The Yahoo homepage tends to be my primary news source throughout the day, as I’m always checking email, or testing PPC campaigns running on the YSM network..
Today, they featured a video titled ” ‘Big Mother’ is watching “, and described it as “A new website lets parents track their kids’ grades, absences, and tardies.” (see below)
Being that I’m a data hound, and love business models which revolve around selling information - not products, I clicked the play button.
What came next, caused me to do a triple take..
Actually, take a look for yourself. Here’s the video:
did ya catch it?
The site they featured as the homepage for Parent Connect? Did the template look familiar?
It should, cause it’s Frank Schilling domain name, and it’s his website they’re featuring (incorrectly). See below screenshot:
The wordly-wise producers of this segment assumed their domain was ParentConnect.com - Which it ain’t.
It appears that the actual product name is ‘Parent Connect XP’..
And that’s not even the end of the story…
The originating company which owns and operates Parent Connect XP (Pearson Education), owns ParentConnectXP.com, but prefers to have the name resolve nowhere (currently brings up a ‘Server not found’ page’), and instead opts to provide all the product specs buried within their root site here. It’s so buried, a Google search for ‘Parent Connect XP’ fails to even generate this page..
That being said, I can’t halfway blame the producers… can you?
I wonder if Frank noticed any traffic spikes on his side : )
This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under General Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
Nice catch! ParentConnect is #3 right now on Google Trends.
I think ParentConnectXP’s webmasters did some lousy jobs which is causing the company big time exposure. Well, their error is good for Frank and I hope the traffic - to his site - this time is very very use so that he can smile all the to the bank. The longer they don’t know the better for Frank; otherwise he might not need the money and just call the folks: ” hey! you guys made some stupid error here, take your dough and get your visitors out of my property.”
2008-05-05 33460 hits 23226 unique
…much much smaller compared to factcheck. That traffic was dangerously large.
I bought parentconnect.com in January of 2003 in my “locked in the house, long hair days”, long before these folks got the sparkle in their eye to create a similarly named product. Events like this make you feel like a farmer, who has owned a homestead for a really long time, and gradually the city is brushing up against your borders.
As far as money, Yahoo and Google smartprice the heck out of volume spikes like this, so it’s not as glorious as it looks.. It might pay for bandwidth
Amazing… ( leaves to grow hair and lock the house )
thanks for sharing Frank.. you’re too kind : )