Going into TV with new partners

As part of exisitng site or starting a new domain

[tomthumb2000]

I have a prospective new partner who can supply video and editing really cheap and we want to launch a whole video side to my informational site. So far all well and good. He's professional and can get it done much cheaper than i could.

Thing is, i want to put the new video side of things on www.widgets.com/tv so that the new pages benefit from the existing backlinks and general standing with google. He's afraid though that if he invests time and money in www.widgets.com/tv then it will be of general benefit to www.widgets.com! So he wants to go with www.widgets.tv which would be fine except that starting with a new domain is like starting from scratch even if we can funnel a good deal of our daily traffic to it.

Should i just propose to take a 30% share of revenue in www.widgets.com/tv recognizing that my site will do well in general out of this new development? That would leave him 70% of the revenue in return for investing in promotion and video content building.

I'm a bit out of my depth here but i'm also equally sure that we have a huge opportunity in this field, widgets have never been more popular and god knows they look good on video...

[jtara]

Do these widgets come in pairs? ;)

I don't see how it makes a difference one way or the other, assuming you are going to match the base domain name.

Isn't the whole idea that his part of the deal is going to benefit from you're bringing in traffic from your established site, and the new site bringing in new traffic? You don't plan on hiding the relationship between the sites, do you? You certainly should maximize it, instead.

I'm not a fan of the ".tv" domain. I think it has a taint with consumers. Do widgets.com/tv or tv.widgets.com.

[tomthumb2000]

.tv is tainted, huh? I hadn;t heard that before, worth knowing.

I guess the thing is that if we start with a new domain it feels like starting from scratch, whereas if we build the tv secion as a folder on the existing site then the pages will rank well automatically.

But then from the inveestor's point of view, that will benefit www.widgets.com as a whole and he only has an interest in the /tv section.

The thought of starting a new site, getting yahoo and dmoz links again, all the other inbounds etc gives me a migraine..

[jtara]

.tv is tainted, huh?

.tv is the country code for the tiny island nation of Tuvalu. It is NOT a gTLD.

IMO, country codes used for some other purpose have a taint with consumers. Perhaps .tv less so than others. (.ws and .cc come to mind.)