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Liz Roscher,Shutdown Corner 5 hours ago
If you go to rams.com, you’ll find information about the Bighorn Ram and not the Los Angeles Rams. (Wikimedia Commons)
When a sports team doesn’t own the domain name for their own mascot, it can be confusing. You’re trying to find information about your team and instead you get, well, the opposite of that. There are more than a few NFL teams with this issue, but the most amusing of them all could be rams.com. The Los Angeles Rams don’t own it, which is why when you visit rams.com you get actual information about rams, the animal and not the NFL franchise made up of humans.
Alden Gonzalez at ESPN found the guy who owns rams.com and talked to him about why he owns it. The answer is surprising and weird and kind of wonderful. The guy’s name is Adam Dicker, and he just likes animals. Seriously.
“I love animals, and that’s about it,” Dicker said in a phone conversation. “That’s my motivation for buying it.”
Dicker apparently watches a lot of Animal Planet, and when he sees an animal he likes, he looks up the domain name. He’ll buy it if it’s not too expensive and then put up a site with pictures and information. And that’s what you see when you go to rams.com: information about the bighorn ram and its unique curved horns.
It seems a little suspicious that Dicker owns a bunch of animal domain names, but he says it’s an honest hobby and not something he’s doing just to make money off of sports teams.
Dicker owns, or has owned, several other similar sites. Such as elephants.com, pigs.com, seals.com, giraffes.com, hyenas.com and even worms.com. At one point, he estimates to have possessed about 20 animal sites.
“And you can see by that pattern, none of them represent sports teams,” Dicker noted. “There’s no worm, there’s no pig, there’s no elephant. Surprisingly enough, there’s no giraffe. You’d think there’d be a basketball team called the Giraffes.”
To be honest, sports teams need to get on some of these animals right now, because both worms and giraffes would make exceptional mascots. (Just imagine a fierce worm wearing a football helmet and it’ll be the best thing to pop into your brain all day.)
Gonzalez says Dicker has owned rams.com for a decade, so he was definitely not thinking about the football team when he bought it. Of course, now that the Rams are a relevant team again they’re interested in owning rams.com, and have talked to Dicker about buying it. But apparently the two parties have vastly different ideas of what the domain name is worth.
The Rams, who would not comment for this story, spoke to Dicker about purchasing the rams.com domain right around the time they moved from St. Louis to Los Angeles early in the 2016 calendar year. But the two sides were far apart. How far? Dicker’s initial asking price was $1 million, and the Rams countered with something in the neighborhood of $2,500, a source said.
So they’re a little far apart, then! Just a bit! And apparently after that conversation, the Rams haven’t spoken to him about it again, willing to continue on without ownership of rams.com. Dicker found a different buyer, though. He’s selling the domain to an unidentified international company for six figures. While it’s less than the $1 million price he quoted the Rams, it’s definitely more than the $2,500 the Rams offered. (Dicker didn’t elaborate on the sale price.)
The internet can be truly wonderful. The Rams are an NFL team with millions of dollars, but Dicker got to the domain name first, and now he controls it. If the Rams want it, they’ll have to buy it, but on Dicker’s terms. So if you’re looking for information on the stately, glorious bighorn ram, just head to rams.com. If you want information about the Rams football team, you’ll have to go somewhere else.
https://www.yahoo.com/sports/rams-dont-rams-com-175832668.html
Too bad Rod didn't think of this years ago, we might all be season ticket holders now.
More likely @-X- would be watching the Rams from Tahiti.
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