The year was 2000, it was summertime. I was sitting on a terrace of a restaurant in Little Italy. At the time, I was working at a search company. We had 5M uniques, Google [probabaly] didn’t. The rest, as they say, is history.
Sitting across me were two executives from the company I would be joining shortly, in September 2000, and which I left in December 2005, after the acquisition thereof of News Corporation.
They had started an online magazine. Squarely in their bull’s eye was Maxim Magazine. Chatting about the nuances of the search and publishing trade, we were talking about competition. I had Google to consider, they had Maxim, GQ, Esquire and the like. They also had TheMan.com, who had just raised $17M from Boston-based Highland Capital. TheMan.com’s CEO had worked for Lycos’ Bob Davis, who was heading Highland.
Every penny count. Every inch mattered.
From Google’s oncoming charge, the topic shifted to their competition: Maxim mainly. Dennis Publishing, founded by legendary British publisher Felix Dennis, had launched Maxim magazine in 1995 and crushed his competition. There was no reason to suggest that he would not duplicate his feat online. By 1999, the company launched MaximOnline.com, because some company had beaten them to the punch for Maxim.com. That must have sucked for Dennis.
“I notice they don’t have Maxim.com,” I said to one of the executives who sat in front of me.
He wasn’t just any executive, he was the founder CEO, “I know, it’s a good thing,” he replied.
“Very good thing, for you,” I figured. At the time, Search.com was believed to be worth more than Google.com (by name alone), today the opposite is true. You can’t exactly trademark generic names…
I joined them months later and slowly but surely, we ate at Maxim’s dominance online, until early 2001 when we overtook them and became the largest player in the space. I always figured that over time, they could overtake us. That might explain why my comrades sold out somewhat prematurely in early 2005.
Between 2000 and 2005, I always made it a habit of checking Maxim.com (which was registered by someone else). I stopped doing so once I left the industry.
And now, suddenly, I was just surfing the Web and saw a Google Ad Sense text link clearly for Maxim magazine, but promoting the url Maxim.com.
I clicked on it and for a split second was salivating at the chance of blasting Maxim’s mismanagement of their online strategy [once again].
“Why, for the love of all things holy,” I thought, “would you promote the url of your brand but that you don’t own, when clearly so many people see a url and either check it later, or simply type it in directly into a browser?”
In the split second that separated the click and the redirect… I was impressed: lo and behold, sometime between then and now, Felix Dennis made a decision to get serious about the Web and buy Maxim.com.
A Whois lookup suggests it was done recently: Record created on 25-Jun-2006.
Hmm… I could be wrong (probably), but would that explain the spike in the graph below:
Smart move, old man, smart move. Thank God you didn’t do it earlier, when I cared about the men’s online publishing industry…
For added pleasure, check out - in red - my boys and I crush Maxim:
Yeah, I know, a picture is worth a thousand freaking words. How you like them apples, Mr. Felix?
Disclosure: I now hate my former comrades.
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