You never know who you're going to bump into in the Cayman Islands. I had my first brush with greatness a few years back at Edoardos one of my favorite Italian restaurants here.. My friend Vern and his wife Kari had come down for a visit. We were having wine (before appies) when suddenly 'the man in the golden wheelchair' rolled in. Say what you will about Larry Flynt but he is a fearless American legend. 'The People vs Larry Flynt' was more than a movie. It's precedent continues to shape American democracy today. There he sat, with a smokin' hot babe (his pilot) and a big tall beefy tough-guy (his bodyguard) at a small round table having dinner about 4 feet away from us. Cayman attracts a slightly older wealthier clientele and the folks around us obviously knew who he was. I just couldn't resist reaching out to say something; so to break the ice and add levity I complimented Larry on his gubernatorial run in California and told him that I liked him much better in that race than Gary Coleman or Arnold Schwarzenegger. He laughed. His pilot and body guard laughed (I was really glad his body guard laughed). Then the older WASP folks at the next table complimented him and said they had always wanted to meet him (I thought to myself how they were probably happy to see him go to jail in the 70's)...
Anyway.. Seeing Larry Flynt at dinner that night gave me a new sense of empowerment. I started to compare myself to him .. and suddenly felt very small. But I was bigger on the web. If you marshaled all the organic adult traffic we control (it came to nearly 100,000 unique visits a day back then [just adult]) we were surely bigger than LFP was online. Galvanized by my meeting I decided to cold-call Larry Flynt Publishing in Los Angeles. I am not a bad cold-caller and I have something tangible to offer (we were selling traffic to the intermediaries LFP was buying from at the time), so I navigated the phone system, assistants and managers to some guy (The Big Guy) who's name I can not recall. I made my pitch about what we do and after enthusiastically explaining why we should partner with LFP on the adult vertical I got the following response:
"Oh you're one of those squatters.. let me give you the name of the guy who runs the affiliate program". (insert the sound of the record needle ripping across the record-album here)
I was really put off.. Firstly, "squatters" deliberately target the trademarks of others. Here I am, a high minded internet entrepreneur who has cobbled together some very good organic traffic, generic adult domain names and " I " am a squatter!?! Secondly: the affiliate program?!? Here is Larry Flynt Publishing.. paying thousands of dollars a day to buy traffic on a per-click basis from the major search engines, but when I own a generic domain name with organic traffic (of higher quality than you can buy from the Search Engine's search-box), I am relegated to some second-rate affiliate program where I don't earn a nickel for my traffic until LFP's slow loading websites manage to miraculously convert the visitor into a sale??! I hung up the phone with this "LFP thought leader" and resolved to continue selling my adult traffic to the Search Engines (Yahoo and Google) who could continue to let Mr. Flynt's marketing department live under the illusion that the traffic they were buying was in fact coming "from" the search engines search-box (much of it came from 'syndication partners' like me)... Then I tore down my People vs Larry Flynt movie poster.. Okay.. that movie poster part didn't happen but everything else did.
The whole episode got me thinking about what a scam affiliate programs (in general) are for publishers. If the affiliate program is incompetent and can't convert visitors to sales, the publisher doesn't get paid. Where is the incentive for the affiliate manager or advertiser to create a better website that engages visitors and draws out a sale if they are getting the work-horse traffic for free? Compounding that is the fact that affiliate marketing is usually the first check-box on unsophisticated advertisers' to-do lists. I understand that alot of domainers target their names within affiliate programs to make more than PPC, but those sophisticated and analytical folks (who are to be complimented) are basically doing 'all the heavy lifting'. They shoud really be running the affiliate programs or selling the products themselves IMO. They don't need the affiliate programs. JMO. I have tried affiliate programs (lots of them) and often been frustrated to see those same advertisers who are taking my traffic for free (on the affiliate side) be the very top paying bidder on the PPC side. Its almost as if they are dollar cost averaging.. getting the affiliate suckers to give them traffic for free and then offsetting against the top pay position in PPC... I'll have more on this later...
... "Springtime in Vienna" was the Tragically Hip's first encore (it's my favorite encore song next to "Gift Shop"). Gordon Downie is the dreamer's poet. I love how he weaves thoughts together and makes you think hard against the backdrop of driving bass and hypnotic guitar riffs - All this happening in the warm, humid nightime Cayman breeze.
Story shows how many great companies are using their brand logos as identities relating to their domain names. A really interesting trend actually. Of course the amount of money one needs to spend in order to achieve this outcome is astronomical and dwarfs the even the world's most expensive domain names by many orders of magnitude.
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