The Man Who Took Every Good Domain Name And His $300 Million Empire
My officemate sent me an article about how every good domain name is taken and the man who took it all.
The culprit is the infamous domainer named Kevin Ham. Like every other domainer, he though of many different domain names and "parked" these on servers showing advertisements. For instance, he grabbed up weddingshoes.com and loaded it with wedding shoe ads (c/o Yahoo Advertising). He was one of the very first to catch many expiring domain names. He did this by creating a script that automatically notified him when domains where expiring.
He went even further and negotiated with the country of Cameroon to serve ads through the .cm domain extension. He banked on people mistyping any website with the .com extension. For instance someone might misspell beers.com as beers.cm. Those who mistyped would be automatically redirected to Ham's website filled with related ads. He earns from the ads.
Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here's how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.
Jeez, I wish I had learned all these sooner. Anybody care to become the next dot ph domain mogul?
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June 4th, 2007 - 09:21
joining the ride with you on the alexa train.
June 4th, 2007 - 13:42
sa mahal ng dot ph domain names? mukhang mogul ka bago ka magiging dotph domain names mogul eh hehe :P
June 5th, 2007 - 06:10
MommyBa, nice seeing ya.
Mae, I think you can get big discounts if you negotiate with dot ph directly.
June 6th, 2007 - 06:20
If you can’t beat them, join them… :-) After reading that article in Business 2.0 I registered 7 “Kevin Ham” domain names. I don’t know if I will ever make much from them, but it gives me a nice feeling like I am plaing the game like the “big boys”. Perhaps KevinHam.ph is available…?
June 11th, 2007 - 18:37
Problem is he’s depriving other people who could have used those domains for more legitimate purposes, instead he resorts to something akin to domain kiting to make money.
Then again, business as usual, right? ;)
June 12th, 2007 - 14:33
There are actually US laws now that hamper his efforts. YOu can actually sue someone who buys your own personal name as a domain name. If somebody buys GabsYOurLastname.com, you can sue them and probably win. As I recall Madonna did.