I had a fellow from Fairfax call me yesterday about some advertising, and he told me that they've now taken 100% ownership of OMG.
It will be interesting to see if they are more interested or less interested in selling their domains now...
interesting - have they sold their portfolio ? They have a lot of great names like jobs.com.au, lawyers.com.au and business.com.au.I contacted OMG yesterday to enquire about a domain and got an autoreply stating:
"Thank you for your email. OMG (Online Marketing Group) will be ceasing operations on 31 January 2016, and this e-mail
address will no longer be in use."
I just want to buy a domain
NB: apologies for grave-digging the thread
some of their directory sites had a massive number of businesses with decent annual fees, for example business.com.au and lawyers.com.auI coulda told them the directories model wasn't the way to go.
I advertised on their financialplanners.com.au website for two years. Didn't get a single lead!some of their directory sites had a massive number of businesses with decent annual fees, for example business.com.au and lawyers.com.au
Wow both lawyers and business .com.au are down for the count. And gasp creditcards too.
Fairfax were quick to buy successful dot com businesses like stayz, rsvp, investsmart etc.
When they purchased the OMG portfolio they should have developed the areas of human interest that they didn't yet cover (like they did with domain.com.au in the real estate arena).
For example, Wealth.com.au and MobilePhones.com.au.
The directory concept was good but they should have been an add on to information portals for things like business or lawyers.
Fairfax should have developed them as brands using their other content resources and not as an after thought.
They didn't have an overall plan and they didn't leverage their strengths. They just weren't listening to the right people.
Fairfax would have done well to develop more domains into sites. There is some great online brand name opportunities there still.
With approximately 30,000 .com.au names in the OMG / Boomerang portfolio at the time this would equate to $1000 per name.
I do agree but it is probably closer to 95% were of questionable value.. but beauty is in the eye of the beholder it seems.20k of those names were of questionable value.