revenge is sweet

another competitor bites the dust

[LifeinAsia]

Many eons ago, I had a personal website, more of a travel log, that I developed and worked on when I had time. Eventually, it grew in popularity. At the height of the .com boom, my wife and I decided to work on it as a full-time business. The idea was that eventually we would add other langauges and expand to other countries.

Around then, we found out that a former co-worker of my wife started doing something similar. He bought a bunch of similar domains and started translating content to other languages. He went around telling everyone that we stole his idea (never mind that our domains were registered long before his). He hired a bunch of people and put out press releases and made a bid deal about all their partnerships, no matter how tenuous they were.

One by one, those exalted partnerships died and the partner web sites faded into nothingness. All the domains basically redirected to one core site that hadn't been updated in years (yet still advertising a limited number of worldwide partnership opportunities still available).

Just for fun, I went to the site today. It's now a fairly generic parked site with the usual assortment of junk parked domain advertising.

Meanwhile, we're having a good year and on track for our latest expansion plans.

Revenge is oh so sweet! :)

[Lovejoy]

I had a reasonable lock on a small niche back in 1999, then a big company with lots of name brand personalities muscled in. They spent 17 million dollars on development and publicity, they were on Oprah, the cover of Newsweek and a number of business magazine, but were never able to get a higher ranking than my humble five page website on any of the major engines. I offered to sell them my site for a piddly 100,000 (chicken feed in the pre bust dotcomworld) and they would then get on page one, they said "No, give us some time and we will bury you". In 2001 they went tits up bankrupt and I scored most of their data for reference purposes.....Yea it's sweet.

Lovejoy

[Crush]

Happened to us too many times to remember. The internet offers a low barrier to entry. It makes me work harder and put my foot on the gas with an occassional look in the rear view mirror to see what is coming. The strong will survive.

[Essex_boy]

The strong will survive. - No, Only the fast

[wyweb]

I once thought only the deep pockets had a good shot at survival.

I know better now.

[thecoalman]

Deep pockets certainly help but if you don't deliver the product you're going no where. The local TV station here has been running ads for better than two years now for their site that is billed as the states homepage. It's always mentioned on their newscasts everyday numerous times and described as being interactive with the newscasts... e.g they ask you to discuss the news topics on the site.

The website has many problems though. Firstly the amount of advertising is outrageous, the navigation is horrible and in some cases misleading. For example they have an embedded forum, next to each forum link is also a link for the advertiser with very misleading text. That's besides the fact it doesn't look very good. Frankly if I was advertiser I wouldn't be doing it on that site.

For the amount of advertising they do on TV its almost a joke that they haven't been successful in getting a community together, the forum and any of the other interactive features are practically a ghost town. I get more posts in day than they had all year.

Now if I had the advertising on TV that they have had...lol... even 1 weeks worth...

[adamnichols45]

Congratulations Im sure it will make you work even harder now!

I personally find that as we give our sites the personal touch we have far more to offer our visitors.

That in turn will always give as the upper hand against the big daddys.