Venting, Yes. Profiting, No.
Without quite having a clear plan, Gregg Rottler began contemplating his Web empire last year on his desktop computer at his home near Tampa, Fla.
As many bloggers have done, Mr. Rottler, a state environmental code officer, followed an impulse to share stories about annoyances. He and his wife, Karen, an elementary school teacher, often eat out, and he realized that people liked to talk about restaurant experiences gone wrong.
“I’ve had my share of bad dinners, and I thought this could provide some catharsis and also be a source of entertainment,” he said. “I always wondered how people put those Web sites together. So I bought a humongous manual and worked through it” to learn how to create a site about bad restaurant experiences.
He needed a domain name. Surely, an obvious one, Dinnersfromhell.com, wasn’t available. It was.
The site went up in January, festooned with text and video links, and readers soon began posting tales of woe.
Later, Rottler saw a television commercial depicting a man trapped in a tiny airplane coach seat between two slobs who were slurping, belching, snorting, sneezing and bellowing on either side. It was an ad for Princess Cruises, to show that cruises have none of these torments.
“It clicked to me that Flightsfromhell would be a cool site,” he said. But surely, Flightsfromhell.com wasn’t available.
It was. It turned out, so were Cruisesfromhell.com and other things from hell, domain names he snatched up as quickly as the ideas occurred to him. Domain-name registration is cheap (about $9 a year).
Rottler hasn’t made any profit yet from the sites. Still, his airline site has links to a gift shop he runs in an arrangement with CafePress.com, selling T-shirts, sweatshirts, track suits and coffee mugs with the Flights From Hell logo.
It also has links to air-travel books on Amazon. (Among them are “Plane Insanity: A Flight Attendant’s Tales of Sex, Rage and Queasiness at 30,000 Feet,” by Elliott Hester.)
Photo by Phillippe Diederich.
DJ Nelson on November 9th, 2007 8:25 am
Someone could use a little help with their monetization strategy. Those are good ideas but the implementation is poor.
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