Lights Out for Broadway Ticket, GEO Domain Site NewYork.com Over Legal Dispute
NEW YORK, NY – While researching some GEO domain names last night I discovered that NewYork.com has now disappeared. It was a huge site I was quite familiar with as I had some past affiliate dealings with them, but today it appears its gone offline and parked at Godaddy.com.
This was initially very hard to believe as last time I visited the site it seemed bustling with traffic and activity similar to its New York City streets in which it ‘virtually’ represented. This large site was the original brain child of Leland Hardy who first registered NewYork.com in 1994 for roughly $10.00.
Apparently the site, originally owned under NEWYORK.COM INTERNET HOLDINGS, INC. became an asset of a new corporation called NewYork.com Entertainment Group, LLC, which was co-owned by its original owner and ENTERTAINMENT BENEFITS GROUP, LLC – a ticket sales goliath who had experience building out Internet properties and maximizing their revenue through primarily show-ticket sales.
According to legal documentation online the new co-owned corporation NEWYORK.COM ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, LLC, despite its highly valuable domain name, struggled to make the site a success with differentiating opinions on why exactly that was and with litigation on both sides likely crippling the business.
A memorandum opinion of initial claims and counterclaims is online here for those who have interest in reading about it; I only skimmed it and it’s not clear (or I just couldn’t find further documentation) what ultimately led to the sites collapse. Archive records show the site active until around December 2016.
About The Author: John Colascione is Chief Executive Officer of SEARCHEN NETWORKS®. He specializes in Website Monetization, is a Google AdWords Certified Professional, authored a how-to book called ”Mastering Your Website‘, and is a key player in several online businesses.
Anyone taking on a business deal without a parachute exit strategy can be detrimental to your domain names and assets. Always consult a good intellectual lawyer. Cirque du Soleil owns it now
Cirque du Soleil is a tremendous outfit. If you know anything more about that transaction or how it wound up in their hands, I would sure love to hear about it. Hopefully both sides wound up with a portion of the proceeds of whatever sale or acquisition took place moving it into new hands..
Wow, lesson learned. Always consult a lawyer.
Hopefully wan’t a total loss.
You think they didn’t consult lawyers? It sounds like a lot of lawyers were consulted! I think this comes down to a very bad partnership rather than not getting advice.
I agree snoop. I do recognize one of the lawyers involved as a well known IP firm so I think it was a partnership that went downhill. Probably a result of the way the company was managed and profits and or lack thereof.
Reading the lawsuit it seem revenue was expanded a lot, appears it didn’t have a lot of revenue before the partnership which I think would be typical of a lot of GEO names as the commercial link is not very obvious unless it is mainly a tourism destination. Looks to have had 200k revenue – not sure of profits. I think the owner has gone down a high risk route to try and grow it via a very fast expansion and presumably the new organic traffic couldn’t make up for the ballooning costs. Sounds like both parties were at fault.
Probably a lesson here about development, it often doesn’t work out.
From the lawsuit: In 2011, NYIH was introduced to EBG and its president, Brett Reizen. EBG, at
the time, allegedly was one of the largest privately held travel and entertainment
providers in the United States and had a proven track record of developing successful and
innovative entertainment destination websites and sales channels. After negotiations,
NYIH agreed to sell a fifty-percent interest in NewYork.com to EBG for approximately
$1,750,000.
So they valued NewYork.com at $3.5M.
Great stuff. The chances of NewYork.com going to expiry auction at Godaddy just went up is all I can think about from all of this. It just takes an incompetent admin person at Cirque for that to happen.
Not sure I understand but that’s an incredible domain.
And noteworthy was the following: “the new co-owned corporation NEWYORK.COM ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, LLC, despite its highly valuable domain name, struggled to make the site a success”
A great domain only gets you so far.
A name is not as valuable as Traffic. And that is not as valuable as a working business… there is always more to any story than makes the news
Online, Traffic is EVERYTHING.