Jon Hein and the sale of Jump the Shark

Last week Gemstar's TV Guide bought the Jump the Shark website and brand from its founder and sole proprietor Jon Hein. The sale was purportedly for over $1 million. Not bad for a hobby website conceived to help Jon learn html. Jon will still contribute to the website, yet maintain his day job as host to the wrap up show and the Friday show on The Howard Stern Show.

So why did Jon get over $1 million for a website that lacks all the neat bells and whistles of today's Web 2.0 websites? Might it be the one million unique visitor's per month? Maybe. Trust me, I would kill for a million visitors per month. But, I don't think that was necessarily it.

The value of the "Jump the Shark" site was the brand ... the JUMP THE SHARK trademark. When someone mention's the phrase, they immediately know what it means. It's the mythical point of a television show's life when it starts to go downhill. For example, Happy Days began it's decline when Fonzie jumped a shark on water skis. Hence the name.

On today's Stern show, Jon mentioned that the smartest thing he did early on was register the JUMP THE SHARK trademark with the USPTO. Indeed.

By the way, the phrase came about when Jon was a student at the University of Michigan (Go Blue!). He and fellow UM alums Rich Eisen, Neal Gabler and Bruce Weber, recently commented on pop culture for LSA Magazine.

Tags: naming, branding, trademark, stern, Jump the Shark, positioning,