Now We Know How Much NBC Paid For SyFy.com: $250K & The Story Behind It
In a new article published by the former owner of SYFY.com, the domain and brand NBC chose to replace the Sci Fi Network and Scifi.com, he tells the story of the negotiations between himself and NBC and confirms that the sales price was $250K.
And for all your domainers out there that think $250K was a pretty good price for a LLLL.com, the former owner, Michael Hinman, is not a happy guy:
“NBCU didn’t even have the balls to approach us themselves. They used a shell company called New Fizz Corp. to buy the SyFy Portal domain name.”
“$250,000…that’s right. That is what they paid us to sell our domain name and our brand. A quarter million dollars. How much of a budget hit was that to NBCU? Let’s spell it out again: $16,900,000,000 versus $250,000. That is 0.0014 percent of NBCU’s overall revenue for a brand that they are now using on a major property. If they had come to us as NBCU, they know that we would’ve looked at the $16,900,000,000 in revenue, and likely would’ve wanted to move the decimal point in the percentage of revenue to the right a few places. Even then, even if we had asked for $2.5 million for the brand and the domain name that we put so much of ourselves into, that would be just 0.014 percent of NBCU’s overall revenue for the year.”"
As domainers we know that many people and companies lie, when they try to acquire a domain.
It is rare they write you and say yes this is Google and we want to buy your domain for a major product rollout.
Instead the e-mail I get claim to be from students, recently divorce housewives, or recently fired people, all of which claim to have not a lot of money to spend.
I usually get the “that’s all the money I have in the world” line only to wind up with them magically coming up with several times more, to get the domain.
Bottom line, the buyer know who they are, and they know what they want the domain for, and you don’t.
I know a lot of you would have been happy taking $25K for SyFy.com.
I think Michael, with all due respect, your pricing expectations are not realistic.
First take the case of CNN, which I understand identified themselves as such, to one of the best negotiators on earth and wound up getting the domain for $750K.
In that case CNN started using ireport for months before even contacting the “Domain King“. At that point ireport.com was probably getting quite a bit of traffic which would only increase over time and the “King”, probably would have been happy with keeping the domain and traffic forever.
CNN which is owned by Time Warner, probably has higher revenue than NBC/Universal and its not really fair to judge the sale by the revenue of a huge conglomerate generates. In the ireport.com case, it certainly wouldn’t be reasonable to count in the revenues of say HBO into the equation, for the value of ireport to CNN. Likewise, why count the money Universal makes off of the USA network into figuring our what the revenue of the Sci Fi network is or a percentage of revenue.
Beyond that domains are not a reflection of a percentage of the buyers worth or revenue.
Michael, you need to look at recent sales of domains in the mulitmillion dollar range.
Toys.com $5.1 Million
Candy.com $3M
Auction.com $1.7M
Ad.com $1.4M
All of these domains sold this year.
Sorry Syfy.com doesn’t compare to any of these.
While I agree domains are undervalued and the Buyers of these top domains Should be paying more and the domains are worth much more than they went for, its what in fact quality domain are going for.
SyFy.com other problem is who was the other buyer?
Other than this project NBCU had, who else on earth would have paid $250K for this domain?
If NBCU backed off and went in another direction, then you would have walked away with no sale.
Sciencefiction.com was offered at DomainFest.com this past January with a reserve of $150K.
That’s a domain NBCU could have bought for less than they paid for syfy.com.
So in my opinion Michael you should sleep well at night, having made a good deal on a domain.
Michael, welcome to our world, were we get offers everyday from people, unknown to us.
Sometimes they identify themselves but most times the e-mail comes from a gmail or hotmail or other ISP account and the buyer doesn’t identify themselves at all.
Many times we turn down offers never to ever get another one as good as the one we turned down.
Other times we find the domain we sold to that college student for a small project, has gone to a major corporation to be rollout as a huge project.
Other times we get a UDRP where that major corporation tries to take away our property without having to pay us one cent for it.
Yes Michael welcome to our world.
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I agree fully that $250k is a price that the seller should be very happy with. There is no one else who would have paid even close to this amount. Even $25k seems high for what it is. Just because he got lucky that a large brand decided to switch their brand to a name he had, that does not seem to warrant a bitter outcry. In this market (and for what syfy.com is in any market), he should be glad he even got close to that. After all, he did sell it for $250k so he can only blame himself.
Great article MHB! In a way, I understand Michael’s argument to an extent, but not with regards to the money. Fraudulent representation is something that really bothers me when selling domain names – something that, I suppose, comes with selling digital real-estate without meeting face-to-face. Of course, this is tough to prove as brokers and subsidiary companies (even individuals) are often those negotiating sales.
Be happy with the $250K! If I could sell my CVCV’s for a 10th of that I would be a very happy man!
Cole
I’m crying. I sold SyFy.net to Buydomains earlier this year… Hold ‘em people, Hold Them!
I agree $250,000 is an excellent price for SyFy.com. However, I can see the guys point. When he says, “the domain name that we put so much of ourselves into” exactly how much work did he invest in the domain? It sounds like he put time and effort into increasing the domain value and at least deserved an honest and forthcoming buyer to come to the negotiation table. This may have been his only valuable domain property and he was denied his shot to completely “max out” on its sale to a big company.
Easy for us to say he should be happy with $250,000 but if you are honest with yourself you would be upset too that NBC passed itself off as New Fizz to dampen price expectations.
To be “honest”, I would be angry at myself, not at NBCU. If you want to sell it to NBCU, and they come along in sheep’s clothing, you should either keep your price high and say your opportunity cost is selling to NBCU or not sell it at all. He made the ultimate decision to sell it for $250k. It is like chess or gambling – while there is some luck, a lot of it is about your strategy. Obviously NBCU out-strategized him. I look at domain m&a like poker or a chess match. If you are unhappy with the outcome, then blame yourself for not being intelligent enough to hold on or use the power of negotiation.
People – this is business. If he didn’t want to accept $250k he did not have to. Sounds like a sore loser and someone who is now capitalizing on the popularity of the SCI-FI channel to preach his own little soapbox.
No love for people like this – if you dont want to sell then dont – if you do then don’t complain. It takes 2 to make a deal.
We all have “could have, would have, if I only knew” stories.
whoever owns crybaby.com – please donate the name to this guy as he most certainly deserves it.
I agree with Alan, the decision to sell was the seller’s. If he thinks that way then treat every potential buyer as a big company and ask for a million dollar price then.
Most of us would have sold that name for that price in a heartbeat and thought we got the better part of the deal. Who else would pay that much?
Why should a big company wanting to buy your domain lay down all their cards when it will only increase the asking price? There are two sides to each deal, and each side has to do what benefits them.
This is a 15-20k domain name. Looking at archive.org I don’t see anything that they did significantly for a number of years to warrant 250k.
Boohoo, my feelings are hurt. How much more did they want NBC to overpay for this domain?
Over 99% of us would have sold syfy.com for under $5,000…and you are that 1% that asked for more money and got it…and now, you are crying like a little baby…i second that motion to donate crybaby.com to him!
JB,
“How much more did they want NBC to overpay for this domain?”
better question is what does this guy want them to do now?
The entire point of articles like this is for people to vent … very unprofessional, immature and just plain silly.
“Looking at archive.org I don’t see anything that they did significantly for a number of years to warrant 250k.”
You don’t have to look anywhere. If they did do anything significant they would have sold for more.
I like his comment
“”"” Last year, NBCU made $16.9 billion. Our little SyFy Portal operation? About $40,000 and some change. Let’s spell that out … $16,900,000,000 versus $40,000 “”"
Last time I checked no tv station in the world made $16.9 Billion in profit – somebody should tell him revenue is different than income.
Comparing apples to apples his $40k in revenue was probably much less in profit. Selling a 4 letter name that has an incredibly limited pool of buyers attached to a small business model for 10-20x income.
Boohooooooo ….
Agree with what most are saying. This is a mediocre domain name and the party that got a sour deal is NBC.
MHB provides the most critical factor in this sale:
“. . . who else on earth would have paid $250K for this domain?”
Because the answer is no one (ever); and likely no one even at 25k; he actually made off like a bandit.
This seller reminds me of a mechanic who runs a small repair shop…the moment a big, shiny BMW pull up, he immediately start to think of ways to raise the price!
I’m sure that a company such as NBC is fully aware of such thinking…which is why they probably decided to keep their identity a secret.
I think $250K is a great sale for that domain.
I think we all agree he got far more than what the domain is worth. Its not the price its the ethics issue for me. I would never do a business deal pretending to be somebody I am not.
Maybe I am naive that this is “just how business is done” to everybody.
No wonder the housing market collapsed and people are losing their jobs.
No one should try and amp a price because they think the buyer has money. Domain names are like real estate. Could you imagine someone raising the price on a home simply because they thought a particular buyer had more money? For one thing, people with money tend to be smarter, not stupider, and they know when they are being jacked. CNN simply screwed up and paid the price to Rick for their mistake.
Seems unanimous, completely agree, the seller got a great price. Exactly right Mike, no one else would have bought that name/come close to that kind of purchase price. Seller should be thankful, thankful that a big company like NBC was willing to pay so much for a name that is not worth a fraction of that price. If NBC drew the line at 200k this seller would have been whining he lost a six figure sale–a lost sale that would have been impossible to replace. As for syfy.net, you have nothing to regret, its not worth much of anything on the open market.
I think He was VERY lucky to get 250k – even if he knew it was NBC that was making the offer.
…No wonder endusers liek to make offers in stealth mode !
Story’s wrong, Hinman himself has said he never owned syfy.com, only syfyportal.com which still redirects to Hinman’s site. Something fishy here.
Very lucky to get $250K
I’d have been happy with $10K for that name
every time,
Unless it was a big site he had, or an actual part of his business.
But good on him for getting $250K
People from outer space would have wanted that domain…
@jblack except that it looks like BuyDomains sold it to GE.com which owns most of NBC… now they’ve got the pair.
The overall problem is the logic, if you own a domain, you should have a price you want to sell that domain. If you get the price, that is a success. Finding out the buyer was a large corporation, does not a) lessen that success and b)it does not mean they would have paid more if you knew who they were, and upped the price for the name.
…@Jason, according to DomainTools, they got a much better deal on the .net version:
syfy.net Jul 12, 2009 $1,888.00
Jon,
yes .. I believe the Klingons may have paid 300k if he had reached out a little further.
Michael,
Lets not forget the most stupid part of the equation, they replaced Scifi.com with Syfy.com. And they paid 250k for the privilege. Must be a Harvard MBA making decisions.
incredible sale. he got very lucky.
i wonder if he asked for 250k and just stuck to it, regardless of who may have been asking, or did he ask for more?
would love to know even more details
Larry
We covered that issue back in March, when the news about the change from SciFi to Syfy was announced:
http://www.thedomains.com/2009/03/18/would-you-trade-scificom-for-syfycom/
That name is worth $1000 to a domainer max?
michael,
yes i read it then and it still amazes me to this day.
larry
First, replacing SciFi with SyFy was not especially advantageous. Second, as the seller, it’s up to you to decide what you will or won’t accept in regard to an offer.
When receiving an offer, it would be preferable to really know who you are dealing with. In the end, the seller has a decision to make regardless of who the buyer is. The offer itself should be the focal point. It’s either enough … or it isn’t. And the decision is yours to make.
Buyers and seller’s remorse typically comes from people not yet able to realistically valuate a property. They gain a better perspective after the sale has closed, and then look back in regret.
Hey All,
One note … a few suggested that it’s unethical to use a proxy to buy a name such as NBCU did here.
I have to say I think whoever agrees with this is thinking only from a seller’s advantage standpoint. A buyer should try to get the best price possible and using a proxy is fine.
Hell, we have people who buy some names for us, many of you have privacy on domains when selling hoping the buyer(s) think it’s expired or don’t question who owns the domain and registrar owned domains often use privacy from the day of initial registration.
So selling using a proxy is fine but buying is not?
Many people use companies that are all owned by one master company for business or tax reasons so why should anyone show their complete hand.
Would you be open to tell the seller your purchase price and have them judge a price based on your ROI.
ex. Tommy – I would pay you $250k but after realizing you only paid $1000 for this name I would like to change my offer to $50k.
I find the whole argument senseless – an argument only a seller would make.
Alan
In real estate, this has been a common practice for years.
When Disney was acquiring the property around Orlando for all of its parks its a fact that they used dummy corporations to secure much of the land.
“To avoid a burst of land speculation, Disney used various dummy corporations and cooperative individuals to acquire 27,400 acres of land.
The first five-acre lot was bought on October 23, 1964, by the Ayefour Corporation(a pun on Interstate 4).
Others were also used with a second or secret meanings which add to the lore of the Florida Project, including M.T. Lott Real Estate Investments (“empty lot”).
In May 1965, major land transactions were recorded a few miles southwest of Orlando in Osceola County. Two large tracts totaling $1.5 million were sold, and smaller tracts of flatlands and cattle pastures were purchased by exotic-sounding companies such as the Latin-American Development and Management Corporation and the Reedy Creek Ranch Corporation. In addition to three huge parcels of land were many smaller parcels, referred to as “outs.”
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_World_Resort
for more info
Thanks – I remember reading about that and its a great link for those in disagreement to read.
“buy as a buyer and sell like a seller” is the quote we all should live by.
Can’t have it both ways all the time.
So it seems then that some names are “worth” more (ie. have more “value”) to some companies/people than they are worth to others. A single domain name parked is worth less in terms of a PPC multiple than that same domain on the same parked page to a large portfolio holder who is able to negotiate a higher PPC revenue share. Similarly, the farm land around Orlando was only worth X for what the farmer could use it for. But its worth Y to what Disney had it mind for its use. So one can argue that a domain name sale price can vary if they know who/what the buyer is and what it may be worth to that end user in terms of ROI. Thus, the “value” is not necessarily fixed or the same regardless of the possible buyer. Rick seemed to prove that with ireport.com–Rick could not have maximized its use, but CNN likely has recouped its investment or certainly will far quicker than Rick could have.
The similarities with domains and real estate are many, but there are areas given that domains are unique assets where similarities diverge somewhat.
The most annoying thing is under his signature, he put:
_The real creator of the term “Syfy”
WTH?
This guy is a complete idiot.
He’s on a completely nonsensical rant now because of who paid him the price that he AGREED to.
So what? Was NMC-U smart to do it that way? Sure, but then again.. even aliens from outer space would not be willing to fork over a quarter Mil for that domain, so he got a major score.
Look, anybody that is negotiating into that range for a basically worthless name has to know that the buyer has a pretty big incentive to have the name if they are still at the table. To go on and on about how he got screwed somehow now, after the fact, is simply childish and stupid.
What will come of his rantings other than the entire world coming to the same conclusion – that he is an idiot.
He didn’t even own the domain.
Look up the history.
He’s claiming he “invented” something that he never even owned and was coined long before he was even around.
If he was willing to sell it for $250,000 he should have considered all possibilities. It was probably all fun and games thinking that he pulled the wool over the eyes of some start-up company until it turned out being a shell for NBC.
The fundamental mistake is for the rebranding to SyFy. No-one on the planet (or any other planet) spells the abbreviation like that, and it wouldn’t pass the phone test/radio test as everyone would assume the traditional spelling scifi. Are they going to redirect scifi.com to syfy.com ? They’ll need to. The stupidest idea this side of Andromeda.
I have e-mailed Michael on this well-thought opinion piece, but I need to make some corrections and clarifications, and share a response.
First off, we never owned Syfy.com. The domain name that was sold as part of this transaction was actually syfyportal.com.
We didn’t acquire that domain name until 2002 following the merger of SyFy World and Star Trek Portal. Previous to that, we didn’t feel that having a domain name was important to the way we operated our marketing efforts, feeling that people who found us on the Internet, likely found us through a link and had already used it, and would then bookmark us from here on out. How times have changed in terms of how sites approach potential visitors on the Internet over the last 11 years, eh?
Also, at the time, domain names were far more expensive as they were now, which I’m sure Michael, as well as many who have commented on this story, are very well aware. As an operation that started out with zero revenue and was being supported by a financially struggling newspaper reporter at the time, we couldn’t justify the expense.
When an online retailer bought Syfy.com in 2000 and started to market sci-fi DVDs on it, we contacted them. However, at the time, precedent in re-acquiring domain names which contain trademarks owned by others had really yet to be set, and fighting such sales legally was extremely expensive (it’s still expensive to fight them today).
In lieu of going through a protracted battle, we contacted the company that owned Syfy.com, and they agreed to put a disclaimer on their main page indicating that they were not affiliated with SyFy World, and even linked to us (if you look at it through the Wayback Machine, you will see that the link is NOT a domain). Such a move, by the way, continues to protect a trademark, even if the result it not a surrender by the offending party.
Second, as I pointed out in an e-mail to Michael … this cannot be compared to a simple domain name sale. I did not sell couches.com or something like that. I sold a domain name as well as a trademark. In none of the examples provided are you showing where a trademark transferred. Not even in the Domain Kings/CNN example can you show where a trademark also exchanged hands. To compare even the correct domain name of syfyportal.com to the likes of candy.com or what-not is apples and oranges. Those were straight domain name sales.
This was a domain name and a trademark.
If I had just sold scifi.com, for instance, and I was complaining about $250,000, I would see your point. Since I am not selling a trademark, and I could always have used that money to buy scifiportal.com, and who could challenge me?
But under the terms of the TRADEMARK sale, I cannot use the Syfy mark, the “Sy” mark, or even the variant “SFY.” I can’t just change part of the domain name and be happy … I sold an entire brand that is now fronting a division that earned $450 million in revenue last year.
On top of that, you have a corporation that is now claiming they “coined” the term. In Fortune magazine, Syfy creative VP Michael Engleman is credited with being the first person to come up with the name, something that is completely false on ALL levels. We used “SyFy” (with a capital “F”) as a branding strategy for everything, capitalizing on being the people who convinced the science-fiction community to pronounce it as “sci-fi” and not “see-fee,” as would be the proper and common way to pronounce it.
I have asked Michael to please correct the syfy.com references, as they are incorrect, and to further clarify the position that this is NOT a simple domain name sale. This is a trademark sale as well.
To answer a few specific comments:
OZIE JACKSON: Thank you for the nice post. I know you were responding to the fact that this was presented in this column as a simple domain sale, but I hope that the discussion here in my response about this being a trademark issue helps make this whole discussion clearer. We spent a lot of time branding everything we did with the SyFy name.
When we sold the name, we had to change a LOT of names. Our corporation, for instance, was called The SyUniverse Group Inc., and had to be changed to Quantum Global Media. Our online radio program that is morphing into a podcast called SyFy Radio had to be changed to Alpha Waves Radio. The arm of our operation that created the radio show and had plans for other media projects was called SyPod. My weekly column that has run for years was called SyFriday, and had to be renamed SciFriday.
I could go on and on. Hard to believe that NBCU, who 30 days before allowed a dispute we were having with the showrunner of one of its programs go right up to the president of SciFi, and who has worked closely with us for years, somehow missed all of our branding and how we utilized a trademarkable name.
===
DREW: NBCU did not identify themselves at the bargaining table, and we had no clue that they were involved outside of a suspicion I had based on a background check I did on the attorney they were using. (That attorney has represented NBCU in other online matters in the past). However, we couldn’t be sure that it was NBCU behind it because lawyers who have expertise in a field is not always tied to a single client.
We felt we were negotiating with a small firm that had some more capital than usual, but not the $16.9 billion that was representing NBCU.
So this was like playing poker with someone who can see through the cards (and I had no idea he could). If he beat my bluff of an ace high with a pair of twos and took all my money, are you saying it’s my fault because I played the game in the first place?
=====
ALAN/ROBB: We are not complaining about the price that was paid. In fact, in initial interviews that I did in the days after NBCU announced the Syfy name change of its network, I made it clear that we had no issue with the amount of money.
However, I qualified that statement with the fact that the difference was made up because of the fact that I would be known as someone who created a name for the network.
I turned on that when NBCU began to claim their creative VP “coined” the term in articles with Variety and Fortune magazine that ran last week.
Also, what I have asked NBCU to do is to make sure they acknowledge the true origin of the BRAND/TRADEMARK, not the domain.
To just clarify, the SyFyPortal.com domain is not even at issue at all in any of this discussion, and to bring it up here only shows that you are not fully informed of what’s going on, and why this issue is up. This is most likely not your fault, although I’m sure you can use Google and find out all the details.
The issue that is being discussed in the column that was mentioned here is the claims that a major corporation is taking creation credit for a trademark they did not create. What we are asking from NBC, and the ONLY thing we are asking from NBC, is to stop making such claims, and to provide proper credit for its creation.
Part of it is because I feel that something I created, I should get credit for. The other part of it is because I feel that the truth should always be paramount.
Also, NBCU generated $16.9 billion in revenue. I never stated profit, and since they are a division of a public company (General Electric), you can verify its 2008 revenue independently. So no need to question where the amount came from, or to misrepresent it as “profit,” when it was clearly described as “revenue.”
One thing to note about identifying yourself at the bargaining table, something we may pursue further if this issue cannot be resolved:
VALUE, as I’m sure all of you who are wheeling and dealing in domain names are aware, is set by the buyer, not the seller. It’s the buyer that determines how much he wants something, and what he’s willing to give up to get it. The seller, of course, has to agree and could counter, but it always comes back to the buyer on what he’s willing to give up to acquire something.
In a good faith negotiation, a buyer makes himself known, even if he doesn’t reveal all his cards on the true value. In good faith, however, that allows a seller to try and determine what exactly the value of such a name has, and to work from there.
We WERE lucky to get $250,000 out of this, especially with them starting at $60,000. But that’s because we were not looking to SELL the brand at the time, and were able to play hardball — not because we knew who we were dealing with but because I gave them a bottom line figure just to get them to go away and stop bothering me.
Nothing against what any of you do in terms of domain names, but I get tired of getting calls asking for people to buy my domain name. And although this was turning into far more significant money than was offered before, I still felt that this was another news site that was looking to set up shop and compete with whatever we rebranded ourselves, using our old name as their primary weapon.
In the final stages of negotiations, I got cold feet about giving up our name to another news organization that I would have to compete with. In the final stage, we countered with this:
Pay us $250,000 and get this brand outright. Or, sign a seven-year non-compete, and we’ll sell it for $200,000.
They took the $250,000, which led us to completely believe that this was not someone intending to name a network (or even have a network in their possession).
Our strategy at that point was to rebrand, and do it immediately. As was pointed out, syfyportal.com STILL points to Airlock Alpha. That is based on the sales agreement that we negotiated. They knew that we would not consider this without a transition period, and that was put on the table.
The transition period was established because we made it clear that rebranding would take a considerable amount of time (it took NBCU two years to rebrand SciFi Channel, and that’s pretty fast, actually). It would take months, especially since we didn’t have an in-house or external marketing team.
However, we were able to develop a new brand in a matter of days, Airlock Alpha, and decided that we would get the new brand ready to go, and instead of waiting to do it sometime within the transition period, we would do it the day the trademark sold.
Then, we could do everything we could to get people to forget about the SyFy brand during that transition period, so at the very least, we would be established with the new name and be competitive to our old name, which apparently had more financial resources than we did to buy a trademark for $250,000.
We were actually doing very good at doing that, even going as far as contacting any site that had links to SyFy Portal, and having them change them to the new Airlock Alpha address — even specific story links that could’ve been five years old.
We were completely surprised when a month into this process that there were no plans to create a competitor to us (as we were led to believe with the decision to not sign a non-compete and pay lesser money), but to name a network with the name.
I do understand why NBCU would want to use a front company so as to not be gouged, but that is the price sometimes that comes with being a mega-corporation, and wanting something that would make them millions of dollars.
It’s not just the name of SciFi Channel they will benefit from — but the potential increase in product sales and other things they can trademark using the word, that could be in the tens of millions if not hundreds of million dollars over the course of just five years.
By NBCU identifying themselves at the negotiating table, while we may not have been aware of the plans to rebrand an entire network, we would’ve at least been given the opportunity to try and think about what a better value for this trademark would be.
I would expound on this more, but this site is called thedomains.com, not thetrademarks.com — and really is completely off topic. In fact, the whole story, once its corrected, is probably really off topic for here. Unless you want to get into the whole discussion of coupling a domain name sale with a trademark.
Michael,
Thanks for clarifying and additional information. The combined sale of a trademark with a domain is certainly not comparing apples to apples to straight domain sale.
I think you will find many people are not on your side because of the way you presented this case – whenever you bring up how much money the real buyer had and how you think you deserved more makes you look like (a) a sore loser and (b) a bad businessman
Your quote
” $250,000…that’s right. That is what they paid us to sell our domain name and our brand. A quarter million dollars. How much of a budget hit was that to NBCU? … If they had come to us as NBCU, they know that we would’ve looked at the $16,900,000,000 in revenue, and likely would’ve wanted to move the decimal point in the percentage of revenue to the right a few places”
Says it all about some bitterness about the price paid.
If the seller is not acknowledging what was agreed to in the terms of the sale and (not just assemed it would be) then sure, you probably (check with your attorney) have every right to try to out these people and set the record straight in public.
But lets be real – as much I believe ethically “the truth should always be paramount” its not the way it is. Certainly not with big business, even less so with press releases, and lower even in marketing departments. Maybe on planet zenon but not on planet earth.
If the credit was so important to you – and you had right to such credit – then next time (if you did not do it this time) please have your attorney create a contract that provides assurances you will be given due credit by the buyer in the future.
As I said – thanks for providing additional information but when making a case for credit to the public you should focus on the facts relevant to your quest for credit and not facts on the buyer had so much money.
Just my opinion and sounds like you were actually happy overall with the money so besides the credit wanted it seemed to be another win-win for everybody.
Michael
Thanks for your response.
Just a couple of housekeeping matters.
First just to clarify for everyone, there are three Michael’s involved, myself, the author of the post, and yourself
Second, I e-mailed the author of the article when I first published the article to run it by him to see if he has any thoughts and I never got a response.
Third, all the info relied in my post was taken from the article which seemed clear to me that you were claiming ownership of the phrase syfy.
If you never owned syfy.com I certainly did not understand that from the post.
How could you say you coined the phrase syfy, if you never owned the domain syfy.com?
That doesn’t make sense in the terms of the article.
If you coined the phrase why didn’t you file a trademark on it to protect it.
So now your saying you sold syfyportal.com for $250K including the trademark to syfy?
Obviously, syfyportal.com in and by itself, in the domain community a “worthless” domain.
If you place that domain into any industry auction, you might get a couple of hundred for it, unless it had substantial traffic and then you might get a few thousand.
So you basically sold a trademark for $250K and any discussion about domains is superfluous.
Your statement that in 2002 “domain names were far more expensive as they were now, which I’m sure Michael, as well as many who have commented on this story, are very well aware” is simply untrue.
Domains are far more valuable now than in 2002. There are been at least 4 multimillion sales in the past few months.
Moreover Sedo.com has written on this and the average sales price of domains keep rising.
I still do not buy your argument regarding trying to peg the purchase price to the revenue, profit or any other such measure, especially of a conglomerate which has many other profit centers. How does the acquisition of your trademark impact the revenue or profit generated by the Tonight Show?
It doesn’t
Your other argument that NBC didn’t identify themselves in the negotiation, I still find unpersuasive. I gave you a very good example that this is how business is done for decades. A property is worth what’s its worth. You want to charge someone with deep pockets more than newco. Would you charge less if a truly poor person needed the property? Of course not.
Now back to the trademark issue.
If I search for a trademark on “syfy portal” I do not find a match.
If I search for a trademark on “syfy world” I do not find a match.
If I search for “syfy” I find 5 of them all filed by Universal in March of this year and none are assignments of previously registered marks.
So I’m not sure what you sold at this point.
I apologize for any confusion but the problem lies in the original post by Michael the author and the way you describe your own story.
Hello, Alan! Thanks for the response.
I brought up the money issue because, to be honest, I felt like I was violating the openness I have had with my readers over the last 11 years by not disclosing something that I am not required to keep under wraps.
NBCU, or should I say “New Fizz,” didn’t feel that such an amount necessitated it being a secret, as the agreement contains absolutely no confidentiality clauses.
Plus, as demonstrated by other domain sale examples presented here, apparently, other people were “sore losers” or “bad businessmen” because those prices were released in some form or another.
The release of the price, in the context of the column and the entire story, was to state that me asking simply to be credited with the creation of the name, which would be a true statement, was not asking for much. When I was asking for it in the past publicly, some felt that I had received far more than I actually did simply because I had not released the amount, and this was to show exactly how much was given, and why in comparison, it was not enough. It was an effort to quash a rather uncommon (but existing) response of “take the money and shut up.”
In regards to whether or not they followed the agreement, unfortunately, I cannot discuss that further here, simply because it IS a legal matter, and a possibly active one.
I can say that there were stipulations made in the agreement that are a bit … outside the norm, in terms of what we asked for, and one of those was historical linkage of the Syfy brand and its past before being bought by New Fizz/NBC.
You are correct in terms of credit. However, like I said in a later post, we had felt that we were simply dealing with someone who wanted to create a news site and had the financial resources to do it with an established brand. You may not hav eheard of us, and we may be hardly world famous, but we are a very well-established name in the genre community, mostly because of our longevity and the fact that there are a lot of sites with similar operations that were inspired by us, or get a lot of support by us (or both).
I’ve never been one to treat competition as anything more than friendly competition, and that’s the kind of approach that helps make many online friends in the community.
If we even had an inkling that the name would be used for anything other than a competing site, we may have made such a demand. But remember, once again, the buyer did not represent itself fully. We had absolutely no clue that the next place we would see the Syfy name was in the pages of the New York Times in a major entertainment story.
I was publicly forgiving of NBCU over the lack of representation, and possibly a sale of a brand for pennies on the dollar, ONLY because of the bit of notoriety I would receive for creating such a name. To me, that has a value that goes beyond even cash.
So imagine what that would feel like if that was suddenly taken away. That’s like giving me $5 million, and asking for $4.9 million of it back.
MHB:
I hate doing this this way as I think it’s messy, but please let me respond directly.
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I am referring to Michael H. Berkens, the person who e-mailed me about the existence of this blog post. To be honest, I did not look at the byline to see that it was a different name, as I had just assumed that you had written it.
Bad assumption to make on my part, so my apologies.
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Thanks. I am assuming you are an editor or a publisher of the site, and that you can make corrections when needed. Corrections, especially ones that misstate fact, should be handled expeditiously. Just some friendly advice.
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I was. I owned the marks for the term “Syfy.”
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It was not clearly spelled out in my column that I did not own syfy.com, because I was not discussing domain transfers, but instead trademark transfers. Since I had addressed the issue of syfy.com to our readers in the past, there was no need for me to bring this up again.
Please note that you took this from a weekly column that I write. About four of these columns since March has talked about this, and many of our readers are well aware of the past discussions made to other media outlets, including the situation surrounding syfy.com.
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I explained this already in my response. I will share it again in case you may have accidentally skipped over it:
Also, at the time, domain names were far more expensive as they were now, which I’m sure Michael, as well as many who have commented on this story, are very well aware. As an operation that started out with zero revenue and was being supported by a financially struggling newspaper reporter at the time, we couldn’t justify the expense.
When an online retailer bought Syfy.com in 2000 and started to market sci-fi DVDs on it, we contacted them. However, at the time, precedent in re-acquiring domain names which contain trademarks owned by others had really yet to be set, and fighting such sales legally was extremely expensive (it’s still expensive to fight them today).
In lieu of going through a protracted battle, we contacted the company that owned Syfy.com, and they agreed to put a disclaimer on their main page indicating that they were not affiliated with SyFy World, and even linked to us (if you look at it through the Wayback Machine, you will see that the link is NOT a domain). Such a move, by the way, continues to protect a trademark, even if the result it not a surrender by the offending party.
Please note that last part of that part of the message: Such a move (as in forcing someone who is using a trademark term to acknowledge they are not affiliated with someone also using a trademark) has been considered acceptable in the past for protecting a trademark with the original owner, even if the result of it is not a surrender of the usage of the trademark by the offending party.
For instance, I call my site Star Trek Portal (pretty much a name we acquired in our 2002 merger). Just because CBS Television doesn’t step in and force me to surrender the use of the “Star Trek” name doesn’t relinquish their right to continue to claim trademark ownership over the name.
This more a discussion of trademarks and not about domains — two totally different tracks of conversation.
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In terms of which article? My column or the article posted here?
I will not attempt to interpret this article here, but in terms of my column, my total discussion was about the SyFy brand, and had nothing to do with any domain sale, outside of the ancillary inclusion of syfyportal.com as part of the total sale.
The leap made by the writer of this column from SyFy brand to syfy.com was made by the writer, and never implied by me. I know it’s complicated, so it doesn’t reflect badly on the writer, but my efforts here are to set the record straight to help eliminate confusion, and maybe provide some context to those who are responding to this story as if I was bellyaching over the sale of an overpriced domain name, which is not factual at all.
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We sold the trademark to NBCU. You do NOT have to file a trademark registration in order to claim trademark ownership. Similar to copyright protection (you have copyright protection of your work here, for instance, yet you do NOT have to file it with the copyright office to get that protection), registration provides a strong level of defense if someone infringes on your work, because it helps establish a timeline of usage.
However, there are other legal ways that you can establish timeline of usage, and we were able to do that simply with documentation and published works that show us using the name, dating back before anyone else can claim usage of it.
If I had just coined it in my diary, and never did anything with it, I can’t take that diary to court to claim trademark infringement. But the fact that we were using it in a published medium, and could establish that we were publicly using such a mark, it can be used to establish trademark usage in court.
Say NBCU knew that we never filed a trademark registration, so they buy Syfy.com from the other company (for far less than $250,000, by the way — I heard it was actually under $10,000, but I don’t know that for sure) and decide to rebrand themselves Syfy.
They never approach us, never buy our mark. We can still turn around and sue them, and even with no money, we would be successful, because we could establish that we were using the name, and had created it before NBCU used it. Even if NBCU could show documentation that they first thought of the name prior to 1998, the fact that they didn’t register a trademark, or create something that could be publicly traced to the original usage of the name, they would lose pretty hard.
And all of that even though I never officially filed for a trademark.
You have to remember, copyright and trademark filings are NOT like patents. If you invent something and start to market it, and you never patent it, but someone else recreates it (even if they took the original designs from you) and patents it, that second person will likely get to keep their patent because they filed for it first.
Trademark and copyright protections are simply certified evidence of the existence of such original marks and material, and are meant to be used in efforts to defend such marks and material against infringement.
I’m not a lawyer, but I do know my way around trademark and copyright law.
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I am not “now” saying anything. I have said it all along. Once again, the leap to syfy.com was not made by me, or even implied by me. That was made by the writer of this column.
I have stated all along that the domain AND the brand were sold. The only thing I’m saying “now” is the amount: $250,000.
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Yep, which lends credence to my claim that NBCU purchased a trademark and brand, not a domain name.
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The site generated about 8 million uniques a year. Not Wikipedia numbers by any stretch of the imagination, but nothing to sneeze at.
But you are correct, if the domain and domain only were to be sold, we would be lucky to get a few thousand.
However, as I have already stated in this line of comments, we did not just sell a domain name, so the entire idea of this column — and many of the comments that followed it (some of them a bit rude, but that’s OK) are actually based on an incorrect premise that I sold a “worthless” domain name for $250,000, and I’m still complaining about it.
The issue that was raised was that I feel that no one else should claim credit for someone else’s work. Especially when that work is mine. I added the amount, which is what sparked your interest, based on efforts to allow people to understand exactly what the brand sold for, and compared to how much money NBCU stands to make in an effective rollout of that brand, why me simply asking for credit in the origin of the name is not asking for a whole helluva lot.
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Exactly. Which is what I stated more than once.
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You misunderstood. I’m talking about the purchase of unregistered domain names. In 2002, a typical domain name sold for about $75 a year. Now, they run around $10 to $12 a year, depending on who you use, without some sort of promotional deal.
While that may be the difference of a little more than $60, it’s still a SIGNIFICANT decrease in price, especially since to buy all the variations of syfy could be an annual cost of a few thousand dollars a year several years ago, compared to what they are now.
I don’t deal with domain name resale, and thus I have very limited knowledge on it, outside of the calls I received and still receive based on domain names I currently own. All the domains name I own I bought through ICANN, and not through previous buyers.
I did make an offer not too long ago on a domain name that was registered for the first time in 2007 that the owner had never actually used. I offered him $200 for it, which I felt was more than fair because I really wanted the domain name (it was an early name idea for our soon-to-launch television entertainment news site), but the guy demanded $2,000 for it instead when he found out who I was.
I walked away, and two months later I owned the name for $10 because he allowed it to lapse. So I not only saved $1,990, but I saved $190 as well.
Basically, my business is creating Web properties and such that deal with news, because I am a journalist, and that’s what I do. The business of people here, I’m sure, is in domain name resales, so you guys are the experts on that, not me.
But let me clarify that I was NOT referring to domain resales. I know very little about that, and actually learned quite a bit about it from this story and the comments that followed, but that is the extent of my knowledge.
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I used NBC Universal as the primary means to demonstrate where the money was coming from (I was going to go as far as General Electric revenues, but it was already an obvious stretch taking it from NBCU).
However, in later comparisons in the same column, I do shell it down to a less eye-catching number: $425 million, which was the revenue of SciFi Channel in 2008. That is better context for my point, although it is only talking about revenue, not overall value, which is a far different proposition.
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Black and white people couldn’t marry for decades. Women couldn’t vote for decades. The American colonies were taxed without representation for decades.
Does the fact that such practices exist for decades make it right?
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Good point, but then I likely would choose not to sell.
What you are leaving out of your argument is the fact that pertinent facts were not brought to the table that would allow me, as the seller, to decide whether or not to accept a deal.
If a poor person came to me and wanted to buy my brand or domain name, and I didn’t like the price — even if it was a great value compared to what he planned to do with it and what his potential profits were — I would have the right to turn him down.
I don’t think there has to be full disclosure, like what you would need on a house sale or a car sale, but there should be more disclosure than this. Like I would want to know how the neighborhood is with crime, if there was a sinkhole problem, or if there was a potential of Disney coming in and buying the land for a new theme park. =P
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I discussed this above. My discussion, obviously came after you made this post, so there is no way you could’ve known it before asking.
However, if you wish to talk more about trademark issues beyond what I shared above, I am open to it, although I don’t have a ton of time, so I will do my best to try and answer things as best as possible.
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I appreciate it, but what would solve the problem is correction and clarification in the original story. Thanks!
Hmmm … apparently my quoting did not work as planned .. I don’t have a way to edit it … but I guess you can read your original post, MHB, and understand where I am going from there.
I went right in order.
Michael,
“The site generated about 8 million uniques a year”
Are you talking about your site – the one you sold for $250,000?
Michael
So you sold an unregistered trademark for $250K and are quoted as complaining about it:
“NBCU didn’t even have the balls to approach us themselves. They used a shell company called New Fizz Corp. to buy the SyFy Portal domain name.”
“$250,000…that’s right. That is what they paid us to sell our domain name and our brand”
Wow
Once again if the original story had any clarity to it, then my story would have been correct.
However, if the story said you sold a unregistered trademark for $250K, and weren’t happy about it I would have wrote about that.
Alan: I am referring to SyFyPortal and later Airlock Alpha.
Note that I used an annual number. That breaks down to less than 660,000 a month, or about 20,000 or so a day.
I said “a year” but just wanted to make sure that was clear.
This whole issue is nearly unintelligble.
It seems like just the bag was sold, minus even the smoke.
And someone is complaining about it.