New cover story on dnjournal about Dan Pulcrano, who owns such names as LosAngeles.com, SanFrancisco.com and Philadelphia.com

Changing of the Guard: How Dan Pulcrano Became The Point Man in the Historic March From Old Media to the New World Online

If you are a domain owner you are involved in something much bigger than the domain business- you are in the media business. The success that domain owners are enjoying today is a direct result of a historic upheaval in the media business that is shifting advertising expenditures away from traditional outlets and onto the Internet.

As one of the few publishers that have successfully navigated the treacherous straights between print media and the new world online, Boulevards New Media founder and CEO Dan Pulcrano gave us a unique opportunity to take you beyond domains for an inside look at the larger forces currently shaping our industry. Forces that are precipitating the fall of old media empires offline and the rise of new ones on the web - a seismic shift hat has put owners of high quality domains in the catbird seat.

Of the six billion people on our planet, only a few dozen had the foresight in the mid 1990’s to start acquiring domain names with the idea that they could become valuable in the future. Those very rare individuals were almost universally regarded as fools who were flushing perfectly good money down the drain. Fast forward barely a decade ahead and yesterday’s fools have become today’s visionaries.

“Visionary” is a word that gets thrown around pretty casually in this business today and it is often applied to folks who, by their own admission, just happened to be lucky - in the right place at the right time. But there are true visionaries in the space and none is more deserving of that apellation than Dan Pulcrano. He saw (and bet the ranch) on the future of domains. Today he owns a near priceless portfolio that includes 20 of the 30 largest American city names in the .com extension (many already developed), including LosAngeles.com, San Francisco.com and Philadelphia.com to name just a few.

But Pulcrano saw much more than just the increasing value of domain names. Back in 1993, when he was already a successful publisher of alternative newspapers, Pulcrano saw and warned his colleagues about the print media train wreck that we are seeing play out before our eyes today. On Oct. 27, 1993, Pulcrano wrote a private paper called The Alternative Press at the Crossroads: Will We Be Players in the New Information Age Or Road Kill on the Digital Highway and sent it to fellow board members of his industry trade group (the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies).

About the Internet, Pulcrano wrote this, “The biggest area of competition for the alternative press, at the user information level, will be at the back of the book: music, movie and event listings, classified advertising and personals. While print offers many user-friendly advantages to electronic technologies and will likely remain the dominant player for at least the next decade, we can expect to see a gradual erosion in the percentage of readers who rely on print exclusively for these categories of information - particularly as portable wireless devices begin to proliferate and screen technologies cross the 2,000-pixel threshold, at which point electronic resolution will overtake print in terms of readability and resolution.”

Read the full story here