CEO domain names barter in a new type of cyper real estate.
Web real estate, that is. Hundreds
of Web domains featuring the names of well-known CEOs and other celebrities
have been bought by entrepreneurs and fund-raisers. But rather than trying to
sell the Web addresses to their namesakes to turn a quick profit, these domain
owners are hoping to use their holdings for charitable donations or, in one
case, to lure chief executives to the bargaining table.
What do Mark Zuckerberg, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos and the Saudi royal family have in common?
Their .ceo domain names all belong to the same guy, a registrant from Trinidad and Tobago who as of last night was responsible for 40% of hand-registered .ceo domains.Andrew Davis has registered roughly 100 of the roughly 250 .ceo names sold since the new gTLD went into general availability on March 28, spending at least $10,000 to do so.
According to
Whois records, Davis has registered dozens of common given and family names in
.ceo — stuff like smith.ceo, patel.ceo, john.ceo, wang.ceo and wolfgang.ceo.
There are a class of names that seem to have been registered by Davis purely because they show up on lists of the world’s wealthiest families and individuals. The domains slim.ceo, walton.ceo, and adelson.ceo match the last names of three of the top ten wealthiest people on the planet; arnault.ceo matches the name of France’s second-richest businessman. Also he owns getty.ceo, rockefeller.ceo, hearst.ceo, rothschild. all family names of American business royalty.
Then there’s the names of members of actual royalty, the magnificently wealthy Saudi royal family: alsaud.ceo, saud.ceo and alwaleed.ceo.
The list
continues to businesses like bacardi.ceo… prada.ceo… beretta.ceo…
mars.ceo… sennheiser.ceo… shimano.ceo… swarovski.ceo… versace.ceo… ferrero.ceo…
mahindra.ceo… olayan.ceo…
Davidson's business partner, fellow
Iowan Mike Cunningham, owns HalseyMinor.com (chief executive of CNET: The
Computer Network, publisher of News.com). Between the two of them, they own
several hundred CEO domains, Davidson said.
In addition to preserving his domains
from the fate of serving up pornography or other unsavory Web offerings,
Davidson does have a business motivation. Although he insists that he would
never try to pry money out of a CEO in exchange for his or her name, the
domains may prove useful in establishing business relationships with them.
"Let's say I had an idea for a
great Internet company," Davidson said. "Instead of sending [an
executive] a fruit basket, if I offered him his name, if he'd just listen to my
idea, that would be a way of doing him a favor. It's not to blackmail them but
to say, 'Hey, here's my idea, here's your name, and you should have it.' I'm
pretty confident I can gain some friends."
According to the administrative
contact for the BoDerek.com domain, the '80s icon had to write a check to
retrieve the address.
"They wanted a $700
donation," recalled Lars Wickstrom of Santa Inez-based Photo Heck, a
photography laboratory with celebrity connections. "We told Bo about it,
and I don't know how much she sent them. They said it was a donation. I think
we settled for less than what they wanted. Now we're going through the same
thing with them for Cheryl Ladd and Ursula Andress."
Other high-profile tech CEOs have
third parties sitting on their ".com" domains, including Bill Gates
(Microsoft), Craig Barrett (Intel), Larry Ellison (Oracle), and Steve Jobs
(acting CEO of Apple).
by Dr. Rob Longwell
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