Media Confusion Over a Parked Domain Name

Frank Schilling benefits from television screw up (again).

Peter Askew over at Domainer’s Gazette made an astute discovery earlier this week: ABC News featured one of Frank Schilling’s parked domain names in a news segment, thinking it was an actual web site.

The news segment is about parents getting alerts about what their kids are doing (e.g. in school), and discusses the web site “Parent Connect”. The film crew recorded the site ParentConnect.com. There’s only one problem: that’s not the actual web site. It’s a domain name owned by Schilling.

It’s quite funny watching the reporter discuss what you can do on the site as the camera pans over different keyword links that lead to paid search results. Check out the video.

This isn’t the first time one of Schilling’s domains has benefited from confusion. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly told millions of viewers during a debate to visit “FactCheck.com” to read about the “lies” his opponent was making. He meant to say FactCheck.org. Schilling owned FactCheck.com. Schilling’s servers melted under the traffic, and he had to forward the domain to another web site (which happened to be critical of Bush/Cheney).

Schilling commented on the increased traffic after the post:

2008-05-05 33460 hits 23226 unique

…much much smaller compared to factcheck. That traffic was dangerously large.

I bought parentconnect.com in January of 2003 in my “locked in the house, long hair days”, long before these folks got the sparkle in their eye to create a similarly named product. Events like this make you feel like a farmer, who has owned a homestead for a really long time, and gradually the city is brushing up against your borders.

As far as money, Yahoo and Google smartprice the heck out of volume spikes like this, so it’s not as glorious as it looks.. It might pay for bandwidth 🙂