THe mystery of the (highly localised guerilla marketing) online dating lawn signs
If you live in America (300mil + of you do, I don’t) you’ve probably seen one of these signs. Apparently, there are at least 8000+ variations of them, all with highly taregted domain names, all advertising online dating.
Who is responsible? Who runs the online dating service (more of a data acquisition mechanic than anything else) that they direct to? Why are they here?
Robert J Moore, (whose excellent data and analytics blog I’ve just discovered) has discovered the secret. His tale goes via New Jersey, Houston, India and Panama.
He researched and purchased webhosting and IP address archives on DomainTools, ran some numbers through Excel, wrote some RegEx queries and used a lot of Google to find out.
It’s a great story, as much for his explanation of good online research tools as anything else.