Obama vs. McCain: “Joe the Plumber” Causes Domain Name Speculation
The winner of the third debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, at least so far, is neither the Democratic nor the Republican candidate. It’s “Joe the Plumber” from Ohio. He was named at least a dozen times during the final presidential debate and even John McCain called him the winner of the debate. The person who could profit most from this is Joe Francis, the owner of the website Joetheplumber.com.
Traffic explosion thanks to Obama and McCain
During the first 24 hours after the presidential debate the website joetheplumber.com received 400,000 visits – which came as a total surprise to the Mexican plumber who owns the site because the site had not had one single visitor in 6 months. A website with a similar name, joelaratheplumber.com, which also existed before the debate, received 180,000 visits, according to its baffled owner.
A run on domain names
Also, during those first 24 hours after the debate, all generic extensions (gTLD, short for “generic Top Level Domain”) and national extensions (ccTLD for “country code Top Level Domain”) that are easy to access were quickly registered. Most of them are being used as parking pages to make profit from curious web users’ visits. But some of them were actually of a political nature (e.g. joetheplummer.com) or dedicated to supporting one of the candidates (joe-the-plumber.biz). In France, a blogger even bought the French version of “Joe the Plumber”, joe-le-plombier.com.
“I am the real Joe the Plumber”
Joe Francis has received several offers of up to $900,000 for his now famous domain name! Mr. Francis finally decided to keep his domain name, announcing “I am the real Joe the Plumber.” He now wants to enhance the design of the website. He did however profit from the attention by selling T-shirts sporting his company’s logo. Now he’ll just have to keep the buzz alive to make sure that his name will still be known after the elections are over…
Sources:
NorthJersey.com
Silicon Alley Insider
Image source: Silicon Alley Insider
Tags: domain name, Joe the plumber, McCain, Obama, speculation
