies. A big storm is brewing. Soon a new platform is going to launch, it’s called Truth Social. I’m not a Trumper, but I’d say to the little blue bird that it’s past time to change your bad behavior because your customers were right and you were wrong. And there’s some ex-communicated folks out there who want to clip your wings.
Tribune Holdout From L.A. Times Sale Finally Comes Out of Hiding.
The good old days when everyone was talking and reading about the LA Times – Cover of “Billion Dollar Blackjack”
When the Tribune boys sold the L.A. Times to one of its shareholders, Patrick Soon-Shiong, there were a lot of goodies left out of the deal. Remembering back to that time and the chaos surrounding the events, it’s a wonder things didn’t get really berserk. Here’s some memories:
Tribune had changed its name of the Times group to Tronc. Oh God, what a field day we all had making fun of that lunacy. The worst corporate re-name in history.
The Times was losing dough, and beset by union problems, staff bailing out, pension buy-outs and financial troubles.
The Tribune guys were ex-medical business guys, fat with cash from a sale to IBM. They dumped the Times and San Diego Union on one of their shareholders, another really wealthy medical business guy. Did any of this group even have a paper route when they were kids? Don’t think so.
What didn’t Mr. Soon-Shiong get? No real estate. The Times iconic HQ was sold to some Canadians. The property where the papers were printed had been sold in 2010. And the biggest sleeper of all, LA.com, which the Troncs had purchased for a reported million dollars, was held back. The buyer got the Times for $500 million, but it was the newspapers only.
For 500 million (roughly the debt that the Times had accumulated) he should have asked for LA.com to be thrown in the deal. A missed opportunity.
The Tribune/Tronc boys had put up a landing page, but did nothing with the digital property. Now it is for sale for $5 Million. Is it worth it?
Well, let’s see. It is the greatest two letter name for one of the greatest cities in the world. Forget about the recent lunatics who temporarily occupy the government. They will eventually be gone, along with the miles of homeless camps, nut cakes and dopers who now occupy the streets. A new regime of competent business guys with common sense will solve the problems, really help out the homeless, put the criminals into rehab or jail and get the city back on track. So yes, the price for the .com is fair. The sale is being handled by MediaOptions.com, one of the great domain brokers.
One more word about the price. In Santa Monica real estate developers are buying up houses for 2 million, tearing them down, and building mega-mansions for sale at 10 million So the greatest dot com that you could ever get for Los Angeles could easily be worth 10-15 million right now. The price of a new mc-mansion.
Will Patrick Soon-Shiong step up and buy this? The Times moved its HQ to El Segundo, a pleasant beach area town. It is so lame that it is now referred to as The El Segundo Times. It is pathetic. Money comes in from Red China every week as a complete propaganda section of several pages to prop up the advertising. The paper is a shadow of its former self of the 1970s when it had great foreign correspondents around the globe.
The only way out of this mess is for Mr. Soon-Shiong to buy LA.com and turn it into the major, dynamic website of the City. Get rid of the agit-prop crew that writes the current nonsense and hire some writers and editors from the New York tabs. Get the Paparazzi on the payroll. Blow the City wide open. The corruption, the celebs, the lunacy, is all there, waiting to be featured on LA.com. Put the Times back in the center of the action.
And one more thing. Don’t wait too long, there’s plenty of aggressive dudes waiting in the wings looking for adoration on the way to immortality. And maybe one of them even had a paper route back in the day.
The Shine Is Fading: New gTLDs Drop From 2018 to 2019
The latest information from ICANN reveals an interesting statistic. The number of NEW Top Level Domains in service actually fell by 444,747 from 2018 to 2019. This is not a good sign, and indicates folks are wise to the fact that a lot of new TLDs have no set renewal and some have skyrocketed in price upon renewal. The Legacy TLDs, like .com, .net, and .org, actually increased by 2,544,947 from the same time period. The country code TLDs also showed a healthy increase.
Below is the news release from ICANN, with the links so that you can download their spreadsheet file and study it yourself.
LOS ANGELES – 9 December 2019 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) today announced the release of updated industry metrics as part of its Domain Name Marketplace Indicators initiative. The initiative presents statistics related to generic top-level domains (gTLDs) and country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) with the aim of fostering greater transparency for reputable information on the evolution of the domain name marketplace.
The metrics released as part of this initiative encompass three categories and six dimensions:
Robust competition: registrant choice, registrant domain adoption, service provider marketplace entry, service provider competition.
Marketplace stability: service provider contractual compliance.
Trust: industry safeguards.
ICANN plans to continue to expand the initiative’s coverage of shortlisted indicators and publish these statistics twice a year in order to track progress against its goal of supporting the evolution of the domain name marketplace to be robust, stable, and trusted.
A community Advisory Panel worked with ICANN to identify relevant indicators that form part of the current schema. Concurrent to the release of these Version 1.0 marketplace indicators, the ICANN organization will continue to work with the community and the Advisory Panel to evaluate additional enhancements that might be incorporated into this initiative in the future.
About ICANN
ICANN‘s mission is to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet. To reach another person on the Internet, you need to type an address – a name or a number – into your computer or other device. That address must be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN helps coordinate and support these unique identifiers across the world. ICANN was formed in 1998 as a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with a community of participants from all over the world.
Are His Tweets A Stroke of Genius Or Will They Lead To Disaster?
President Donald Trump is the first U.S. President to rule and rile using social media. His tweet storms are legendary. His personal attacks on friend and foe alike are maddening. Half the country laughs while the other half foams at the mouth. The next day the half split may reverse itself, the foamers laughing and the laughing screeching. Is the President mad? Some psychiatrists have gone on CNN to say the guy has syndromes galore. Others think Trump is actually a genius, using tweets to rule, to ridicule his enemies, to taunt foreign leaders (as well as his own cabinet), and shock everyone else by his technique of twitter voodoo that causes any who reads it without laughing into coming down with a disease called Trump Derangement Syndrome.
One thing is absolutely certain. Day after day, and usually late into the night-time talk shows, all the attention is on HIM. The Orange Eminence rules the roost, he is the head rooster, and all the chickens are constantly clucking about him. The amount of nasty remarks piles up every day. “Listen to all these LIES he has told, Just This Morning”, blasts out Morning Joe, his stone face actually showing some twisted emotion. And then there’s nightingale Rachel who blathers on for seemingly hours detailing everything wrong that the Orange Man managed to do during the day, starting at 4am tweet time and continuing non-stop until he disappears into his man cave. “And did you hear that he actually wants to buy GREENLAND? *sputter sputter*
Years ago, when I worked at a national public relations firm, there was a mantra that was something like “Say anything you want about me, just spell my name right.” This was sort of a smart alack response to attacks on political figures. But there is actually some truth to it. The repetition of a name 1000 times a day on TV and Radio, does grind into the minds of the masses. What the context was, all the other words, can be forgotten because there’s a huge confusing amount of chatter and accusations that nobody can begin to recall a week later. What sticks are the words “Donald Trump”.
What is going to be crucial to the next election cycle is what the impact of Trump’s constant turning of the spotlight on himself. Will the masses of voters, bombarded every minute of every day with Trump News, even remember 10 percent of the bad stuff? Will they just vote for him because of name recognition? Travel around on a bus and listen to the conversations. Amazingly, most have nothing to do with politics. Many individuals just tune out the political chatter, “it’s just politics.” They tire easily of the constant bickering, and it’s easy to say that the Dems are saying bad things about Trump because they are Dems. And the Elephants are chopping the Donkeys because they have Big Trunks with Tusks and that’s what they do. It all reminds me that my boss at the PR firm, the great Hal Evry, said clearly and often, that we need to appeal to the Average American who has the mind of an eleven year old, and that’s max eleven.
Trump seems to know this, and to top it off he has a blast furnace rudeness that has great mass appeal. Archie Bunker has finally made it to the White House. A certain percent love that off-the-wall, insult everyone mentality. And many folks love the fact that Trumps speech writers, if there are any, all seem to have worked at Mad Magazine in the 1960s.
And then, there’s the really personal touch:
He seems to never tire of giving someone on his hit list a derogatory nick name. “Cooked Hillary” is one that comes to mind. And if he is too busy to formulate a nickname then he sticks a moniker on someone, like his Attorney General, Sessions, “He was a weak man, very weak.”
At his rallies, he invites audience participation by inventing clever slogans that his followers can chant when he triggers it. They can’t seem to wait, they squirm in their seats until their moment in the spotlight when they can yell out “Build That Wall”, or “Lock Her Up”. Back in the day, the rule of thumb was that a political speech should be no longer than 10 minutes, because after that the audience just zones out. Trump has knocked that rule upside down. His rallies, his speeches go on for hours. The crowd sticks around for the fun, watching the few protesters being humiliated and thrown out. “Get him out of here”, says Trump. “Out, Out, Out” chants the crowd. The working class crowd has a great time. It’s better than sitting at home watching TV, in fact, you get to be on TV, chanting, whooping and yelling! It’s a blast. It’s MAD TV.
So the answer to the question will be revealed at the next Presidential election. Will the voters remember all the lies, all the bad things? Or will they just remember that name, brainwashed into their eleven year old minds. It may be hard for them to vote against someone who is Larger Than Life! He must be almost a king, the chosen one, because everyone talks about him day and night.
Maybe some folks should remember that silence can be golden. If nobody ever mentions your name, do you exist?