Before I have my whinge in this post, I think there’s something I need to make clear upfront. I have had some posts published on Stay At Home Mum. More than that, I have an ebook published through them (which, I might add, I believe a lot more people should consider buying) – I think I’ve sold forty copies so far.
Furthermore, I know Jody, since we both live in the same town and occasionally move in similar circles. I also know Jody’s husband, Nicole and I’ve met Chris.
I don’t get paid by SAHM, except if people buy my book, and I’m not on their staff. I’m just an occasional contributor, and I haven’t even done that for ages.
I say this upfront because I don’t want to be accused of underhandedness and not revealing my connections.
With this in mind I’ll also say that, aside from liking the Facebook page and reading some of their posts, I don’t know anyone from The Organised Housewife. At least, as far as I know. I did used to live on the Gold Coast, so maybe. Who knows. Stranger things have happened. But here’s the thing, I’m sure they’re lovely.
Now that’s out of the way, let’s get to the points I want to make regarding the little shit fight between these two great pages.
For those of you who don’t know, SAHM is being attacked at the moment for purchasing domain names similar to other sites. Worse, they’re not giving them over to these other people with the original names when they ask very nicely, and in some cases have had the audacity to ask for money to give up a domain they own.
Initially, I wasn’t going to weigh into this, but the amount of cyber bullying around this is a disgrace. People seem to feel justified to write just about any horrible thing they can think of. This is the sort of spitefulness I associate with hormonal school kids.
I’ll say this, Jody is a good person. She’s a lovely person. In fact, it’s not only her husband who thinks she’s a bit of a catch.
In fact, this is the sort of person Jody is: She specifically told me to stay out of this bitch fight for fear of harming my own site.
But the personal attacks at my friend are really upsetting me, so I am going to repeat what I wrote to the people who were attempting to involve me and my site by sending me personal messages to garner support for ditching Stay At Home Mum.
Firstly, the cynic in me sees this whole thing as a move to get people riled up (mission accomplished) and increase interaction (I guarantee this is the case). Which is fine. Whatever works, right? After all, interaction on Facebook drives your posts into the feeds of your followers and effects advertising. I’m guessing this is good for business.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of spiteful, horrible chat on Stay At Home Mum’s Facebook page about how unethical they’ve been. Really? I actually don’t see a big problem. They bought the names, they can do what they like with them, can’t they? They were for sale. To be used. The sites who didn’t buy them and left them on the shelf did so on purpose, knowing full well someone else could throw down anything from $2.00 to $85.50 (.xxx are expensive!) to snap them up.
To use.
In fact, if you want to go buy some Big Family Little Income domain names and set up similar sites, the following are available:
bigfamilylittleincome.com.au
bigfamilylittleincome.net.au
bigfamilylittleincome.net
bigfamilylittleincome.info
bigfamilylittleincome.xxx
bigfamilylittleincome.org
Here’s where you can buy them: http://www.crazydomains.com.au/domain-names/search/?domain=bigfamilylittleincome&tld=.com.au
I don’t know how much easier I can make it. Go crazy. Do what you want. Set up a porn site if you feel you must. I don’t care. You see, I have the .com I wanted and paid for and work through. If I wanted the others or felt it was important, I’d have bought them when I bought my domain.
I didn’t. They didn’t. You can. They did.
Secondly, as for the accusation of stealing traffic…really? I’d love to see those figures. I link over from Facebook myself so there’s no chance of going to the wrong site. Furthermore, the links from searches on the likes of Google for Big Family Little Income brings me in a whopping …well, let’s see. One today. None yesterday.
But that really adds up over a year. Umm…no.
And then from there people got into accusations SAHM steals ideas. Like recipes, you mean? So you’re assuming Jamie Oliver, Maggie Beer and Nigella Lawson all came up with the idea if you mix things like sugar and flour and butter you can bake a cake? Ridiculous. Even Heston Blumenthal works off the back of other recipes, albeit sometimes some really old and funky ones.
Nothing is new under the sun -except for the feelings I have towards craft beer, which have only materialized rather recently and totally changed my downtime.
Sadly, this whole thing between SAHM and TOH has blown up and has now gone from a dispute between websites to a personal attack on my friend.
And over what?
I tell you what, if someone would like to buy one of those domain names I mentioned above and put up a similarly looking site to mine so I can publicly call my more vocal followers to arms, that would be great 🙂
Like all bloggers and sites, I’m always looking for ways to increase my traffic.
🙂 please share, like or comment – remember, that’s what all sites need 🙂
“Raising a family on little more than laughs.”
It’s business. Not personal. People should treat it as such I think. Personal attacks, especially via social media are the lowest of the low. Good on SAHM for posting a video about the issue and not hiding behind a computer screen/keyboard.
Great article. I am a fan of both pages and find it disappointing that there seems to be a battle going on. Domain names are up for grabs by anyone. My husband has bought a couple of ridiculous ones just for the hell of it. SAHM were probably clever business wise to snap them up. I hope it all settles down soon as I find it hard to believe that either side are really terrible people.
PS: love the blog. Never fails to make my grey sky blue
Ergh. Yes and no. I will agree to disagree Bruce. I honestly feel let down. I have been a member since they clicked over the first 15000 members. I genuinely love the site but I feel what they did and what they are doing by holding people to ransom over the domain names crosses a moral ground. Yes its business at the end of the day and I appreciate that but their following is of housewives who have always appreciated the SAHM stance on simply being nice to eachother. This isn’t nice. I have agonised all day over my decision to finally just unlike the page. Will I be back? Probably. But not today. Maybe its naive of me to believe that morals and business have room to play together but I will sleep at night knowing that I haven’t deliberately stepped on toes to get ahead in life. As for the bullying? Disgusting. Let he with the least sin throw the first rock.
Cheers and I appreciate that you took the time to write this because I was curious.
I kind of feel like just because you can isn’t really a valid reason . I don’t like all the nasty stuff either and it should , I think have stayed between the two parties and not been aired publicly . As my mum says you catch more flies with honey than you ever will with vinegar.
It is amazing what happens to some people (Not all thank God!) when they start typing their comments, what you might get away with face to face sounds downright mean and nasty in cold hard comments on screen, yes you have a right to an opinion but be prepared to respect someone else’s opinion and if there is a stoush between two sites or people, let them deal with it, don’t jump on the eternal bandwagon where you get so many people joining in that half of them don’t understand the original argument!
I’ve personally been targeted, yes, targeted, by SAHM. My business name is in no way associated with hers, or has any similarities to her business. She bought it out of spite, no other reason for it. Should I have snapped it up earlier? Absolutely! But I was so busy building my Facebook page (which Jody astutely tuned in to), I didn’t think of it. My bad. I’ll own that. However, there’s morals involved here. Sure, morals in big business are few and far between, it can be cutthroat. However, when you’re living the “mums helping mums” mantra, and living the “mums screwing mums” lifestyle, essentially pulling the wool over the eyes of your loyal fans, there’s an issue. A BIG issue!
Jody is not a victim in this scenario, and while it’s very nice of you to stand up for your friend, you’re naturally going to stick with her, no matter what. If you weren’t so quick off the mark to snap up your dot com domain, then later found out that Jody, or someone else had bought it from under you, for the sole purpose of parking it for ransom, how would you feel? Then again, this shoe-on-the-other-foot scenario won’t be reasoned with a clear head because Jody is your friend. It’s a good thing she’s still got you as a friend, because she’s lost many over the last few days.
It’s unfortunate that hundreds of thousands of followers have been duped into being sold on a mantra that wasn’t lived by. Do as I say, not as I do, huh?
Jody’s video this morning claims she has five workers. Really? I have an article stating she has “37 employees, all over Australia.” Hmmmm….and the shout out to contact her, which I did, so she could “make it right,” has fallen on deaf ears. I’ve had no response from Jody. She’s blocked me from posting on her Facebook page. She’s deleted my posts. She’s deleted hundreds of posts!
Chris’s tweets are deplorable. Re-directing traffic to your own website, asking for inflated prices to get your business name domain back, all of it, is a misuse of power.
There’s no excuse for name calling. I don’t agree with that at all! But Jody gathered her hundreds of thousands of villagers, and when the truth came out, those villagers came at her with flaming torches! I don’t have any sympathy for her. She knew what she was doing. She knew what her staff were doing. I think a lot of people have learned from this debacle. Some good may come of it after all. We can only hope.
With respect,
Michelle Vogel
I hate all the nastiness! People should really think before they type. They may not agree with what happened and that’s fine, state your opinion but don’t go overboard with all the bitch comments. I have been a liker of stay at home mum for a while, that is how I found your blog! But I do feel sorry for all the other bloggers. But as (I think it was jodie?) Said in her video, ohw should get in contact with her about this. Also do we actually know if they have said they won’t give names back unless they get $$ for them ?
So I guess the thing now is, what is TOH going to do now they have SAHM’s attention? Try to get the thing fixed they wanted fixed, or milk it?
I’m always interested to see what people do with the (perceived) high moral ground once they hold it. I think it says a lot about them.
Bruce, I have no association with either site, from the outside looking in the actions of SAHM have been deceptive and morally wrong. TOH has been nothing but classy. There is no question of moral high ground (perceived or other), TOH has never set out to do this, after trying for months to resolve an issue she simply made her subscribers aware of the issue.
I don’t even have to think about the answer to your last question, TOH will remain the classy fb/blog/website she has always been. Any suggestion otherwise shows where your loyalty (and sometimes pay check comes from!)
I will have to respectfully disagree with you on this one. I think it is easy for you to say that you wouldn’t care if this happened to you, but you really don’t know how you would feel until it actually does happen. If someone bought up the domain ‘www.bigfamilylittleincome.com.au’ and did redirect it to a pornography site I seriously doubt that you really would be ok with that. But we will never know, because it hasn’t happened to you….yet. I agree in a sense, yes these other businesses should have bought the other domain sites that were similar to thier own, that turned out to be a mistake and they are wearing it now. But initially SAHM was actually using the ‘organisedhousewife.com’ site and having it redirected to her OWN website. Not just parking it, but having it directed to her OWN website. That to me implies she was hoping to have someone looking for The organised housewife type in the wrong web address and end up at her OWN website. It might be just a business strategy, but definitely that is a purposeful and in my opinion, an unethical decision. BTW, bullying is NOT ok, fullstop.
I can see and agree with the point that domain names are there to be bought and used and that this is potentially a clever marketing strategy for businesses. What I believe is different in this case is the attitude of the director (in reports that he tried to sell 3 of the domain names for $20k each to the businesses in question), the initial responses which blew it off as a mistake by an outsourced provider, and that this isn’t just business: blogging is a personal experience for both the blogger and the reader.
I totally agree things should be kept clean and respectful. However I also believe SAHM can’t be upset if some of their target market (stay at home mums) find this conduct offensive. Morally, some of their audience feel that this was sneaky and the wrong thing to do. If SAHM feel they have a right to purchase domain names of other competitors, why didn’t they just admit it instead of attempting to glide over it with poor excuses? I personally believe that it is their attempt at handling this situation that has fueled the uproar that has occurred.
You surely can’t blame people for questioning the integrity of SAHM – including Jody and her husband – when it appears they haven’t been totally honest about what has occurred? It is wonderful for SAHM to be celebrating their success in previous newspaper articles however Jody’s apology earlier today conflicted with what they reported in the newspaper articles (namely their number of employees).
I can only assume that Jody has been a target for some threats and vile language which I do not agree with under any circumstances. I do believe everyone has a right to their opinion and it should be expressed without using offensive language or personal attacks. But in the world of blogging, sadly this is a big issue.
I love and respect your blog and your opinion and will continue to follow you. Please consider that it’s not the act that has most people upset – it is how it has been handled.
Where to start? I’d suggest (and I haven’t asked so this is just an educated guess) that the difference in employees would have to do with whether she included salaried staff or paid contributors. I’m not a paid contributor. I get paid if people buy my ebook off her site. Which they don’t in droves lol I’m certainly not getting paid for comment, nor do I expect to get anything financial out of supporting SAHM in the manner in which I have, which is to say I don’t have a problem, ethical or otherwise, with what they’ve done. They bought the names the other sites left on the shelf, so they can do what they want with them, including directing traffic to themselves. As for would I feel different if it happened to me 🙂 Try me. Buy one of those sites I’ve listed and go nuts. No one has taken me up on the challenge yet, which is disappointing. I saw a comment today where someone said Bunnings let one of their domain names lapse and it was auctioned off with Woolies buying it for tens of thousands of dollars. I don’t hear anyone ripping a fart up them. Blogs, big and small, are about traffic. Both SAHM and TOH are BIG sites with big traffic. They’re businesses. Let them sort it out because the nasty comments are personal and unwarranted.
bigfamilylittleincome.net is only $3.99
Just saying 😉
http://www.crazydomains.com.au/domain-names/search/?domain=bigfamilylittleincome&tld=.com.au
I see where you are coming from Bruce, and I completely agree at how the behaviour of many people commenting is terrible. But a lot of them aren’t. Like me they are disappointed about the way SAHM has tried to capitalise on mistakes made by people looking for a particular site. Some of the domains they bought weren’t topic based, they were specific names used by other blogs. And I know of at least two businesses who approached them when they had tried to obtain the dot com dot au domain for their business domain and SAHM wanted exorbitant amounts of money for it. People have worked extremely hard to build their brands, something which Jody would understand. I think she made a huge mistake, and their initial reaction was poorly thought out. Now that she is working with those businesses to rectify the issue I hope that everyone can move forward and go back to doing what they do best.
Danette posted this on BFLI’s Facebook page. I think it might clear a few things up about whether or not what they did was right or wrong.
It’s apparently a cut and paste from a Melbourne IT doc.
“This is the part of the policy that most businesses don’t
understand. They feel they have ‘more’ right to a domain than
someone else. So long as that someone else meets eligibility
requirements, and they got in first, trying to use policy to
subsequently grab the domain is bad .
The second part of the policy is who is eligible to hold the
domain. This is met in two ways. Either it’s an exact match or
abbreviation of a ABN/ACN/RBN (and the associated provisions
for TM’s etc) or the registrant is ‘closely and substantially’
related to the domain.Close and substantial is very broad, it can cover products or services you offer, a location you trade in, a profession you or your employees are involved in etc. Basically, anything that reasonably associates the domain name with your use of it.
You should note that ‘policy delete’ does not mean hand the
domain over to you as the new Registrant. This means that the
domain will be deleted from the Registry, and subsequently be
available for registration by the first eligible applicant.
Most complainants’ think this is simply a matter of waiting for the domain to be deleted and then casually registering the domain
at their convenience. But this is not the case. If the domain is
even mildly generic in nature, companies like Netfleet (www.
netfleet.com.au) use highly complex technology and automated
systems that register domains within milliseconds after the
domains are deleted from the registry, and add them to their
daily auction. This is what is known as ‘Drop Catching’.”
When I set up my business and bought jstyle.com.au, I didn’t worry about jstyle.com because it was owned by a Japanese kit housing company, and I only wanted .com.au because I wanted everyone to be clear we are an Australian business. THEN one week I had three customers tell me they had accidentally clicked on jstyle.com and got a bit of a shock. It had been bought by a Korean porno site and when I clicked on it to see just how bad it was I got full frontal, legs apart zoom in close up on the front page. Not only that, my 0.5 seconds peek meant for the next few months I got targeted ads for all kinds of interesting websites. The porno site has been taken down now (sorry you missed it!), but the same guy still owns the domain name. For the 2 years or so I knew that it was a porno site I had to tell every new customer to NOT FORGET the .AU! You may think you don’t care if someone buys it and it becomes a porno site – but seriously – you DO NOT want it to be a porno site. Other than that I agree that it’s impossible to cover yourself for all options on your domain name. We often have people get our name wrong. j-style, jstyles, jaystyle… I can’t afford all those names. I just have to cross my fingers they don’t get bought by another porno site!
Whew! I thought I had been swimming against the tide on this subject. I don’t really know either blogger particularly well but I TOTALLY get where TOH is coming from. I do. I have been there. I bought 80+ domain names in all sorts of derivations around my business name to protect my IP and category – parked a lot and redirected the more relevant ones to my one and only website. Each domain is cheap and I added them slowly but collectively invested quite a bit because I figured that I am not paying for bricks and mortar space but digital space.
And because I sell LBD’s (there are a LOT of them out there in the cyberworld) I (like TOH) added a ‘THE’ to my name because most of the already registered succinct LBD domain names were… LIGHTING distribution companies. The local guy had snapped it up for the bare minimum whilst I was in development because whoever owned it had it let it lapse and I didn’t know you could sign up for alerts (Go Daddy $4.99 a year) to watch the activity on all the URL’s you wanted. I contacted him and in his words he was ‘surprised he managed to snare it for nothing’ – he offered to sell it to me for $15K. I decided I would build my brand and traffic without it around a dot com – my loss his gain. Yes, there is a risk a customer will go to his site AND become confused but when I look at my web traffic most of it is via Google search (which I have proudly and organically reached #1 above Wikipedia – I’m impressed because there are a LOT of LBD’s out there) or via direct links. And even more confusingly to get what I wanted I had to add a hyphen in between. I was worried about that but thought if Net-A-Porter can build a mammoth business with a couple hyphens then so could I! I would hazard a big guess that when they started they could not get netaporter.com so cleverly used the hyphens – who knows who owned the original domain and for what product – they have since grown their business and subsequently bought the domain without hyphens which now directs to the existing site WITH hyphens because that IS their brand now.
Then I had a competitor who probably was frustrated that they couldn’t find an LBD domain so they dropped the Little from LBD – no problem with that – she had a product and needed a name but a lot of her press coverage kept referring to LBD’s so I sent her a brief note explaining that they would be inadvertently directing people to me which I didn’t mind but said she would not being doing herself any favours. Because I owned it and had it directed to MY site didn’t mean I was stealing her web traffic. No more so than the rightful owner of LBD without My ‘The’ is stealing my traffic. Nor him wanting to sell it to me for a huge profit. Could, shoulda, woulda.
And I had a chuckle because obviously my research (such as the Melbourne IT and Bunnings references) to try and calm the fray has now been quoted across the net and again here. So here is another one – my digital guy said that Quiksilver – no ‘c’ as in quick – probably had to be clever in tweaking the name for available business registration and he knew they wanted to buy the quicksilver.com and dot au to capture and redirect those who inadvertently typed in the incorrect spelling (a lot of companies with strange spelling will capture the typically spelt domain as well). Quicksliver didn’t get what they wanted I guess either because of the $$ or it wasn’t for sale.
And as the Melbourne IT reference – “close and substantial is very broad, it can cover products or services you offer, a location you trade in, a profession you or your employees are involved in etc. Basically, anything that reasonably associates the domain name with your use of it.” and SAHM use of the organisedhousewife.com.au was used correctly as was redirected to… an organisational page on their site.
So it was a digital strategy and as best I can ascertain completely fair and legal. Was it smart? yes and no. It’s about capturing traffic and because of the specific nature of some of the domain names in question quite clearly a case of riding on coat tails too. But that isn’t a reason to howl down SAHM and the public tide to burn their reputation at the stake and force them in to action and demand an immediate response when clearly they were dealing with the fall out to seek proper advice on how to handle this. Even if it had been unfolding over time. She was even vilified for reading her statement – bloody heck I would have chosen my words carefully and made sure I stuck to them given the attacks. She was vilified for showing how humble her set-up actually is when clearly she is making millions and millions? probably all that PR spin to talk up the business as they sought funding to grow it.
So, do I feel bad for the other businesses/ bloggers affected by this? Absolutely. From what I have read I think Katrina (and others) had tried to deal directly and quietly behind the scenes for some time with SAHM but weren’t getting what they wanted and SAHM didn’t have to give it to them. Or the other companies. Particularly if they also don’t have a business registration to match and it (in their mind) gets ‘bought out from under their brand’ by someone quicker and smarter. Even if Mr Lighting guy was actually another clothing vendor and redirecting to an LBD page on a completely differently branded site (which he has every right to do! because it “reasonably associates the domain name with your use”) I would never dream of a public campaign to smear him because he had ‘bought it out from under me’ (Um… I didn’t know it was for sale – my bad). Could, shoulda, woulda.
It has been a valuable lesson for a lot of people. About IP. And everyone has an opinion but I am just stunned at how nasty it has become. My advice would be that SAHM directors should keep their noses clean and not make any more smart remarks like the previous tweets – just VERY carefully considered ones.
And just to be TOTALLY clear – I do NOT think that Katrina at TOH was trying o smear SAHM – I think she too was being very clear and considered in expressing her frustration about the position she inadvertently found herself in, wanted to educate others about how important it was not to make her mistake AND explain to her followers what was happening in a factual sense so they were not confused about why they were going to a different site – a situation over which she had no control.
Then the shitstorm started.
And just to be TOTALLY clear – I do NOT think that Katrina at TOH was trying o smear SAHM – I think she too was being very clear and considered in expressing her frustration about the position she inadvertently found herself in, wanted to educate others about how important it was not to make her mistake AND explain to her followers what was happening in a factual sense so they were not confused about why they were going to a different site – a situation over which she had no control.
Then the sh**storm started.
Ah Bruce I do believe you are trying to encourage us to do something illegal by buying similar domain names to yours….
something called cybersquatting
http://wrenmedia.com.au/2014/06/cybersquatting/
Illegal? Anyone with a more than the average number of kids and on some form of welfare could qualify for that name lol And my point is – I don’t care if they do. It doesn’t matter to me. If I wanted those domains I’d have bought them. If someone can buy them and use them, good luck to them. The effects of my business would be so redonkulously minuscule. I tell you what, if someone does it I’ll link to them on this FB page. There you go, free traffic. I might even write a post about their audacity – I’ll be applauding it 🙂
Hi all 🙂
This is an interesting situation and one that is very common.
The internet has opened up a lot of what used to be called “cottage” business’, small enterprises that operated out of the home. The difference being that the internet allows you to go to a world wide market and not just your local area.
Unfortunately the people that operate these blogs, etc. quite often have found that they have a talent and gather “followers” rather qwuickly and can make money from this new found fame, sadly the growth and money generating ability very rarely matches the persons business skills and understanding.
So along comes someone with a few business smarts and sees the potential of the “branding” and looks for opportunity to exploit any avenue that hasn’t been covered.
Unfortunate, yes!
Wrong, depends on your view!
Naive, Definitely!!!
The world has changed and your brand is everything!!!
I went and educated myself on the world via the internet and the guy doing the lecture (very well known and a great internet marketer) asked us who in here has protected their own name?
He was the only one!!!!
The next question, what if you make it big?
The point I am making is that times have changed, business has changed and if you dont catch up and look after your “brand” you will loose out.
A prime example of this is the good old aussie brand “Ugg’s”.
The owners who had been operating under this name for 30 + years never protected it, along comes a big American shoe company, registers the name via business and the web, then tells the original “Ugg” owners to stop using the name, all fully legal!!
Fortunately the courts saw this as a blatant attempt by the big boys to cash in on a household name and they had to hand over all the legal rights to the original “Ugg’s”, very very lucky!!!
So there is not a lot that can be done about this situation we are discussing, yes you can take the moral high ground, but hey you have entered the business world now and the market is global, so learn from this and go out and protect your brand, it cost less than $100 and you can just about cover all the domains you need to, I know I have done it!!
and before the keyboard warriors attack me 🙂 I learnt the hard way and had one of my brands pirated id you like, was I angry? extremely pissed off, but at the end of it all it was my fault for not protecting my brand and i learnt the hard way!!!!
So 2 questions for you all,
have you protected your brand??
and have you registered your name???
think about it you never know where your blogging may take you.
Have fun everyone 🙂
It’s illegal in a lot of countries to ‘domain sit’, which this sounds like. Kinda like breaching some copyright law. I hadn’t even noticed this ‘fight’, must be too busy living my own life to get involved in others!!