Chicago.com no longer a directory; owner also powering new email service at Power.com.
This morning I read an article by Robin Wauters lampooning Power.com, which offers an @Power.com email address and subdomains for a very steep price.
The site immediately reminded me of Chicago.com and its personalized @chicago.com email addresses. Indeed, Power.com is “powered” by @Identity, a company formed by Chicago.com owner Josh Metnick and Thought Convergence’s Ammar Kubba.
As I looked into this story I went to Chicago.com and was surprised to be forwarded to identity.chicago.com — a page pitching @Chicago.com email addresses.
The Chicago directory is gone. Or at least hidden. Metnick is going all in with email addresses.
He’s had some success selling these addresses, and I guess it makes more money than the Chicago.com directory. (I’ve reached out to Metnick for comment.)
But I think selling @Chicago.com addresses is very different from @Power.com. I certainly wouldn’t expect an @power email address to sell for more than @chicago.
When Robin checked [email protected], he was quoted $7,576 for a five year term. [email protected] is (a still steep) $749 per year.
As you can tell from the comments to Robin’s story, it’s not easy to convince people they should pay for a vanity email address. There are plenty of vanity email address for free or at a very low cost.
I reached out to the whois contact on Power.com, Leigh Power. His company Power Assist, Inc. has owned the domain since 1992.
He said the pricing is by design.
“This is obviously designed to be for a rather exclusive group of people,” he said. “I don’t think the person that goes for a free email at Gmail will go out for it. We hope there’s a small group of folks who will be interested.”
The venture is being run by Scott Smith, a Canadian entrepreneur (and DNForum member). Smith tried to broker the Power.com domain last year to no avail. I’m chatting with him later today and will update this story.
With regards to vanity email services in general, I imagine customers will be concerned with who actually owns their email address. If you’re a business customer using an @Chicago.com address, what happens if Chicago.com suddenly shuts down?
Selfishly, I’d love to see this form of domain monetization take off. But you can call me a skeptic (at least at these prices). I’m glad other people are trying it instead of me.
Sid says
F’ing hilarious. Not one will they sell, not one.
@Domains says
It does look like Chicago.com dropped the directory. The hotel and real estate links at the top of the page go to PPC pages.
The directory probably takes a lot of work to run, and the email business is more passive, but you’d think it would be still worth it to run a city directory on a domain like that.
Especially if you get people using @chicago.com in an email address, it’s like free advertising. Perhaps they’ll get back to the directory at some point, or are revamping it.
Christoff says
@power.com… how is that even a vanity email? Who would need to associate themselves with the word ‘power’. There’s a lot more clever ways to monetize that domain name but looks like a lazy approach was taken to try for some quick cash.
And do you need 3 or 4 guys involved to sell email addresses? Does 1 guy handle the one time DNS settings, one guy handles the landing page, one guy set up the payment processor, and one guy receives the bank statements?
JP says
You couldn’t pay me any amount of money to run a vanity email service.
You have a serious end user/customer nightmare on your hands with this one. So much to go wrong, and so much support to have to give. If the email address was free then you tell the customer, dude it’s free so quit complaining. If you charge a premium and someone who paid you big bucks has a problem emailing, even if the problem is the customer doesn’t understand how email works or quotas or whatever omg.
I am speaking from experiexe, I used to own a brick and mortar IT company. Supporting clients ability to send and recieve email is a task big enough for an IT guy to do alone as a seperate business’s. Like all other IT support tasks, its all good and simple, until there is a problem.
DEP says
The pricing algorithm for .chicago names is fun to play with.
I found that I could buy [email protected] for $79 a year — but my own uncommon last name is $749 per year. In Chicago, I’d rather be Ditka — I’d get good tables.
I agree that power.com doesn’t make any sense at all — but place-based email addresses should be nice mailbox money, particularly as they fine tune pricing.
One thing the commenters here seem to forget is that they have the benefit of testing different price points and conversion rates every single day, if they want. They should be able to converge on the perfect price for chicago.com within a reasonably short period of time.
J says
to JP.
I do not think anyone offers email hosting, only email forwarding. Most people would probably just set up their vanity email as return address in Gmail.
And to Christoff point, it does take all of 5 seconds to set up each email forwarding. So I also have no idea why several people need to be involved.
I also think people would only buy emails of their occupation – [email protected], city – [email protected], and major hobby – [email protected], but prices need to come down to maybe $100/$200 per year. [email protected] does not make much sense to me, unless it was $10/$20 a year.
Josh says
This poor woman, she should have learned by now what the name isnt worth and any more odd ideas wont help.
Steve M says
Sometimes even vanity costs too much.
help says
“it does take all of 5 seconds to set up each email forwarding.”
Sounds easy … until a few spams are forwarded and your server is placed on blacklists …
Torcuato says
They should share profit selling emailboxes or email addresses based on other people’s domains
John says
Have You written anymore recent articles on this topic? Does GoDaddy allow one to sell and manage emails from domains they own? Do you know how exactly @identity works? Thanks