Cybersquatter who owns lukeravenstahl.com Web site causes buzz
That's not the Mayor Luke we know
Saturday, May 19, 2007
By Bill Toland, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Eric W. Parkinson has the Pittsburgh blogosphere abuzz, not to mention parts of City Hall.
Who is he? Just your average West Coast cybersquatter (someone who buys and then resells Web site names), the guy who owns lukeravenstahl.com and has had much fun with it of late.
Last week, Pittsburgh bloggers discovered that the Web site named after Mayor Luke Ravenstahl directed visitors to a pornography site. Once the Web site was outed, by the likes of The Burgh Blog and The People's Republic of Pittsburgh blog, it began diverting visitors to the Post-Gazette's Web site, then a William Shatner celebrity roast, then to a music video, then to a YouTube video of Gilbert Gottfried, possibly the most annoying American comedian of the 20th century.
Cybersquatters, who prefer to be called domain speculators, buy up Web site names they think might be bankable someday in hopes of selling the name down the road to people or businesses. Domain names, through various companies, can be purchased for as little as a few dollars.
Often it's fruitless. Sometimes, it's a bit repulsive -- shortly after the killings at Virginia Tech, a man from Phoenix registered the domain names CampusKillings .com, VirginiaTechMurders .com and SlaughterInVirginia com. And sometimes, cyber-squatting can be a lucrative business. This week, the domain porn .com sold for $9.5 million to a Detroit company. That's quite a return, considering the domain was bought for $47,000 in 1997.
Mr. Parkinson hasn't done anything so grievous as the Virginia Tech squatter, though on one occasion his quick reflexes got him in a spot of trouble -- when he snatched up toddwitteles .com (named after a semi-famous poker player) the day after he won a major poker tournament, Mr. Witteles fought back. He did so through the National Arbitration Forum, a mediation group.
But the poker player lost, and an arbiter ruled that Mr. Parkinson was allowed to keep the Web domain because Mr. Witteles had no standing, according to guidelines laid out by the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. "Occasionally, someone will feel 'entitled' to a name I own," Mr.Parkinson said. "If they feel they have rights greater than my own, then they can spend the time and money and file an official dispute and take their chances."
Mr. Parkinson, formerly of Washington, Pa., says he's a "businessman and gambler" who moved to California in 2001 and eventually started a talent agency in Los Angeles. His cyber-speculating, however, is now his primary source of income.
Right now, he's sitting on a bank of about 1,500 names, and at one point he had up to 4,000. He's been doing it for two years.
He says he sells about $100,000 in domain names each year. One of his biggest sales, he says, was a Reggie Bush-related domain name, which he bought for $1,200 last summer and sold for $13,000, just weeks later. (The former University of Southern California running back and Heisman Trophy winner plays for the New Orleans Saints.) He also bought for $20, then sold for $2,500, TerribleTowel .com after the Steelers won Super Bowl XL.
That's why it's called speculating -- he bought the domain right after the Steelers lost to the Indianapolis Colts in 2005. But by February 2006, TerribleTowel.com had increased in value 125 times.
Domain squatting has been going on for a decade. Most squatters buy up names that they hope can later be redeemed for cash, and others park on intentional domain misspellings, knowing that they'll get some traffic. (Various misspelled versions of post-gazette.com are occupied by squatters, for example.)
It's an oddly competitive business -- by the time Mr. Parkinson thought to register the domain name MarkFelt.com, after the now infamous Watergate "Deep Throat" figure, somebody had already bought it.
That was his first taste of domain squatting, in spring 2005, and he was hooked. "I ended up buying about $600 worth of Watergate-related domain names," he said. "Over 90 percent of these names were useless, [but] I ended up selling enough of them to essentially break even."
As for lukeravenstahl.com? He bought it last year, a few weeks before Bob O'Connor's death lifted Mr. Ravenstahl into the mayor's office. He's been sitting on it since then, and has been changing the content on a daily basis only in the last week, once the Web site was discovered (Incidentally, there's also a lukeravenstal .com -- notice the missing "H" -- that somebody snapped up on May 11, after the other Web site was revealed).
"Last week, I received a phone call from someone inquiring about the name," said Mr. Parkinson, 38, in an e-mail interview. "I asked if they were calling on behalf of the mayor, and they said 'yes.' I gave them a quick sale price of $1,250, and I haven't heard back from them."
The asking price, he said, has risen since then.
"I have lots more material that I may put out there, so being able to have fun with the name is probably now worth more to me then the money. So the price has probably gone up a bit if I decide to sell," Mr. Parkinson said.
As for the other Luke Web site -- the one without the "H" in his last name -- that was registered by UltraRPM Inc., of Pasadena, Calif. That company, which traffics solely in domain-name speculation, says on its Web site that "UltraRPM does not intentionally register or use any domain name that is identical to or confusingly similar to any person's trademark."
Personal names are fair game, though, and Luke Ravenstahl is neither trademarked nor copyrighted. For Mr. Parkinson, it was an opportunity lost.
"I just wrote myself a note to buy that nam-- too late," he said. "If this site gets big, then those typos will get traffic."