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

My garbage can is full of these signs

[Anonymous Coward]

These signs appear in my neighborhood about once a week in the wee hours of Monday morning. I usually remove about 10 of these signs from my neighborhood by 8:30 am. To date I have disposed of about 250 yard signs. It is illegal to post the yard signs on my property and my fellow home owners property without our permission. Thanks to your research our lawyers will be able to send letters to the proper people now.

BTW, those signs are illegal

[sootman]

If you hate them as much as I do, visit this site for tips and contact your local code enforcement office.

Legally, they are no different from litter. If you don't have a permit to leave something in a public place, it's nothing but trash. That said, the neanderthal assholes who post them might not be aware of that* and almost certainly won't be happy if they catch you taking them down, legally right or not, so be careful when picking up trash.

* and I'm sure the assholes who SELL the signs never mention it, either.

Re:Well done

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to bitch about the submitter advertising his company in the summary but after reading the article, I say that he has earned it. I didn't much care about this company but the whole detective process was quite fascinating.

Agreed.

What I'd like to see next is this guy taking out the "Crazy Fox" scam. Late-night TV commercials with the same video, namely a poorly-rendered CGI fox, talking about what an awesome home-based-business... yadda yadda yadda. The commercials are identical, except for a random number prefixed or suffixed to the domain name containing the string "crazyfox".

It's obviously a pyramid scheme of some sort, but the mechanism of spamvertizing it is ultimately the same as that employed by the "randomaffiliatename"{singles|dating}.com scam. The only difference is that it uses TV commercials (which are probably the "thing" being "sold" by the people at the top of the pyramid) instead of lawn signs.

Re:Slow News Day?

[RobertB-DC]

Okay, I understand the need for new and fresh content to keep the customers coming back, but an article about a dating site that uses town names from across America?

Let's think this through:

1. Anyone who wants to get more Obama can go to news.google.com and read through several dozen international news sources, as well as the Huffington Post and Fox "News", and get more than enough of the regular headlines.

2. Slashdot, as a news aggregator, is finding slim pickins on the tech side, as Obamamania sucks the oxygen out of every other news story. Cool for us political wonks, not so cool for CowboyNeal & co.

3. This really is a nationwide conspiracy. Every tiny suburb and exurb of Dallas is frequently spammed by these guys. I thought they were a local outfit, so it's very interesting to see the extent of their reach.

4. The way the guy investigated is cool, and I'm sorely tempted to upgrade my own DomainTools.com account to "paid" status, now that I know that it really works.

5. Last, but CERTAINLY not least, it's about a DATING SITE. Dating, as you may have heard, is part of the mating ritual of Homo Sapiens Solaris, aka "those of us who have emerged from our parents' basements". It involves meeting FEMALES, which is kind of an awesome concept when you think about it. Opportunities for +5 Funny moderations abound (deserved or not).

I think the "Together Dating" guerrilla marketing behemoth, with its sign spam, is reaching the same shallow end of the gene pool that buys enough v1@g@ra to keep our inboxes full of e-spam. Pretty sad. Especially when there's a free dating site that almost certainly generates better results. But I guess some folks think, if you don't pay for it, it's not worth anything. Hopefully, those folks won't be asking me for a date.

Together

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Has been around since long before the web- this is just their latest marketing technique. I'm actually a somewhat satisfied customer- turned out to be a great way for a geek to get a family, just faxed them my commute map and they introduced me to a gal who became my wife two years later. It helped greatly that her apartment was halfway home on my commute.

Re:Together

[ShadowBlasko]

The hell with printing them... Just the signs alone.

The price of Coroplast has tripled over the last 24 months. I buy 4'x8' sheets of it for making cages for small animals. My price went from around $6 to over $25!

Recycling election signs works nicely though...

Re:Together

[conspirator57]

not in oversaturated markets. When these started springing up around DC with different neighborhood/town names in the same style I leaped to the conclusion the article draws. It is good to see it confirmed though. Additionally, since the geographical granularity is so hilariously fine, it seemed less than likely that non-transplant locals were behind it. (Of course it could have been non-transplant franchisees getting buffaloed by their franchise distributor.)

Franchise distributors have a strong proclivity to assume your market is like the market where they come from and bully you into making decisions that are more valid for that market than yours. E.g. I knew a Blimpie franchise owner who was bullied by the franchiser into following a NY-NJ business model for a fast food restaurant: find an office building and rely on the building to supply the majority of your customers. The problems with this in the DC area are several, but here are two of the biggest:

      -most DC buildings are smaller than NY buildings (esp in DC itself due to the convention of not building higher than the Washington monument.)
      -due to lower population density and poorer public transit, parking is usually needed in DC whereas NY restaurants can ignore this, relying on foot traffic.

These and others contributed to the failure of the franchise.

As an aside, knowledge of how to sleuth out domain registration and correlation is somewhat de rigeur for most of us in the Slashdot audience, and as such should reduce the newsworthiness of the story.

Re:Together

[ShadowBlasko]

No, thats fine. Ask.

We have a small animal rescue (wildlife and guinea pig) and "Cubes & Coroplast"(p) is about the best thing you can use for Guinea Pigs.

Most store bought cages are criminally undersized for active, grazing, social creatures.

Re:Fines?

[HTH NE1]

In my city, a little old lady was arrested walking down main street placing more of these signs by none other than the chief of police. The signs stopped appearing for awhile, but apparently they got someone to replace her.

Re:missed the point

[Not-a-Neg]

I wonder how secure the database is? Why not just hack into their servers and steal their database, then you'd have thousands of potential dates in every state to hit on, and since you know they're desperate (having submitted their info to one of the sites) you're chances are greatly improved. You could even call them pretending to be from the company and tell them you've found a perfect match for them, then set yourself up on dates with them! When you're all done, you could then sell the whole database to some other sleazy marketing company.