Our Beginnings

In 1995, and while still maintaining a full time law practice, Gregory Paley founded NewMedia Holdings’ predecessor company which began developing web sites for its collection of domain names that he had begun registering during that year. Between 1996 and 1998, development continued while each site offered simple designs and rudimentary features that were considered, at the time, to be “cutting edge”.

Operating Company Formed

In 1999, Gregory bootstrapped operations and assumed full time responsibility over the day to day operations our business. Operations were also consolidated into a formal operating entity known as Virtual Countries – a name reflecting our primary focus at the time – operating niche online assets based upon the everyday, common names of countries. Management and staff was recruited to develop technology and implement features that formed the basis of the current sites. Our earliest designs offered search engines, business directories, discussion boards, comment sections, moderators, community managers, vanity email, personalized domains, and other features that would later become known as “social media”.

Private Ownership Rights in GeoDomains

In 2001, following the dotcom crash, and continuing through 2003, we faced three separate legal challenges brought by foreign governments over our right to own “Country.com” domains, later to be known as GeoDomains. In each of those cases, we successfully defended the challenges brought against our intellectual property rights.

Online Publications and eZines

In 2004 we underwent a reorganization when Virtual Countries was renamed, NewMedia Holdings. Over the next few years, we resumed and expanded our operations. New staff and personnel were hired as we embarked on a top to bottom redesign and reformulation of our brands. One of our most important steps was to create our own technology and to add professional writers and editors to our staff. The combination of technology and editorial support resulted in our efforts to solidify our brands, maintain creative and editorial control of our network by offering unique, exclusive, and high-quality content that we prepared.

Each of the domain assets started undergoing a complete makeover starting with new designs and functionality based upon a scalable suite of technology and features developed in-house. Our editorial department was created to regularly contribute fresh, high quality content into each of our sites. We also began securing additional trademark to an expanded version of our “.com” brands by co-branding most of our sites as “Channels” to reflect the expansion of our content and commercial.

Milestones, Online Publications, and Expansion

Today, NewMedia Holdings remains the largest single owner of Country.com domain names. In 2011, we reached an important milestone having published  our 15,000th page of content exclusively featured on our Network. Our intellectual property strategy, that begun ten years earlier, resulted in the Company being issued its twenty-second Federal Trademark.