An interesting press release from Aron Meystedt of XF.com Investments came to my attention recently. XF.com is selling the domain name tablets.com which the dictionary defines as "a number of sheets of writing paper, business forms, etc.,fastened together at the edge; pad." Obviously the hope here is to cash in on the rapidly expanding market for tablet computers . No news there really. Tablets.com is not even going up for auction, much less been sold at a record price. What is interesting is how Mr. Meystedt is using a press releases, Linked In, and the tablets.com site itself to promote a sale.
The title says it all: "One of the Most Valuable Domain Names on the Internet Hits the Market". Will tablet.com be more valuable than Citrix's domain cloud.com, or Monster's jobs.com, or Calvin Klein's underwear.com? For accounting purposes Cirtix values its domain name at $18 million, but who knows? From a marketing perspective it doesn't matter.
On a Tuesday in a slow news week before a vacation Mr. Meystedt is offering any number of story lines - the high price of select domain names, how you can cash in on domain names, can a new record be set for domain names, is the system for allocating domain names fairly. That is the magic of this approach. By offering an interesting idea and then using supporting sites to provide facts, the story practically writes itself. By my count in just 24 hours since its release the press release has generated 27 stories in English, Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese. In addition the number of hits on tablets.com is bound to increase its statistics (which Alexa currently ranks as the 456,093 most popular site in the world). Not bad for an empty site.
Photo Credit: macronald
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