Internet "Portals" — Ocean.com

From Michael Sellers

We are planning as part of our work going forward to create an internet “portal” site that would be content-rich and serve as a magnet for people who are interested in anything along the lines of underwater exploration; marine mammals; etc. The trick with something like this is to come up with something that is precise enough so that it has a strong identity, but broad enough to bring in numbers of eyeballs.

In working on this, we started with “dolphins” since that’s the very specific focus of our movie, but then have been working out way out from that very narrow focus to try and identify something wherein dolphins would be an important subset of a larger whole — but a whole which would not get so big as to have no focus.

The thought process goes something like this:

dolphins>dolphins/whales>marine mammals>undersea life>undersea explore>oceans

Right now that’s where we’ve landed in the analysis. The thinking is that “oceans” is a very broad term which would allow us to attract people with a wide variety of interests, but all held together by an interest in various aspects of oceans.

Now … we aren’t the first to arrive at this place. Go to ocean.com and you will see a good example of how someone has had a simlar idea and implemented it reasonably well. It is in fact designed to attract a large part of the demographic we’re after — but it is kind of what I would term “flat” and “staid” …. kind of “armchair traveler” in tone, rather than vibrant, alive, etc. The interesting thing is that there are ways we can use the work they’ve done to benefit our efforts to capture the same demographic, and we will certainly be doing so.

We’ve reserved some domain names. My favorite at the moment is “oceans360.net”….trying to get “oceans360.com” but they want $5,000 for it and I’m not sure it’s worth that. I got “oceans360.net” for ten bucks……