First Move – make sure you have the best web address
For those who read of the adventures during the ansathat.com experiment, you will not be too surprised to hear that as soon as it finished I had only one thing on my mind – ensuring that I got as much good space on the internet as I could. I had seen the future and, contrary to what Peter Kay might suggest, it was NOT garlic bread, it was actually internet TV.
The possibilities were endless and all I needed to start off with was a great web address or two. I figured that with great internet domains I would have a strong start and ‘instant brand’ with which to launch as many new commercial channels as possible. My first thoughts centred on internet TV channels being created to share news and ideas for towns and cities – the so-called ‘geo market’.
Even though I made my living as a professional journalist/features writer, I was still heavily influenced, and in favour, of the idea of citizen journalism. In many ways I felt that internet TV would be as revolutionary to free speech as the original printing press had been when first introduced by Johannes Gutenberg in 1440.
The internet had begun with the thoughts and ideas of people depicted simply in word and number form, and soon these words were backed up by pictures – but now we had the technology to show video of what was happening in our world – end everyone connected to the internet could see it exactly as it happened. If a picture paints a thousand words…. – then a moving picture would paint millions of them. Everyone had a video camera, be it a professional ‘Hollywood’ type through to a modest family handheld, or even a the camera on their mobile telephone.
We were all able to document our world. No longer would we have to wait for the BBC to show up to film events and give us their slant on what HAD happened. We could capture the train crash, the celebrity kiss, the Earthquake, the war scene, the off-the-cuff remarks of the politician AS THEY HAPPENED. In short, we would be there, on the ground, seeing news as it really unfolded, not as it had been packaged and made palatible. Truth was the only winner, and with truth comes real democracy.
Wow, this wasn’t just about simple internet TV, this was a way to change the whole world. And I loved it even more.
This period of time, February 2007, may not seem so far away, but it was a time when local newspapers didn’t seem to realise what was coming their way. I felt they didn’t understand that the old media model they were based on, with its high production costs being passed on to advertisers, was no longer going to be sustainable. Advertisers just wanted results, and if they could get them more effectively through the internet then that is the direction where they would head.
So, the Wild West of internet TV lay ahead and cheap land (the URLs) was available to anyone who would venture into an area which few understood, and precious few had ever been. In the past I had been lucky with the name AnsaThat, which turned out to be very catchy, and even more so, much earlier, with the name PetrolBusters, but the whole world of internet TV was a completely different thing.
On the evenings of the 23, 24, 25 and 26 of February 2007 I stayed up until the wee small hours registering every geographic domain name I could get my hands on – and all had the ending TV.com
I managed to get a great many names such as SurreyTV.com, OxfordTV.com, LancashireTV.com, etc. Big geographic areas that certainly warranted their own internet television channels. I’d also spent more money in a few evenings on purchasing ‘domains’ than most people would on buying a family car. Little did I realise this was just the start.
I was petrified of having wasted my cash and kept reassuring myself that as the person cutting the route ahead of everyone else I was bound to have more trepidation than those who would surely follow. Very quickly I found that many of the names I would have liked to register had already been taken. I was obviously not alone in seeing the future. And many people had some really good ‘digital real estate’.
Times would change in the following months as I decided to add .TV names into my internet land bank. In the next two years I managed to acquire some of the best digital real estate imaginable for internet TV purposes. Among my more ecstatic highs were the moments I purchased US.tv from a gentleman called Kam based in Hong Kong, acquired DIY.tv at a German internet auction, bought my home county Shropshire.tv from a fine old gentleman in Shrewsbury, took Tourist.TV in auction and sent poetry to the self-styled ‘Queen of the Domainers’ to eventually drive off with Motorist.tv.
Oh, and as a side note, I woke up one day and ‘just had to buy’ the name BING.tv because it sounded ‘just right’ for a little project I wanted to create for online television. Little did I know that some months later the head of one of the largest corporations in the world would also come to the similar conclusion that Bing was a great name – only for him it meant ‘search engine’.
Upshot of this whole story: GET A GOOD NAME