It’s early yet in the 2016 presidential campaign, but if there's one thing we've learned, it's mind your domains. Ted Cruz didn’t. Carly Fiorina didn’t. And should New Jersey governor Chris Christie decide to enter the race, he’ll quickly discover that he didn’t either. ChrisChristie2016.org doesn’t belong to him. It belongs to Oliver Anderson.
Anderson, a Brooklyn cinematographer and self-described political junky, has owned ChrisChristie2016.org since 2011, when speculation about a 2016 Christie presidential run was even more fervent than it is today. (Bridgegate appears to have slowed the momentum.) The page has lain fallow since, ownership maintained thanks to an affordable $13 per year fee and the wonders of autopay. As next November creeps closer, though, Anderson now finds himself with a potentially valuable commodity on his hands.
There’s a lot you can do with a presidential candidate’s website. Squatters have turned tedcruz.com and carlyfiorina.org into minor protest engines, while an Oregonian couple is using jebbushforpresident.com to further the conversation on gay rights. Subversion, either subtle or direct, is a time-tested approach. The other is cashing in.
"I’d heard from a friend of a friend that her father had paid her tuition to NYU by buying up porn domain names in the ‘90s. And he sold them and made a ton of money," explains Anderson of his land grab. "So sort of on a whim I was like, all these campaigns have so much money I wonder if anybody has bought this domain yet?"
Anderson’s spent the intervening years mostly not thinking about chrischristie2016.org (.com was already spoken for, even back then); at one point he assumed that his ownership had lapsed. It was especially discouraging that when Christie did make the news, it was frequently for the wrong reasons.
"Bridgegate was like, the most depressing thing I’d ever heard. I was like oh my god, this guy blew it," says Anderson. "After that I kind of forgot about it; I figured he wasn’t going to run."
In fairness, he still may not; Anderson notes that no one from the campaign has approached him yet, which seems like it should be a sign that Christie hasn’t yet mobilized in any serious way. Then again, that logic so far hasn’t applied to three of the leading Republican candidates so far.
If Christie does decide to bull rush the White House, though, Anderson could be sitting on something quite valuable.
"If I were Chris Christie and I were running for president, to me it would be worth a lot of money" says Dave Evanson, Senior Broker at Sedo, a popular domain marketplace. Evanson is also quick to point out, though, that pricing domain names can be a particularly tricky type of voodoo.
"If you were to take 10 really qualified domain brokers, there’s typically going to be a couple of valuations that are pretty tight," Evanson explains. "But the rest will be outliers, sometimes five or 10 times the value on the upside, or half or even lower on the downside."
The difficulty stems largely from the lack of available information, and from the specificity of most of these transactions. Unlike buying a house, where there are several comparable sales one can use as a baseline to determine value, no two domains are alike, and no two domain buyers are equally financed---or for that matter, motivated.
Chrischristie2016.org represents a particular challenge in that there are really only a handful of potential buyers. "It might be the candidate himself," posits Evanson, "It might be a couple of opponents who want to buy the domain and put up negative stuff about him." Otherwise, who cares? And if Christie ends up not running at all, well, so much for that.
In fact, the only real known value of chrischristie2016.org is what it will be worth on November 9th, 2016, the day after the presidential election: Zero. Nada. Zilch. Anderson was smart to grab a potential campaign domain, but unfortunately bagged one with a built-in expiration date.
Still, when pressed, Evanson puts a purely speculative value on the site at "potentially tens of thousands of dollars, and possibly even more." Which makes sense, when you consider that it could be used not just to protect and enforce the Christie brand, but to drive at least that amount in donation dollars directly into campaign coffers.
Anderson’s not too worried either way. If Christie ends up not running, he says, it would have been worth it for the story. If he does run but doesn’t buy the site, Anderson will just go with Plan B: using the site as an art project of sorts.
"I’d like to do something interesting that makes you consider the ridiculousness of the circus of politics," Anderson speculates. "There’s so much money, there’s so much careful control. People might find it endearing to see that one person can subvert that control a little bit."
And if an eventual Christie campaign does come knocking? Anderson reckons he’ll open with $50,000, and see where it takes him.
