David Vivero

Well, it looks like I’ve made it big. If you type in “davidvivero.cm” rather than “davidvivero.com,” you now land at Agoga.com, a business that is said to deliver $300 million in revenue and probably $200 milliion in EBITDA. Like many in its industry, it’s a cash cow.

I’m flattered to be considered an affiliate of such a successful business, but unfortunately it’s not an exclusive club. Business 2.0 had an interesting article a couple months ago about an entrepreneur in the Pacific Northwest, Kevin Ham, who made a deal with the government of Cameroon to forward all the domains under their TLD (”.cm”) to his servers. His servers then serve up a few targeted ads from Yahoo or Google that send visitors off to the right sites, collecting a small fee in the process. Type in techcrunch.cm, or mayfield.cm, and you’ll get to Agoga.

A violation of trademark law, perhaps? Or, in my case, an onliny identity theft? Not according to those cited in the Business 2.0 article:

Several companies have already tracked down Ham’s attorneys, claiming trademark infringement. Ham argues that his system is legally in the clear because it treats every.cm typo equally and doesn’t filter out trademarked names. 

[Top domain attorney John] Berryhill concurs. “You can’t really say that [wildcarding] is targeting trade-marks,” he says. “It captures all the traffic, not just trademark traffic.” Moreover, the anti-cybersquatting statute applies only to people who register a trademarked domain; using a wildcard doesn’t require registering names.

If your company isn’t interested in taking the time to capture all the myriad ways that customers will express their intent online, someone else will capture that value. Even if it means a flight to Cameroon for one guy from Seattle.