How I Ended Up With Aught.com

Back in 1996, I was a young and eager media aspirant, only a couple of years into Silicon Alley and all of its promise. Somehow, I found myself with the title “executive producer” for SPINonline, where I was charged with developing their website (and leading the then-relevant music magazine into the digital age).

Alas, a sexual harassment case against then-owner (pornographer’s son) Bob Guccione, Jr. led to an eventual sale of the magazine – and more importantly for me – a dearth of money to develop their website. This gave me a lot of time to surf a brand new web, and think futuristic (and perhaps pot-fueled) thoughts.

I remember it was early 1996 and someone was talking about the best bands of the nineties – a common conversation at SPIN magazine – which got me thinking of decades. This lead to the wonder of the next decade’s brand — I thought to myself “if this is the nineties, what will next decade be called?”

At the time, I had I no idea what the next decade should be called – the zeros maybe? I did recall an episode of The Simpsons where Grandpa Simpson was going on about life in Springfield in aught-five when he wore an onion dangling from his belt (which was the style of the time.) Aha! Aught! That’s the name of the next decade!

I was delusional enough to think that I was the only person having this thought, and because I was working in the digital “space,” I went to networksolutions.com and saw that aught.com was available, Thinking that this was going to be the catchphrase of skateboard of the next millennium (“dude, that Ollie was totally aught!”) I registered aught.com, fully expecting to eventually sell it for maybe $50,000 (which was the style of the time.)

Guess what? I never sold it. But its still my private email domain (and now serves as the private email domain for my wife and boys!). For most people, it’s not that big a deal to have the same email address for 15 years. But the ups and downs of a career as a freelance television producer, writer, and interactive consultant has made me appreciate the consistency of my own domain: aught.com. (I’m choosing not to be depressed by that last sentence.)

That being said, wanna buy a domain?

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.