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Slots.net redirects to Slots.com, Did Calvin Ayre’s Bodog Brand buy it?

Slots.net

2010 was an expensive year for Calvin Ayre when it came to buying domain names.

In June 2010, Calvin Ayre’s Bodog Brand purchased the domain name slots.com for a reported $5.5 million, which grabbed headlines for weeks.  A month later in July, Bodog Brand acquired the Canadian top level country code domain, slots.ca, for $206,906 at Moniker.

It now looks like Calvin Ayre has continued his buying spree for more “slots” domains. 

If you hadn’t noticed, the web address slots.net now re-directs to the slots.com website.  Re-directing the name, was the same technique used for the slots.ca domain after its purchase. 

It’s not confirmed yet whether Bodog Brand was the actual buyer of slots.net, but if I were a gambling man, I’d put my money on Calvin Ayre as the new owner.  At the time of this story, the sale has gone unreported. 

If a deal was cut, one can only guess that the price may have been in the seven figures.  Last year, Poker.org sold for $1,000,000.

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Calvin Ayre has no comment on whether he’ll bid on Gambling.com

Gambling.com

Calvin Ayre had no comment on whether he’ll bid on the domain name Gambling.com, which sold for nearly $20 million in 2005

That’s according to a story published by Steven Stradbrooke on CalvinAyre.com on Wednesday, after a BlackJack Champ story speculated that the billionaire who purchased Slots.com for $5.5 Million in 2010 would own the domain by the end of the month.

It’s not big news that Calvin Ayre could be a potential buyer of Gambling.com  as many could have guessed.  But this is the first time since Gambling.com went up for sale that Calvin Ayre has made some type of public comment on whether he’ll bid.

Here’s what Steven Stradbrooke had to say about the possibility of Bodog Brand buying the name.

The domain’s owners, MediaCorp, have set a reserve bid of $9m. Is L’Atelier about to witness another multi-million deal done with mobile phones in one hand and beers in the other?

Sadly for L’Atelier staff hoping that the Bodog Brand bigwigs would make it rain again, the odds are against it. While Calvin will tell anyone who’ll listen that the Slots.com purchase was the best deal he’d ever made, the best we could get out of him about these gambling.com rumors was ‘no comment’.

Bottom line, none of us here at CalvinAyre.com has, as of yet, received any invitation to L’Atelier on the day of the auction. So, as far as we’re concerned, the whole ‘Bodog Brand to bid for gambling.com domain’ thing just isn’t happening.

Steven injects a bit of humor into the story and sacrcasm saying that when Calvin Ayre said no comment, “at the time he was still hung over from his New Year’s excesses, so while we’re sure we said ‘domain sales,’ he may have thought we said ‘no grain ales’ and he was trying to be ironic or something.”

Yes, Bodog Brand seems like a pretty good bet to be the new owner of Gambling.com.

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Slots.com buyer Calvin Ayre: Not for nothing do people say ‘content is king’

Bodog Girl

On CalvinAyre.com today Billionaire Calvin Ayre wrote an article about the Adweek Media and Harris Interactive survey that indicates: “almost two-thirds (63%) of Americans claim to ignore internet advertising”.   Calvin Ayre’s article centers around the same survey that Robin Wauters discussed over at TechCrunch earlier this month.

While Robin discussed the results of the survey, little insight into how companies trying to build their brand should go about it online was offered.

However, Calvin Ayre did.

The data in this survey highlights the folly of any company attempting to build brand value predominantly via online advertising. Seriously, the only people getting rich off this arrangement are the companies who get paid to host the ads. Not for nothing do people say ‘content is king’. The branded content I’ve created over the years for the Bodog Brand and its associated entertainment properties – BodogFight, BodogMusic, Calvin Ayre WildCard Poker — not only made a significantly greater impression on viewers than a plain old banner or pop-up ad, it continues to resonate years after its initial release, and will continue to do so for however long digital media exists.

Calvin Ayre knows a thing or two about building an online brand.  As the public face of Bodog, he launched the company with little more than  $10,000 in 1994.  He is now a billionaire.