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How
many times
have you tried to explain to friends
and family exactly what it is you
do and why you love, of
all things, domains? I'm sure
that anyone who has tried to do it
is familiar with that blank look
you get back from the other person
who is too polite to respond,
"What planet did you say you
were from again?"
It's
hard to explain the unexplainable.
After years of trying and failing I
came across an article in our local
paper this week that gave me one of
those rare "Aha!"
moments. The subject matter was a
most unlikely source of
enlightenment - it was a
McClatchy-Tribune News Service syndicated
piece about fanatical
fans of the 1977 Burt Reynolds
movie Smokey & The Bandit
and, more specifically, the 1977 Pontiac
Trans Am that starred along with
Reynolds in the film.
I
had no idea there were
fanatical fans of that
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movie
- fans so devoted that they
actually get together every year to
re-enact the cross-country beer
run that is the centerpiece of
the film in which Reynolds's Bandit
character uses the car to outrun
police while helping to get an
illegal load of Coors beer from
Texas to Atlanta (at the time it was
illegal to sell Coors east of the Mississippi).
To keep things fresh, the movie's
fans run a variety of routes - this
summer's re-enactment started in Carlisle,
Pennsylvania and ended two weeks
later, on July 3rd, in Myrtle Beach,
South Carolina).
Normally
I would have skipped over such an oddball
article but a few years after Smokey
& the Bandit came out I had
occasion to spend some time around
Burt Reynolds when I was a sports
reporter for a TV station in Tampa,
Florida where Burt had a
minority interest in the fledgling
United States Football League's Tampa
Bay Bandits. Reynolds, who
played college football at Florida
State, would show up at practices
from time to time and I found him to
be a very approachable and likeable
guy (even though he was the biggest
star in Hollywood at the time) so I
wound up following his movie career
more carefully from that point on.
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Find
your niche image
from Bigstock |
I'm
glad I read the piece because
the more I read the more I
recognized in the movie/car
fan's behavior, the things
that really tie domainers
together. I should have
recognized it before because
I've always advocated
developing at least one
website with an emphasis on
finding a unique niche
that no one else is filling
(that is what I did with DNJournal
in 2003. It has since become a
much bigger niche that many
capable people help fill, but
finding it early on helped get
the site established for the
long run).
Though
it is bigger now, the domain industry
is still a very small niche
in the overall
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business world.
When you are involved in such
a small corner of the world at
large you tend to have an affinity
for people who share that cozy
space with you - people who understand
you (and your love for
something the rest of the
world doesn't quite get) in a
way that no one else can. So
on that level I can understand
the people the McClatchy
article profiled. |
After
all, when it comes to niches, what
could be more niche than
people regularly getting together to
re-enact a fictional beer run across
hundreds of miles of U.S. highway?
Actually it is even more finely
tuned that that as 90% of
them are Trans Am owners
(even though you don't have to have
one to participate).
One
Trans Am owner, Drew
Demarco of Baltimore, explained
the camaraderie and special
connection, telling
McClatchy, “We have a blast. The
cars are quite a show, but they
almost become a by-product because
of the friendships you make.
It’s a great thing.” If you
have been in the domain business for
a few years, you can probably
identify with that sentiment.
In
another almost exact parallel
to our business, Larry
Smith, a farmer from
Franklin, Illinois, noted how
his esoteric hobby had
expanded his horizons, noting
“We know people from all
over the world now.
It’s a family.”
I
may not get the beer run and
the fixation on Trans Ams but
I do get that. I grew up
in a small town in central
Ohio but thanks to domains,
like many of you, I now have good
friends on almost every
continent on earth (still
looking for one from
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Friends
image from Bigstock |
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Antarctica!)
and have traveled to industry
events all over the world
(next stop will be India in a
few weeks). As inscrutable as
a love of domains may be to
99.9% of the earth's
inhabitants, it is wonderful
to have this unique
love in common with the special
people who make up our
small, yet global, community
of domain aficionados. |
If I
was a beer drinker I would pop open
a can of Coors to thank the movie's
fans for the insight into the forces
that really fuel otherwise
unexplainable passions. I'm
not, but I will toast them
with a glass of red wine - and while
I am enjoying it I might do a little
prospecting. I bet there are
some pretty good "movie
nut", "muscle car"
and "beer run" domain
names still out there for the
taking!
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