Panmedia finally gets its Dot Com

When we developed our first website in 1997, we found out that someone already owned the Panmedia dot Com domain.

We weren’t particularly perturbed because the dot Com dot JM at least told visitors we were in Jamaica.

But we were not happy that there was another Panmedia company out there. An ego problem, we will admit.
At the new millennium, however, that company either went out of business or lost the domain.

We watched with interest each time it came up for renewal to see if it would lapse. We even planned to snatch it if the domain
owner moved too slowly at the renewal dates.

No such luck. So a few months ago we began negotiating with the domain owner, confident that he must be tired of holding it without getting any offers to buy. It turned out that it was someone living in Canada who had exercised foresight and bought that domain name in the early days of the Internet.

He was asking for US$22K and thought that was a generous offer. A former Panmedia web master who had monitored the domain name from the start began our negotiations. His first response to that price was: "Pfffft!""

He convinced us that we shouldn’t pay more than a fraction of that and to start bargaining low. So we sent the domain holder a note explaining that it took 87 Jamaican dollars to buy one US dollar. We appealed to his conscience, telling him we are a tiny company in a developing country and that buying a domain name was a real luxury.

He then made an offer that was lower than his original price but still much higher than what we were prepared to pay. We ignored him for a few days. This time when he contacted us again he said he had an offer from a third party but would give us right of first refusal at a slightly higher price. We respectfully declined.

Our guy predicted we would hear from this person again and to just cool it. A few days later he contacted us asking for less than what we had set as our "get it" price. So we did the deal quickly and thanked him for keeping our domain safe these past twelve years.

Now we will re-direct our dot Com dot JM to the new domain and give thanks for patience.