We have about 12 full-time employees. I used to do everything, 18 hours a day from chef, cook, and bottle washer. We hired management. We have offices right diagonally across from Madison Square Garden, the world's most famous arena. We have some salespeople and beefing up as we go. Right now, during this period, just trying to keep the ship running and then poise ourselves for implementation of some of our other strategies. I think we'll have a fairly big platform.
I would say that there have been several strategies from the lowliest of them, if you will, was I remember drawing out a graph with an apple as the center of the solar system and other little apples around it as satellites, representing the city. The first plan was to be a platform for New York, to let people be able to purchase cheap, or sometimes even counterfeit, goods and services, that people would come to New York's Canal Street to purchase. Even right now, today, you can go to Canal Street in lower Manhattan and go get a $5,000 Louis Vuitton piece of luggage for $100 and that kind of thing. That was the original plan, because so many millions of people come to Canal Street to do that, why not let them do it on the Web? Of course, we never did that. There are many legal implications and the whole thing of selling counterfeit goods. That was an initial idea. The whole ISP boom came along where everybody was trying to be an ISP, so we thought about that.
It was Always travel, tourism as a primary focus. We had evolved into what we are now, which is a primarily travel and tourism play, obviously, with every hotel, restaurant, shopping experience. We recently launched a viral video element called the "City of Fame." So many people want to get famous, that we put that there for people to upload their videos like YouTube and to be critiqued and that kind of thing. That's the strategy now, and there's some very innovative plans going forward that involve the domains of NewYork.com.
Fortunately, we benefit from the domain name and obviously the media relevance of it and so on. It's pretty easy to contemplate what it is. One of those in the wake of it, which you refer to as declining PPC revenues from parking and some of the things that are otherwise going on in the industry, it becomes increasingly important to establish direct relationships with advertisers as well as to figure out ways to drive traffic directly to your property. One of the things we've done is, in fact, just that. We have an ad sales team out there soliciting advertising from individual companies in addition to the affiliate relationships that we enjoy that are pretty much mainstays in the industry.
I was busted at the Chicago O'Hare airport, I remember, for putting NewYork.com stickers on every trash can in the airport. Throwing cards in airport seats because [interference] the flight. It's the perfect piece to have people come up . . . every gate vacates when a flight leaves, and then the people gradually and slowly reappear at that particular gate when the next flight is supposed to go out of there. Of course, there's ample opportunity to place a card in every seat after the plane leaves. I would stay in airports and do that. Try to work some things out with the cleaning folk, because the cleaning people that you see pushing the carts, their job is to come in right after a plane leaves and pick up the newspapers and all that. So I would try to work that out with them.
There are a number of things out there. For example, you can have an unlimited number of subdomains with your domain, so hypothetically, BeautyShop.NewYork.com could be sold to an individual beauty shop. Similarly, BeautyShops.NewYork.com, with an S, could be a locator of directory type play for all the beauty shops in New York, and it could be broken down regionally within the state. You have alphabetically by city, click on it and it will show you a list of all the beauty shops and those beauty shops could be charged a fee to be included. You have the Verizon Superpages of the world, some of the other directory type plays pursuing something similar. They benefited by untold dollars from us paying our respective wireless phone bills as well as the phone book and so on. There are many opportunities out there to go that route, as well as to go with the customized email address play.
There was a period of time, and it still will work, it's got to be marketed heavily, both Yahoo! Plus and Hotmail Plus offered the service of two gig email boxes for $19.95 a year. Of course, that was before the advent of Gmail. When Gmail came, that kind of trounced both of those business models. I wanted to partner with Microsoft to have Microsoft market to its, I believe, 400 million Hotmail users at the time to, "Hey, if you love New York, if you like the Knicks, Nets, Giants, Jets, Yankees, or Mets, sign up for your @NewYork.com email address. Brought to you by Hotmail. Two gigs of storage, only $19.95 a year." It never happened. We entertained, had conversations with them, whatever. They just never did it. They were too big a gorilla. There could be some opportunity in that regard as well.
Sex.com, which I may have visited it once. Sex.com is something you talk about, everyone talks about the big number it went for and that kind of thing. Anything that is a generic, short, category-type domain, I regret not having gotten. I would say those types of names. Business.com, which really hasn't . . . everyone knows the meteoric dollars it went for from the original registration fee to, if I'm not mistaken, $15,000 to $75,000 to the next seller and then that person sold it. Ultimately, it went for $7 million as pretty much a name. It was built up and sold to Scripps Howard for $345 million cash. Those are the kinds of things that can happen with a domain name. I think there are a lot of them out there I wish I would have got.
I would love to have a sit down with Ted Turner. I believe Ted Turner would love NewYork.com and be interested in making up for what many think is the worst business deal in history, that being Time Warner's merger with AOL, where at one point it was AOL being the dominant of the two players as AOL/Time Warner. I think that Ted Turner would love to have the last laugh, and I think we would benefit greatly from his tremendous capacity as well as his experience in the media space.
I have a method I developed of working airport parking lots. Whatever you can think of, I've done it. Lawn signs, placing them up. I have campaigns running right now where I have signs up, corrugated plastic lawn sign material, it's easily hung on fences. I got that going on in places. There's a tremendous amount of opportunity if you get out there and hustle. I don't see when you get to the next level and be able to sustain yourself in traditional mass marketing, outdoor, online, radio, TV, etc.
To put on a Super Bowl ad, it's $3 million for 30 seconds. You have to be creative and do other things. I believe all those things are important elements of promoting a website.
When asked how he finds new domains, he replied, "Certainly, I would say in 99% of the cases, the fact that the domain wasn't available would not in any way deter me from pursuing the business opportunity because, as I said, being creative, you can come up with a domain and it's relevant enough. You just have to be very creative. Going back to the Kansas example you gave earlier, one of the domains I happen to have is KansasBakedBeans.com. It so happens it's one of the biggest things in Kansas is baked beans.
Much more of the interview to come soon
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