Insane Advertisers still don’t get it

This relates to quite an old post, basically I owned a domain which I caught for reg fee/£5.  As soon as a large company started a TV advertising campaign their url was not clearly labelled and I started getting type in confused type in traffic (around 100 per day), it was noticed early and after speaking to them they agreed to pay £2 per sign up if I redirected their traffic back to them. The TV advert lasted about 4 weeks and made £814.

Got an email from them late last year to say they were running the TV advert again in January and would offer the same £2/signup deal, this time the domain earned just over £1k.  Yet through all this they were not interested in buying the domain for £3000-£4000, I still don’t understand their logic really, had an offer through Sedo@ $5000 so decided to sell it as there may/may not be TV adverts in the future and with the £1k just earned it seemed a good time to cash out of that domain name. I’m happy enough but absolutely baffled that they didn’t have the budget to get involved in the domain auction when informed {sigh}

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. I swear there is no logical reasoning going on at certain companies and organisations, ah well you’ve done well out of their clueless-ness! 🙂

    A good return all in all I’m guessing? In terms of the time you’ve spent on that site?

  2. It was just an undeveloped domain, did have a mini site on it but no time has been spent on it so a nice return all in all.

  3. Bizarre to say the least - someone in that company is doing a bad job but if you can take advantage of their ignorance - crack on!
    Sounds like you have done very well out of it.

  4. Yea that is just totally bewildering. I guess they were just really unsure about how many more times they’d run that ad so they just preferred to stick to the pay as you go approach for that domain?

    Till then,

    Jean

  5. Wow thats a bizarre situation. I’m sure its just the usual case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing in large companies. Worked nicely for you though!

  6. That sounds like the joys of multi-channel marketing at it’s best! I would imagine that if you are talking about a big brand then there would be an inhouse marketing team, a network and possibly several agencies (offline and online) all at work.

    It was probably in the interests of the agency/party you were dealing with to get the CPA deal as they’d get some kickback on it, whereas from a straightout domain sale it would obviously be better value for the client but the agency wouldn’t be able to get their mucky paws on their clients’ dosh so wanted to continue fleecing the client on the CPA deal instead.

    Seen this sort of thing happen so many times I’m sorry to say…

  7. That makes absolutely no sense at all, why would they prefer to pay you per lead as opposed to just purchasing the domain? These big companies really don’t see the bigger picture, I guess it might be because you spoke to someone who didn’t directly benefit from cutting costs? Oh well, their loss, your gain, I’m glad it worked out well for you 🙂

    Ruchi

  8. Looks like they have a case of marketing myopia.

  9. Did you check afterwards who bought the domain? Maybe it was that same company after all?

  10. That is weird. I wonder if the people who bought it still do the redirect for them.

Leave a Reply