Fake Fred Wilson Dot Com

I just bought fakefredwilson.com. It’s pointing to this blog although it may take a few hours for the DNS records to update.

I think this fakeperson.com thing has legs. I love reading fake steve jobs and this Alexa chart shows that Fake Steve Jobs already has more traffic than Jeff Jarvis’ Buzzmachine, a top 100 weblog.

Like everyone else, I’ve been wondering who Fake Steve Jobs is. My money is on Nick Denton. It would be just like Nick to create a fake blogger and then engage in a hunt to find out the real identity. Or possibly
John Heilemann who clearly has Steve Jobs on his mind and this post almost outs John as FSJ.

But beyond the identity of Fake Steve Jobs, there lies a bigger question. Can this fake person dot com thing turn into a real media opportunity? I believe that Federated Media and FeedBurner together can make FSJ over $200k per year. But is there an even bigger opportunity?

I remember in th early days of Weblogs Inc, they had the Official Apple weblog, The Official Microsoft weblog, The Official Google weblog, etc. Those blogs had/have some readership but not anything like FSJ.

Would it be better to build a network of company specific weblogs with Fake Steve Jobs, Fake Steve Ballmer, Fake Sergey Brin, etc, etc. I suspect that would be a much more popular set of weblogs if they were written as well as FSJ. Of course, that is a big if.

So back to what I did this morning. I don’t think that fakefredwilson.com is a particularly interesting media opportunity but given that I was going to write this post, I figured it would be smart to own the domain.

Look at fakejasoncalacanis.com. Here’s the domain name record. Maybe Jason owns it. Maybe not.

Bottom line. fake person dot com is something to pay attention to. If you don’t want someone blogging as a fake you, buy the domain.