Hypothetical scenario

[aspirin]

Hopefully being sorted!

 

[peter_w]

Respond with your "standard leasing prices" in a fancy PDF document, to make it look like it's something you do normally. Either that or just give it to him in exchange for a tweet.

I'd also delete this thread, just in case someone types Steevan Fries in a reply and his agent/whoever responded sees your thread on Google. I'm not entirely certain, but I wouldn't have thought Nominet would look too kindly on registering a celebrities name with the sole intention of profiting by selling it to them?

 

[Ashton]

Redbird on here owned the domain before fyi.

 

[woopwoop]

they reply with "we've always avoided registering co.uk but if it's available, we'll lease it. Have you registered it?"

I get the feeling that they are saying if no one else has registered it (if it's available) they would lease it (register it with Nominet and pay the fees to Nominet).

If this interpretation is correct they've taken a pretty firm position (not much room to bargain).

I think other important factors would be how long after the drop and catch were they contacted. They might be peed if its very soon after.

When it was offered to him (without £) was there any hint it was being sold or offered free? With names like this, where there's pretty much only 1 real enduser, I think the best thing to do is not muck around and offer it for sale. They pretty much control the negotiation - if they want to pay xxxx/xxx great. If they want to pay xx good.

 

[Edwin]

Poor Stephen. Why not just hand it over to him and be done with it?

 

[Skinner]

Stephen (I'm sure its a ph) seems like a cool guy and takes the time to reply to alot of people, including myself.

I would think you would gain more by simply offering the name to him as good will, and maybe ask for a back link or a retweet to one of your sites.

£6 for a tweet to a few million people is worth it 100x over.

 

[aspirin]

I would think you would gain more by simply offering the name to him as good will, and maybe ask for a back link or a retweet to one of your sites.

This was the intention

 

[Systreg]

£6 for a tweet to a few million people is worth it 100x over.

Yes, very good idea for some free advertising.

On Stephens .com site, there is a section for people to request a tweet to themselves or their site, so I think they would be more than happy to do one in exchange for the .co.uk name.

They also state on their site that whilst they can tweet about you/your site, they advise you to contact your webhost first, and ask them to confirm that your site will be able to withstand the massive rush of hundreds of thousand of people suddenly viewing your site without it crashing, as Stephens tweets seem to have that affect on sites when he mention a url in one of his tweets.

[edit]

Apparently he no longer does Twitter requests:

Twitter requests of Stephen ***

For Tweet requests please email tweet at ********** dot com

Sadly, because there are so many hundreds of tweet requests concerning individual charity endeavours, we are no longer accepting such appeals.

WARNING: When Stephen tweets a URL to a given website, up to 3-000-500,000 people will attempt to visit that website within one hour. Very few websites can manage that intense traffic. Your website, it must be able to capable of taking 1200+ calls per second to the website’s server in order to be able to stay live once Stephen’s Tweeted. Please check with your website server provider. Many providers will simply say “Yes it is”. You must double check with a technician for your website.

There are three waves of capacity within that hour with the 2nd wave of retweeting generally as strong as the first original Tweet.

You must submit your request with a shortened URL, we suggest “TinyURL.com” but there are many more.

Before submitting your 140 digit Tweet, including shortened URL, please be absolutely sure that you have double checked again with your website technician that your site is robust enough to handle the extra traffic. Stephen *** cannot promise to fulfil every Tweet request received.

Emails or phone call requests for paid or product Tweeting will be ignored.

 

[aspirin]

Yes, very good idea for some free advertising.

On Stephens .com site, there is a section for people to request a tweet to themselves or their site, so I think they would be more than happy to do one in exchange for the .co.uk name.

They also state on their site that whilst they can tweet about you/your site, they advise you to contact your webhost first, and ask them to confirm that your site will be able to withstand the massive rush of hundreds of thousand of people suddenly viewing your site without it crashing, as Stephens tweets seem to have that affect on sites when he mention a url in one of his tweets.

Yes I asked yesterday on a hosting forum about this, and it would cost a small fortune to handle this kind of traffic burst. My poor VPS would burn and die very quickly.