Reprinted from Sun-Sentinel, Monday, May 10, 1999:
She bought CoxCable.com and CoxCommunications.com hoping to save her tiny cable news show.
She bought Eve.com and Gwen.com to teach her young daughters a thing or two about the Internet.
She bought TheSuperstation.com to meet Ted Turner.
As she goes grocery shopping, shuttles Eve and Gwen to school and visits with friends, Rogers keeps a pen and pad handy: A new ``domain name,'' or Internet address, might pop into her head.
``I'll see something and I'll say, 'Hey, that's a really good idea.' And I'll write a little note to myself.''
When Rogers gets some free time early in the morning or late at night, she logs onto her living room computer and goes to her favorite site: the Internet Network Information Center, or InterNIC, the official domain name registration center.
If the names are available, Rogers buys them - at $70 a pop - just as she did recently when she bought ``greedylawyer.com.'' She may use it, she says, to post ads and information from personal injury lawyers with a sense of humor. ``I already had greedylawyers.com, but somehow I missed greedylawyer.com,'' she says. ``I think that's a really good one, too.''
It's a 60 hour-a-week job that Rogers hopes will pay off as her company, U-Surf.com, develops the names into Web sites and sells advertising on them. She believes the 300 or so ``best of'' and ``best in'' sites - such as ``bestofNYC.com,'' ``bestofAtlanta.com'' and ``bestofRichmond.com'' - have the most promise. Judging by her meeting with some venture capitalists in Denver, she may be right.
``My husband used to say I should get a real job,'' she says. ``He doesn't think that anymore.''
She's been through numerous negotiations in the past year. Some have been amicable, as with a California beauty supply company that paid a pretty penny for Eve.com. Others have been heated, as with Cox Communications, which brought five Atlanta lawyers (at least she thinks they were all lawyers) to her Williamsburg house last summer.
Rogers, 39, is a longtime entrepreneur. Her father, former Williamsburg mayor and current Councilman Gil Granger, owned two radio stations. From him, she ``learned how to figure out mortgage payments before I learned my multiplication tables.''
After a string of off-beat jobs, she became a saleswoman at her father's radio station, WMBG. And in 1994, upset with how the local press covered a Williamsburg child molestation, she founded her own TV show, ``First News.'' Then, ``from money I earned working hard,'' she says, she bought one of her father's stations, WPTG.
Rogers says she ``didn't know anything about the Internet'' until two years ago. She had an account with America Online, but that was about it.
While flipping through the paper, she came across an ad for ``wmbg.com,'' a Web site devoted to Williamsburg and wondered whether the site's owner was trying to cash in on the radio station's good name. He told her she could have it for $70,000. She was mad at first but then realized: ``If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.'' Still, her goal, she says, has never been to sell the names but to ``help companies with their marketing.''
In March 1997, she bought her first domain name, ``localnews.org'' and by last fall had 200-plus names. She has hired five Web developers and developed 74 of the names into Web sites.
She taps into the large pool of people who mistakenly wander into her sites looking for something else. ``TheThrillPark.com,'' for example, attracts lots of ads from Kentucky companies making their pitch to people trying to reach ``ThrillPark.com,'' the official site of a Kentucky amusement park.
Similarly, she expects ``TheSuperstation.com'' to capitalize on people looking for ``superstation.com,'' Turner Broadcasting System's site.
Last fall, in what may very well have been her smartest move, she bought about 300 ``best of'' city and state sites, where she hosts online contests about the best pizza joints and jazz bars in town.
She has begun developing those sites.
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