Nationwide Domain Name/Yard Sign Conspiracy

robertjmoore writes "Everywhere I go lately, I see these lawn signs that say "Single?" and then give a URL with my town's name in it. Being a huge business intelligence geek with too much time on my hands, I decided to track down who was behind them and wound up uncovering ten thousand domain names, a massively coordinated and well-funded guerilla marketing machine, and the $45 Million revenue business hiding behind it all. Hot off the presses, these are my findings."

Comments

Guerrilla Marketing

[apt142]

This is extremely fascinating. I'm not quite sure how it becomes news for nerds. But fascinating none the less.

Re:Guerrilla Marketing

[Red Flayer]

Why is it news for nerds? The same reason you found it fascinating.

Guy observes something odd related to his field of work.

Guy notices more oddities, all related.

Guy gets an itch to figure out what is going on, and scratches the itch.

Guy keeps on scratching until he's completely satisfied.

Seriously, what nerd hasn't done the same thing in their particular field of interest? Whether it's the grepping to find instances of an odd item in your logs, or statistical analysis to compare voting records by state to federal balance of payment figures, or figuring out how to make the pelvic actuators on your girl robot work properly, one thing all nerds have in common is sleuthing.

Nerdhood, to me, is defined by inquisitiveness and a strong dedication to finding answers and increasing our knowledge. So yes, it's news for nerds, since we can all relate to the author's search for truth.

Re:Guerrilla Marketing

[Facegarden]

This is extremely fascinating. I'm not quite sure how it becomes news for nerds. But fascinating none the less.

Maybe you're being sarcastic, but i really don't see why this is interesting, really. Upon reading the article, it seems to me the guy has the reasoning powers of a shrew - it was obvious to me after seeing just two identical signs with different addresses that this company must be doing this all over the place. The author makes it sound like it's some crazy complex conspiracy and blah blah blah. Hey, guess what!? BayAreaHelpWanted.com is also part of a similar situation! There is also SacramentoHelpWanted.com and a bunch others. Gasp! Someone is using location specific domain names as a way of appearing more local!

Next he'll find out that the Shane Co. is not a local mom and pop diamond company, but a huge nationwide chain, with ads targeting specific areas (our ads only mention the 3 local stores, for example, and Tom Shane always makes himself sound so down to earth that he couldn't possibly be the head of a huge chain).

Really, i'm surprised that anyone is surprised by how this works.
-Taylor

Fines?

[Ecuador]

Now that we know who is behind putting up all these signs, apparently without permission, won't there be some huge fines coming up?

The "from the..." Department

[D Ninja]

I know I'm slightly off-topic here, but I really have to wonder about timothy's choice of department for this article. It is:

from the tragically-yes-I'm-single dept.

Now, I am not trashing people who are in relationships or who are married or anything else. Please do not take my response that way. But my question is - why is it so "tragic" these days if someone is single? It seems as if everybody spends much of their waking time thinking about whether or not they have a date Friday night and the never do something with their lives. I personally have a number of a friends (girls tend to be the worst offenders) that gain their self-esteem from whether or not they are in a relationship. That seems horrible to me (and a really crummy way to live).

I don't know...mini-rant I suppose. I guess I just don't see what the big deal is about being single. Yeah, it *can* be lonely at times. But even people in relationships can be lonely. (On the flip side, I do know singles who can be alone, but their not lonely.) Being single offers so many advantages - your time is yours, your money is yours, you aren't tied down, and single people (especially ones who are content with that) tend to adventure a lot more.

Why being single = a bad thing, I don't think I'll totally understand.

Any response back from anybody here on Slashdot?

Re:The "from the..." Department

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that, quite frankly, one of the most painful issues with being single for geeks is when we have friends who constantly enjoy the pleasures of physical relationships. I, for one, have a friend who is constantly "pulling women from the bar" because "variety is the spice of life". Sure, he's always complaining to me that he will never find a good girl... But at least he's getting to have some fun in the sack.

For us pragmatic geeks who think about consequences, consider other peoples feelings, and simultaneously have the same mammalian urges as our more risky, wreckless friends, it's clear how one can feel that being lonely is tragic. ... comming from a 24 year old virgin who has more experience writing in assembly than hacking into panties.

Re:The "from the..." Department

[merreborn]

why is it so "tragic" these days if someone is single?

I believe the "moral" imperative to "be fruitful and multiply" comes from a desire of certain subgroups (mostly religious and ethnic in nature) to grow themselves. People born in to your church/ethnic group are pretty likely to stay loyal to it.

From this simple goal come many other "moral" values: anti-abortion, anti-birth control, anti-homosexuality, anti-promiscuity, anti-interracial marriage, and anti-singlehood.

However, the world in which these values formed is very different from the world we know today. A few centuries ago, with high infant and childhood mortality, a much higher birthrate was necessary to produce enough adults of childbearing age (the extra hands on the farm helped too).

Today, childhood mortality is incredibly low meaning most children make it to child-bearing age. The threat of overpopulation, rather than extinction, is now looming. Additionally, birth control dramatically alters the consequences of sex.

Our moral values are only slowly catching up, hence the intense clashes over abortion and homosexuality.

In short, being single is "bad" because we still have yet to shed some antiquated moral beliefs that aren't nearly as applicable in the modern world as they once were.

Re:Together

[demi]

I can see two or three minor arguments for using a top-level .com address: One is a result of your argument--among anyone who has a vague idea that domain names have to be purchased, they may have an understanding that it might be kind of expensive, and therefore it seems more "selective" than something which is obviously just a hierarchy. That is, the internal logic goes like this: "houston.dating.com" is just part of "dating.com", it's not special for houston, but "houstondating.com" is only for houston so there'll be a lot of locals in it. The second is that people actually just screw up subdomains to a surprising degree. People seeing a sign will remember the words "houston dating dot com"--they never remember dots or hyphens or anything like that. So they go home and type "houston dating.com" or "houstondating.com" in their web browsers and get your site. (In actuality, they often type "www.houstondating.com" as well, regardless if that's correct or not).