Story Time... How myLot Was Almost Named Something Else

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I noticed the discussion about myLot's name origin recently, and felt like it would be fun to share a story that's been kept secret for over a decade and never been told before. So here goes... Back in 2006 when myLot was still just an idea with no website, we had the name narrowed down to a couple of options. One of them was myLot, but it was NOT the first choice! You see, the first choice for this project was actually theLot, and we even owned the domain name thelot.com. I can't remember exactly how much we paid, but since the domain was already owned by someone else, we had to pay a fairly significant amount to acquire the domain. Meanwhile, back in 2006, television was nearing the end of the Reality TV explosion fueled by the hit reality show "Survivor" which premiered six years earlier. Mark Burnett was the producer of Survivor. In an effort to try and produce another hit TV show and capitalize some more on the reality tv trend, he partnered with Steven Spielberg to create another reality show - this time featuring filmmakers competing in weekly elimination competitions. What does this have to do with myLot? Well, the name of that Burnett/Spielberg TV show was "On the Lot", and they needed a domain name for their show. For whatever reason, they liked "thelot.com" better than "onthelot.com" and approached us wanting to buy "thelot.com" just a couple weeks after we had just bought it from someone else. We weren't really interested in selling (we had just bought the domain!), but our website hadn't even launched yet, and they ended up making us an offer we couldn't refuse. So we sold thelot.com to the Hollywood studio, and went with our next choice... mylot.com, officially naming it myLot! "On the Lot" aired in 2007 was met with negative reviews and low ratings, and was ultimately cancelled after only one season. But myLot is still alive and kicking over 10 years later! To this day though, the domain name "thelot.com" still redirects to ParamountStudios.com