ALBANY, NY — The announcement that New York Gov. Eliot “Law and Order” Spitzer was nabbed during the bust of a high-dollar prostitution ring elicited many reactions. One of the strangest — if not least expected — was the sudden proliferation on the Web of “Client 9” websites.“Client 9” was the name Emperors Club VIP is believed to have used in order to identify Spitzer anonymously. Mere minutes after the New York Times broke the story about the philandering governor on Monday, every URL permutation of “client 9” that could be imagined was snapped up by speculators eager to profit from the resounding crash landing of a man who rose to national prominence as what the Times called “a fierce enforcer of ethics in public life.” URL variations of “room 871” — the hotel room in which Spitzer allegedly met at least one hooker — likewise sold quickly.
Spitzer resigned from office fewer than 48 hours after the scandal broke, but his legacy lives online. Some of the sites are adult in nature, like Client9.net, owned and operated by No Rivals Media. No Rivals owner Chris Potoski bought the domain for $5.97 even before the original report about the scandal had flickered off the television set on which he happened to be watching CNBC. He designed and built a site and set it live before the end of the day. It received about 2,000 hits within its first 24 hours and netted him 11 new members, he told Wired.
“We definitely saw an increase in sales,” Potoski said. “I definitely plan to keep it up. As long as I make one sale per year, the domain pays for itself. This type of news lasts forever. And so does the traffic.”
