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The man who ran SIFerry.com, the unofficial but extensive site about the Staten Island Ferry, is now auctioning the website on eBay. The starting bid? A cool $2.9 million. So far, there are no takers. Trevor Gherardi told the NY Post, "I decided to do it for the money — it's as simple as that. It would take me 10 years to make that money normally, so I figured why not?" Ten years to make $2.9 million? Gherardi is a ferry engineer - Gothamist had no idea they raked in that much! He started the website while taking a computer class in 2001, and has put about $21,000 into the site, which is often mistaken as the Staten Island Ferry's official website. The Department of Transportation told the Post they weren't interested in buying the domain, but Gothamist will guess that some intellectual property lawyers are skulking around Gherardi to get him to turn it over for far, far less.
View from the Staten Island Ferry from Bluejake.
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Needless to say I'm monitoring this carefully.
www.forgotten-ny.com
That's abit of a creepy pic, I feel like the quote below it should be "The Final Moments of Spalding Gray"
Only $2.9M? That's a bargain. I'll take two. I don't think he's being pressured to sell. It's just human greed. After all, someone else is still successfully cybersquatting on statenislandferry.com, and that's a much more valuable domain name.
Frankly, I don't see how anyone could mistake it for an official site. It's ... how shall I put it? Amateurish. Bad layout generated by Frontpage. Not standards compliant with no use of CSS. Terrible, gimmicky menu design. Lots of misspellings. Small snapshots with no captions or context. Why not some shots of the old architecture at Whitehall? He writes that an earlier "Barberi" [sic] crash "injured a handful of passengers." No mention of the 2003 crash that killed 10 people. Why not directions on how to get to either terminal? I could have done better for much less than $21,000. Trevor, don't quit your day job to become a web designer.
I agree, Captain Midnight. I just checked out the nyc.gov website (the people that didn't want siferry.com), and their site is far superior. Also, the ebay description says the site gets 2,000 hits a day. I'm not a web expert, but it doesn't seem like that much.
"He started the website while taking a computer class in 2001, and has put about $21,000 into the site..."
What in lords name cost $210 (or $21) let alone $21,000 for this site? What is he basing the value off of? And why are local news agencies NOT questioning everything about this?
"Also, the ebay description says the site gets 2,000 hits a day. I'm not a web expert, but it doesn't seem like that much..."
Mini-Web Metric Lesson:
No matter how you slice that number, it's bunk. A 'hit' is technically described as any item being transferred by a web server. So if one person views one page and that page has 20 elements, that one person has now registered 20 'hits' on the websites resources.
Using the hit-metric, my site--Pic Patrol--gets about 3135 hits a day. Woo-hoo! I should be valued at $4 million dollars! We're in the money! We're in the...
Wait...
The reality is that I get 319 page views a day. Meaning 319 pages are viewed a day; obviously. And the 2816 remaining hits are just the loading of images, javascript, stylesheets and all that jazz. And further broken down, I get about 105 visitors a day. Not so impressive now, huh? That's the web reality.
Hits mean shit.
This SIFerry guy is full of something. $2.9 million for what? Nothing but hype and dellusion.
wow, that is an ugly site. maybe it was all hosting fees or something.
If this kid gets $2.9 mil, or even half that, then sign me up for the next web design class at NYU SCE... dudes, it's time to quit the day job!
Kristin,
DOT wouldn't be buying the actual site even if they were interested. They'd be buying just the domain name then put their own content on it.
Tien,
Yeah, except you can find pretty cheap hosting nowadays. I figure that site might cost $200/year tops for hosting, even assuming it got an incredible number of visitors. On the bright side, at least he doesn't use any Flash animations (probably didn't get that far in computer class, thankfully) or have lots of winking, blinking banner ads.
I saw a NY1 segment on this earlier today. The man is either lying that he spent $21,000 on this crappy site or just a big idiot and got conned by this hosting provider or something. Nobody spends that kind of dough on a website that a 12 year old could create. Jack's right -- NY1, Post, et al, are kind of glossing over the fact that there's no way he spend over 20K on this site.
Dirk, to give you some perspective I pay about $250 per year to host my various personal sites. I consider that pricey, but for my needs--such as the sundry UNIX things that are not included in many hosting plans--it's well worth the price. And I have been hosting my own personal sites since 1999 and such. So total cost to me over 6 years is $1,500.
But that still doesn't explain this guy's claims. His hosting service--1and1.com--seem to offer a variey of basic packages. Ranging from $4.99 per month to $19.99 per month for basic hosting.
This guy managed to grab the attention of news agencies without too much to back himself up. I'm shocked NY1 has falled for it as well. They are usually good at researching stuff.
Speaking of research, it looks like virtually ALL other domains that can have 'siferry' exlcuding the .com this guy claims is up for grabs. Info provided by the domain lookup on 1and1.com's website.
siferry.name
siferry.cc
siferry.net
siferry.org
siferry.tv
siferry.biz
siferry.ws
siferry.us
siferry.info
$1500 sounds more like a reasonable figure for maintaining a basic website.
Obviously, the site is a labor of love for the guy, so I can't knock that. But asking almost $3 million is absurd.
I just read the Post article linked to above and the guy claims his hosting was only $100 a year and he spent $20,000 developing the site. For that kind of money, he could have hired a professional web designer and had a much better site. Heck, considering professionals charge as little as $50 a page, he would have saved money, considering he doesn't have anywhere near 400 webpages.
Now, now, his design ain't THAT bad, tho that ferryboat at the top looks like it's about to crash. Y'all sound like design snobs. Not that I'd pay $3M for it.
My total layout for FNY over the last 6 years has been abt $7500-$8000, and that has been cut down considerably since I bought a digital and don't have to develop film any more, and found a webhost with reasonable rates.
www.forgotten-ny.com
If the guy started bidding at $3,000 he'd have some nibbles on it. At this rate, it has gotten tons of hype and little real interest.
Just because you put a price tag on something, doesn't mean you'll get it.
This thing is so ill conceived on so many levels it's beyond belief.
If you want to see a labor of love that is well taken care of and simple, check out the Coney Island Light Station website:
http://www.coneyislandlightstation.com/