RT.COM or formerly RussiaToday.com – Russian most powerful propaganda machine aimed outside of the country. Officially it’s registered to Autonomous Nonprofit Organization “TV-Novosti”. Obviously, this “autonomous” organisation is affiliated to largest Russian TV network which is the main propaganda power for the bears on unicycles inside the country.
RT.COM commercial says Obama’s nuclear threat is greater than that from Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who are a friend of Russia.
In the early February 2009 RussiaToday.com (or ANO “TV-Novosti”) have bought RT.TV domain name for a whopping $62,500 from a private cybersquatter John van den Berg. Such a big price for a national TLD made the deal the biggest one in the .TV top-level sector in the Q1 2009.
Approximately in the same time RussiaToday bought RT.COM domain name and changed its brandname to a trendy short RT.COM. This deal was not covered in the domain sales media, and the price of purchase wasn’t disclosed. But it can be figured out pretty easily. Short .COM domain names are usually at least ten times more expensive than .NET of the same length. In 2009 not so phonetically pleasing two letter .NET domains were traded for about $150,000.
RT.COM – registered by the first cybersquatters back in 1991 is a great value today. Abbrevations.com returns 88 results for RT. So I think TV-Novosti paid at least $3,000,000 for RT.COM (perhaps, much more). Well, not a sacrifice for an oil-buffed country which have spent on its English language heavy artillery of propaganda at least $90M (perhaps, much more) in the first (2005) year of operation, according to Wikipedia.
Tags: shmolitics, Web 2.0
