Sunday, December 7, 2008

In Which I Spend $300 Buying GOP Domain Names

Y'all gather round and see what I got! Don't bother clicking on them, I don't have anything up yet.
RICHARD-SHELBY.COM
JIM-BUNNING.COM
JUDD-GREGG.COM
JIM-DEMINT.COM
TOM-COBURN.COM
ARLEN-SPECTER.COM
RICHARD-BURR.COM
JOHNNY-ISAKSON.COM
CHUCK-GRASSLEY.COM
KIT-BOND.COM
MIKE-CRAPO.COM
JOHN-THUNE.COM
GEORGE-VOINOVICH.COM
LISA-MURKOWSKI.COM
DAVID-VITTER.COM

That's 15 of the 19 GOP Senators up for re-election in 2010. Mel Martinez and Sam Brownback are retiring, bob-bennett.com is taken and he's from Utah so a serious challenge is unlikely, and everything McCain related has been taken off the market already. (Jeb Bush is a likely Florida candidate, but everything remotely interesting on him seemed to be taken.)

At present, my plan is to do these things up more or less like my Saxby Chambliss site. I only got that going in October, so there wasn't enough time to do good search engine optimization and drive it to the top of the Google results. This time I'll be able to start early, hopefully getting my sites even higher than the Republicans' own campaign webpages or their Senate pages. I imagine I'll be able to use some of the same material on all these sites, so having one person do all this is actually a fairly efficient process.

Chris Bowers and a bunch of people at Open Left were buying Google ads against Republicans this time around, and I imagine we'll have even more people doing stuff like that in 2010. It helps you get better ad placement for the search phrase "Jim Bunning" if your ad links to a site that has "Jim Bunning" in the URL. Part of my goal will be to create an excellent target page for our team's Google ads.

I've also played a little defense:
HARRY-REID.COM
RON-WYDEN.COM
BYRON-DORGAN.COM
CHRISTOPHER-DODD.COM
KEN-SALAZAR.COM
BARBARA-BOXER.COM
BLANCHE-LINCOLN.COM
CHRIS-DODD.COM

I'd like to give these away to the senators or the Democratic Party, hopefully with the message that they need to be a bit more aggressive about domain name defense. I mean, Chris, you were running for president, and you didn't buy up chris-dodd.com! Sam Brownback (or somebody) bought up sam-brownback.com, and he's from the 13th century.

Back to the Republicans. I'm probably going to get the real sites on them up in 2010 after the next year has happened. What should I put up there for the time being? Any ideas?

8 comments:

Rob Miller said...

In the mean time-
how bout something edifying?

I live in Georgia, and was really upset by both campaigns' ads in the runoff. MANY folks I know undervoted because they could not bring themselves to support either candidate.

If you want to use your $300 investment to actually win the hearts and minds of people- offer them something positive, uplifting, and real.
Obama looked at his opposition's attempts to smear him and ran on "Yes We Can."
Martin did not think as highly of himself, and took the low road.
Who would you rather be associated with?

Neil Sinhababu said...

You know, I could compile a bunch of stuff from sites like Ontheissues that would just give people information about voting records and such.

cathalcom said...

you could post one of those standard 'site coming soon' notices. but subtly change the details to things like 'when anything is posted on this site, it will probably be deceitful', or 'check back soon to be misled on important political issues'

Anonymous said...

Regardless of what you opt to post on these sites, the very idea is pretty damn brilliant/hilarious. Bravo.

Neil Sinhababu said...

Somebody on the other thread suggested that I have the David Vitter site redirect to an escort service. Even if I do something more high-minded with the others, that's just got to happen.

KV said...

How come you haven't bought up the sites without dashes? That's probably what most people use (i.e. chrisdodd.com).

Neil Sinhababu said...

Kartik, those were already bought up.

Bob Bennett said...

Just stumbled across this post. I'm the "Bob Bennett" (a longtime singer-songwriter) that owns the BOB-BENNETT.COM domain name. For many years I've been hoping to somehow obtain BOBBENNETT.COM (without the hyphen/dash) from a "Bob Bennett" in NC who is absolutely not using it. And, still, absolutely will not sell it. (Check ARCHIVE.ORG and see how far back the page stays static and meaningless for BOBBENNETT.COM.) If you can find a way to wrest the non-hyphen BOBBENNETT.COM from him, then you'd certainly be welcome to my hyphen/dash version!

:-)
Best regards, the non-Utah, non-Senator Bob Bennett