Why Every Domain Name You Can Think Of Is Gone
Excellent article in the June, 2007 Business 2.0. Summary:
Kevin Ham is a domain hoarder in Canada with over 300,000 domains that run a combination of Google and Yahoo! ads for an estimated $70mm / year of revenue. He’s been collecting the domains since 2000 and has worked a deal many of the top level domain registrars to get first pick on expiring domains in exchange for paying 10x the regular price (still usually a massive bargain compared to some of their market values).
Interesting takeaways:
- Ham has often taken advantage of little known 30-day return policies on domains. Get the domain, run ads on it, drop the ones that don’t perform well.
- Was one of the first to buy up thousands of .cm domains - which are accessed when people misspell “.com”. Try beer.cm. Ads served by Yahoo!
- To capture more misspellings, he’s working on Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) . One must strike a deal with the government of the country in question to become the registrar for that TLD (top level domain).
- He’s quietly working on a new firm called Reinvent Technology that will invest money in businesses that can be built on his domains. Like a land owner looking for real estate developers.
- His network receives 30 million unique visitors per month (most of them probably accidental)
- He’s filed a patent application on the misspelling trick he pulled off with .cm (Cameroon)
- Many companies are looking to sue Ham over trademark violations related to the .cm scheme.
- Wrote scripts to compare lists of domains from Verisign then cut deal with them to buy the ones he wanted (at a 10x premium)
- Eventually he started his own registrar called Hitfarm
- Internet REIT is a a domain investment firm that has raised more than $125 million from private investors, including Maveron, the venture firm backed by Starbucks founder Howard Schultz.
- Ham’s current portfolio of domains has an estimated value of $300 million.
- He’s overpaying lately for a lot of domains. Some of the prices he’s paying would take 15-20 years to recoup the investment, assuming pay-per-click advertising tracks at the same pace.
- This is why he’s starting the new firm, Reinvent Technology, to come up with mini media businesses on many of these domains. Sounds like an SEO play to me, which is also at the end of its arc.
- Ham: “If you control all the domains,” he says, “then you control the Internet.”
Business 2.0 Article: Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains - June 1, 2007
June 13th, 2007 21:29
interesting, but he could never control the internet cuz any site of any real value or importance could just add a bunch of numbers to the end. hitfarm5000.com is still available for whatever reason. but if he could take out the electricity in the world like in escape from LA, that’s a different story…
June 13th, 2007 21:33
I agree that he thinks he has a lot more power than he actually does. Google and other search engines are going to start cutting “ad farm” sites like his out of their indexes. Google’s goal is to reduce the total number of click a user has to make before getting to what they’re looking for. Sites like his only slow people down. After he’s out of the index his traffic will drop to nothing.