

The Man Who Owns the Internet: Kevin Ham's $300m Domain Empire [2007] - gatsby
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm

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a2tech
This guy isn't a hero-he's an abuser. He saw an opportunity and capitalized on
it, and made good. That doesn't change the fact that what he was doing was
simply grabbing domains and running ads to hopefully trick people into
clicking

~~~
ohashi
I've always found it fascinating where entrepreneurs draw their moral line on
other entrepreneurs. He didn't just buy domain names, he bought the whole
registry's traffic. That was by far his most brilliant move. He avoided
trademark issues by wildcarding all of .cm much like many ISPs and browsers
do, showing their own ad pages for non-existent domains.

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melvinram
1\. His practice of buying prime domains and using them for displaying ads is
like buying land in the middle of Manhattan and just using it to display
billboards. It'll make good money but nothing like the true potential of those
properties.

2\. Even as lame as domain squatting is, I admire his genius for recognizing
opportunity at the right time and betting big.

3\. They are not locked into their current strategy. At some point he'll want
in on the action that he's advertisers are getting. That's when he'll really
make a killing.

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stanmancan
Kevin ham, I despise you. I also despise everybody in that right hand sidebar.
You ruin the internet.

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maguay
Interesting that religion.com is not launched. Does anyone know what happened
to his content plans? Sounds like an ideal marketer for content farms to me.

Seriously, both domainers and content farms are absolutely trashing the
internet today. It's a mess.

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SimonPStevens
In the long term I think domain names are going to become less important and
will gradually fall in value.

People will start to use a portal like Google or Bing to access the web.
Rather than typing a domain name, many non-tech people I know just search for
the company name.

Coupled with ICANNs plans to open gTLD registration up I think we will
eventually see the focus move away from .com domains and the prices will start
to fall. As the .com space becomes increasingly crowded and a wider range of
gTLDs become available it will become more and more acceptable to exist in
other TLDs so there will be less competition for .com domains.

~~~
arkitaip
I think Facebook and other social networks will have a better chance of
creating flourishing portals than Google or Bing because they already have a
working combo of people+data+interaction. The Google approach to portals would
just be very AOL-ish.

You are 100% right about people googling services and companies, though. Hell,
we know for a fact that people google Google or Yahoo or even Bing... As long
as you don't pick a offensive name, most people don't seem to mind about the
domain name or tld.

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pyre
I'd add a [2007] seeing as this is out of the CNN archives...

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nopinsight
If all browsers adopt Chrome-style address bar, the net worth of these guys
should drop a lot and it will be a good thing for the Internet.

Obviously, the fortune will be partly transferred to search engines but they
provide real values to the world, unlike the guys covered in the article.
Search engines could use the money to better fight spam and research for more
advanced technology (like IBM Watson) as well.

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selectnull
This is an old article, already discussed on HN. For those interested in
previous discussions, here are the links:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515684>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23899>

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valjavec
He is no different than guys at Wall street or Hedge funds. All they care is
money money money.

What he does barely benefits anyone but him.

Nevertheless he get's 10 points for execution, for exploring every loophole,
for perfecting the system, but 0 points for the value he's creating with his
"business".

------
paolomaffei
The big question is: will there ever be depreciation of domain names?

~~~
thematt
Probably, but it will require a new system in which we don't depend on domain
names to navigate. I think Google has already envisioned it, as they're
starting to de-emphasize the address bar in Chrome.

~~~
rmjb
The parked domain advertising market is so lucrative that even Google has
entered it (possibly through the DoubleClick acquisition) with their AdSense
for Domains program.

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asksol
Back in the day, when VeriSign took control over the .com and .net TLDs they
decided to redirect all unregistered domains to their own site.

(See <http://news.cnet.com/2100-1032-5077530.html>)

I remember me and a friend rushed into their Oslo offices telling them exactly
how we felt about that move... :)

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gvnonor
I found the part where Ham applied for a patent for the act of basically
redirecting typo traffic from unregistered domains to a single domain( and
bribing top government officials for exclusive access), quite amusing.

Considering that the patent system is downright broken, I would'nt be
surprised if he was granted one.

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antidaily
Think he can get me the phone number of the cute blonde with the backpack?

~~~
EnderMB
It's hard to deny his influence when I was able to picture the same woman
almost perfectly.

