Domainers can learn from Beijing Olympics

Is it just me, or did the jackass that owns beijing.com just leave a suitcase of money on the table by running a parked page on his site for the past 2 weeks?

From a user standpoint, the parked site is useless. You keep clicking links and more links and never really get to the information that you’re looking for.

Missed opportunities

The owner of beijing.com could have done so much more with the domain, and made much more money too!

Here’s some of my suggestions:

1. Lease the domain to the Beijing Olympic committee for the 12 months leading up to and following the Olympics. This is a win-win for everyone. The domain owner makes money for doing nothing, Beijing uses a great domain to showcase the great show they put on, and the user experience is top notch since the domain would be full of targeted Beijing 2008 content.

2. Lease the domain to one of the Olympic sponsors. How much do you think McDonalds, Visa, or Johnson & Johnson would have paid to flash their ads in front of type-in visitors all day long?

3. Built your own site with 1000 pages of content, rank it in google and approach all the advertisers directly and sell them ad space. With all the type-in traffic and organic traffic you would be getting, the advertisers would be lining up for front row access to your visitors.

Moving forward

Next is the 2010 winter Olympics in Vanvouver. And the guys at Reinvent are busily building out a nice one-stop resource over at vancouver.com

It looks like Reinvent “gets it”. I bet they make a fortune off the site starting in 2009. I can’t wait to see the finished product.

What’s next? In 2014 we have summer Olympics in London, England. Right now, london.com redirects to another London related site called LondonTown, so I presume that the domain is leased.

But I bet the owners of london.com either already have a clause in their lease to use the domain themselves during the Olympics or they plan not to renew the lease during 2014. If they don’t take a pause from the lease, the LondonTownpeople are going to be collecting their own suitcase full of cash!!