
Meet the 'Mann' who registered 14,962 domains in 24 hours - mjfern
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57418250-93/meet-the-mann-who-registered-14962-domains-in-24-hours/
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wizard_2
I feel like we need a chance in policy that makes this practice not worth the
trouble. I see no value that he gives the internet. I may be bias though, I
can't grab the .com variant of a non profit school I work for because someone
like him owns it and wont accept offers for less then $600 bucks.

~~~
felipemnoa
I wonder if buying lots of domains in the hope of making it big is like buying
lottery tickets in the hope of making it big. Does anybody know if this
business model actually works?

~~~
njharman
Both (lottery tickets, domain names) have working business models. Google it.

~~~
krelian
Not knowledgeable enough about domain names but I am certain that buying
lottery tickets is lose-lose proposition to anyone, by design.

~~~
njharman
You are wrong. Lotteries are systems, systems are hackable. I bothered to
Google one example cause I know many people are ignorant and make assumption
without research like you.

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128264.900-lottery-w...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128264.900-lottery-
wins-come-easy-if-you-can-spot-the-loopholes.html)

~~~
krelian
When I said lottery I was referring to a fair draw. You cannot beat the math.

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JohnnyFlash
The prices on his website are rediculous.

thesearchservice.com - 2 million!

You don't even get searchservice.com with this domain. Simarly .org and .net
are not even registered meaning after buying this you could be facing
competition from similar names.

I find squatters are the bane of the internet. My little brother had a small
gaming message board where he and his friends would prepare for games. No seo
value.. long domain name. Parents credit card expired and we didn't notice.
Domain name expired briefly. Tried to register it again as soon as we noticed.
Someone else pinched it. Offered to sell it back to us for $1000. It has been
for sale for the past 2 years with no interest..

The squatter has got nothing from it. My kid brother lost his domain name.. I
think the majority of squatters are scum tbh.

~~~
zalew
Similar experience here, domain still on sale, no interest.

------
lathamcity
Has anyone ever actually bought one of these domain names?

I tried to once. I had a good idea one day and wanted the domain name for it.
It was a somewhat out-of-the-blue idea, so I wasn't really expecting it to be
taken, but it was and all the names somewhat close to it were taken as well. I
went back to the original name I wanted and e-mailed the squatter asking how
much he wanted, hoping it would only be in the low hundreds of dollars. He
e-mailed me back asking for $6600. When I said that it was too high and I
wasn't interested, I got a much less professional e-mail:

"LAST 5.5 K

Keep or find other domain name

Bye"

I said it was still too expensive, and got

"LOL ...

Bye"

I went to the website that the e-mail was sent from and it was all Lorem
Ipsum. When I went back to the domain name I wanted when I was writing this,
it had a startup-y logo, a promise of something cool being built, and an
invitation to follow the developers (a tech blog I had never heard of) on
facebook or twitter. It was all sounding legitimate, and I was upset that
someone else apparently had an idea that was probably similar to mine, until I
started clicking the really random assortment of "sponsor" links (to medical
and legal sites, which pay a lot for ads but which had no obvious connection
to any idea that would be associated with the domain name) and some of them
took me to more lorem ipsum sites.

Very mysterious, and tremendously irritating.

~~~
garethsprice
I've successfully negotiated a few domain purchases and unsuccessfully tried
for a few more. All the unsuccessful ones are the professional squatters who
won't take less than 4-figures - although they do regularly e-mail with lower
and lower prices so never take the first offer from these guys.

The successful purchases have all been from individuals who registered the
domain at some point with an idea that they never developed.

If it's useful to anyone, here's an example of the opening note I send
(improvement suggestions welcome). I make an opening offer around 50-75% of
what the actual maximum is, make note that the site is inactive and costing
them money, make it clear we're considering other options but that we are
ready to purchase quickly. Even if the purchase is for personal use I'll
reference a "client" as it helps to have a man behind a curtain who just won't
budge on his price.

\-----

Dear Sir/Madam,

I see that you own DOMAIN.COM but are not currently using it for an active
website.

I am currently looking for a domain name for a client of mine, and your name
(DOMAIN.COM) is on our short-list.

We have budgeted around $250 for acquiring new domain names and my client
looking to close a deal quickly.

Please could you let me know if DOMAIN.COM is for sale, and if so what price?

------
cgag
I bought a domain today, and I ended up having to come up with a bunch of
synonyms for what I wanted and using a script to see if any of them were
available.

I guess I support the entrepreneurial spirit, but at the same time I kind of
hope that guy gets hit by a truck.

~~~
japhyr
Entrepreneurs build things. Domain snatchers/ squatters are not entrepreneurs.

~~~
RollAHardSix
Entrepreneurs take advantage of business opportunities. And it IS a business
opportunity. Fact is people pay for those domains.

Let the down-votes commence.

~~~
wpietri
The people who inflated the mortgage-backed securities bubble also "took
advantage of business opportunities". That doesn't, in my view, make them
entrepreneurs; it makes them antisocial assholes.

Of course, it's no surprise that the domain squatting business is populated by
similar arrogant jerks. It's not like this idea didn't occur to a lot of other
people; the just recognized it as society-negative BS and went and did
something useful.

------
deniszgonjanin
I think we should institute a Homesteading Law
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle>) for domains. You can
claim a domain as long as you use it for a legitimate purpose instead of just
parking on it. There would be details to hash out for sure, but in the end I
think we would have a much better system in place.

~~~
Dramatize
That's a terrible idea. People would just create fake purposes for the
websites.. and then who would be responsible to decide if a purpose is
legitimate or not?

~~~
rachelbythebay
Wouldn't it just be a return to the days when domains were free? Back in the
mid-'90s, when people I knew registered vanity domains, they tended to come up
with some ridiculous expansion of the name to make it look official. Nobody
ever checked that "foo" really meant "fraternal otter organization" (or
whatever), so those would become the top line in whois.

~~~
eli
Was that before Network Solutions? I bought a domain in maybe 1996 or 1997 and
it was decidedly not free

~~~
rachelbythebay
Yep. Then it jumped to $100/2 years before competition brought the prices
down.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#Registry_and_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#Registry_and_registrar_business)

IP space used to be free, too, as long as you could justify it. What times
those were.

------
matt1
At the risk of seeming spammy, please check out my service Lean Domain Search
[1] before buying a premium domain name. It pairs your search term with more
than 2,000 other keywords and instantly shows you which are available, making
it really, really easy to find great available domain names.

Guys like this depend on scarcity to drive up the cost of domains. One of my
goals with Lean Domain Search is to show people that there actually are lots
of great available domain names left for whatever you're working on. The
problem until now has been that there haven't been any tools that make it easy
to find them. Over time, if enough people gravitate away from domain
squatters, the value of their portfolios will fall, they'll stop renewing
their holdings, and it can change the face of the domain name industry.

[1] <http://www.leandomainsearch.com>

~~~
nzealand
Where did you get the current list of registered domains? I wrote a script to
ping domains then perform a whois if ping returned nothing, but it was really
slow.

------
Tycho
This gave me an idea. Write a program that generates random melodies. Then
upload them somewhere public and timestamped like YouTube.

Then write another program that detects new songs with a high degree of
similarity in the melody. Then sue for copyright violation.

Call it melody squatting.

------
citricsquid
Vaguely related, a lot of people seem to jump to the conclusion that a domain
that is registered and is not in use is automatically someone that bought it
and wants to sell it to you at an extortionate rate to "steal" money from hard
working "real" entrepreneurs, but how many people here have 1 or more domain
that they don't use but did register with honest intentions? I bet most people
do. I bet there are people who want your domains. Assuming someone is a
squatter and not someone who registered a domain but never used it is silly.

~~~
codeka
I think there's a big difference between 30-40 domains not being used for an
honest reason, and 15,000 domains purchased for the specific purpose of
reselling them at a higher price. And that's only 15,000 bought over a two-day
period. How many does he own in total?

Given the numbers here, I'd say that any random parked domain you find is
statistically far more likely to belong to a domain squatter than a legitimate
"I have this crazy idea that I'm not sure if it'll take off" entrepreneur.

~~~
simonbrown
There are probably many more people doing the former than the latter.

------
drucken
The link in the article to "The Man Who Owns the Internet"
([http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm))
is far more interesting than the article itself.

It almost makes Mann look like a rank amateur by comparison...

------
saddino
I know MM personally, and although he's a bit quirky, he's not "evil" by a
long shot (see grassroots.org).

~~~
ceejayoz
From what I can see of Grassroots.org, it's just funneling money from well
meaning donors to Mike Mann himself.

Hardly innovative. Kanye West does the same thing with his charity:
[http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/02/21/kanye-
wests-...](http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/02/21/kanye-wests-
charity-spends-more-than-500g-annually-donates-0-report-says/)

------
frontier
Simple solution, just need to make the wholesale cost of domains >$100/yr then
it won't be viable for the squatters to sit on "really speculative" names like
the ones in this story would be.. and for a real business/service with 1 or 2
domain names, that extra cost means nothing.

~~~
ceol
I agree with this. I believe it's why .io still has 3-letter domains
available, because it costs about $96/yr to register one.

------
sidman
I dont know what to say ! i get angry when i see a domain name that i want
being parked on and going to absolute waste, but on the other hand the
business this guy has created and the money he has made could be viewed as a
smart hack in some perverse way. He has basically seen a market where no one
else did in the early days (or only few did) and has managed to capitalize of
it very sweetly (all of which he did skillfully and legally).

~~~
ishansharma
Surely, it is legal and indeed a hack. But still, not morally correct!

~~~
abrichr
_After he sold to NameMedia, of which he still owns a 15 percent stake, Mann
had a noncompete that kept him away from the domain game for about four years.
Instead, he worked on his many other ventures, such as SEO.com and a nonprofit
called Grassroots.org._

From grassroots.org:

 _The mission of Grassroots.org is to help charities succeed by providing them
with modern technologies and best practices at no cost._

I don't know if it's morally correct or not, but Mann doesn't otherwise seem
like a morally bankrupt individual.

~~~
ceejayoz
Grassroots.org appears to just be away for him to funnel more cash to himself.
The charity gives away his SEO services - i.e. donors are just paying for his
salary.

------
bryanh
I've only once been able to snag a domain on the drop (everymentor.com).
Though I've tried dozens of times for various domains, I _always_ get beaten
to the punch.

What kind of resources do these guys have? Hundreds of EC2 instances pounding
registrars for good domains? I'm surprised registrars allow it.

~~~
personlurking
I accidentally let one of mine lapse and it was snatched minutes later. The
Whois is private so I can't see who bought it, though one thing is for sure,
they left the DNS pointing to one of my main blogs (albeit a defunct blog
which I deleted yet Blogger never took offline. In turn, the defunct blog has
the same name as the the right/original one). I can't get too mad since it
still references the right location. Even when out of my hands, I get to stick
it to the Mann.

~~~
jacquesm
Beware of that. Don't accept that traffic, all you're doing is helping the
current owner of the domain to increase the value of the domain _and_ to put
you in a worse position to negotiate.

------
shalmanese
Mike Mann also has the dubious distinction of being the first person ever
banned from Quora for being abusive.

------
jpalomaki
How important is it to have the .com name, is there any research available on
this topic? I known that common sense says that mydomain.com is better than
mydomain.cc, mydomain.io, mydomain.to or whatever, but is this really the case
and how big are the differences? (For example how much more likely users
remember a .com vs .io name)

~~~
ovi256
<productname>.com is considered the most important domain name to have, the
reasoning being that when people hear of product X, they'll go check X.com

Dropbox started on getdropbox.com, but they found out lots of people
reflexively typed dropbox.com and saw a squatted domain. So later, they bought
dropbox.com

I tend not to agree with this 100%, I think most people google the name of the
product, instead of trying X.com directly.

------
stevenj
I tried snatching up newmogul.com (it was a developed community like HN for
business news at one point) when it expired, but was beat to the punch,
presumably by someone like this guy (as it currently seems to have some fake
blog parked on it now).

The original owner and operator of New Mogul just shut the site down out of
the blue, and I got a replacement site setup at <http://forlue.com> and wanted
to direct NM to forlue.

I sure miss NM.

------
zachallia
it's one thing to buy good domains, but this guys main motivation is "greed"
and he literally doesn't care about how anything he is doing affects anyone or
anything. Makes me sick.

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_k
I stopped paying for a 6 letter .cn domain, and the Chinese got in touch with
me, they snatched it up, thinking I was going to pay them some money for it.

I once asked how much a .com domain name was worth. They replied by email, it
was about $ 3,000 and I didn't email them back. They had my phone number so
they made an international phonecall asking me what I was willing to pay. A
few hundred bucks, tops. They didn't sell it to me.

------
NatW
The article says he claims that he sometimes buys domains via GoDaddy. Why
would he use GoDaddy since he can get them from cheaper (and more-ethical)
domain name registrars than GoDaddy?

~~~
citricsquid
Cheaper than GoDaddy, like who? GoDaddy give _awesome_ discounts if you're a
bulk buyer. You can pay close to verisign price. It can work out more
economical than running your own registrar if you're willing to trust GoDaddy.
They also have great support for high quantity customers.

~~~
NatW
I just researched it and fair enough! Though you can easily find cheaper
prices if you're not a bulk customer, you may be right on bulk.

Ok, then I guess he just doesn't care that he's supporting an ethically-
challenged company that has supported SOPA, etc.. but that's not too
surprising.. giving what he does for a living :).

~~~
true_religion
Go-daddy is probably a loss leader when it comes to domains. They just use
domain sales to try and upsell you to other things.

If you're only buying bulk domains from them, you're not really supporting
their business very much.

------
prezjordan
Fuck this guy.

------
pkulak
He is contributing so much to society...

