Dear Frank: Thanks for the Relevant Links
Friday, September 19th, 2008
It’s election season, which means I’ve been visiting one of Frank Schilling’s web sites a lot.
The U.S. Presidential election is less than two months away, and there’s one web site I’ve been visiting a lot lately: The Annenberg Political Fact Check. On this site you can read about both Obama’s and McCain’s lies and their skill and stretching the truth. (Yes, they both do it.)
There’s only one problem. Annenberg’s site is FactCheck.org, and I keep typing in FactCheck.com instead. Frank Schilling owns FactCheck.com, a parked domain full of “relevant links”.
This is perhaps Shilling’s most famous domain name. During the 2004 vice presidential debate, Dick Cheney mistakenly referred to FactCheck.com instead of FactCheck.org. This sent a flood of traffic to Schilling’s parked page and he was forced to redirect it because the traffic was taking his servers down.
Honestly, it wouldn’t have made much of a difference if Cheney had given the correct domain name to the millions of viewers. Many still would have typed .com. After all, I’m a domain name expert and I’ve found myself on FactCheck.COM many times over the past month. It’s the natural thing to do. Our brains are trained.
According to Compete.com, FactCheck.com is among the top 300,000 most visited sites on the web.
Related posts:
- Joe Biden’s Domain Name Blunders
- Media Confusion Over a Parked Domain Name
- Paul Sloan’s Frank Schilling Interview is Worth a Read
Tags: factcheck.com, factcheck.org
Forced to change??? Why over a mistake? Was it pressure? It is not his fault Cheney dont know whats going on!
Ricky, he was forced to change it because the traffic was melting his servers. He forwarded it to an anti-bush/cheney site owned by George Soros.
I updated the story to clarify.
Factcheck.org provides a commendable service. Its not without bias however.
Surprised to hear factcheck.com was forwarded to Soros’s site. Interesting, both forwarder and forwardee profit greatly from the US market but pay little in US taxes.
I’ve started to see traffic coming to my site: politicalcheck.com. But, like Frank’s, it’s parked as well.