Websites That Sold For Millions

Most Recently Website Sold In October 2014

Ebola.com Domain Sold For $200,000 To Russian Marijuana Company Ebola.com isn’t much of a website at this time. As the name suggests, it features several articles about Ebola news and tips for containing the virus. However, the websites owner just cashed in by selling the URL for more than $200,000. Last week site owner Jon Schultz announced that he was prepared to sell Ebola.com for $150,000. In an interview with The Washington Post he said the price was reasonable, while announcing that the website was receiving thousands of pageviews per day, traffic that is likely to grow as more Ebola news is generated. Schultz purchased the domain in 2008 for $13,500. He decided to purchase the name after watching the movie Outbreak. Top Blog Sites That Have Been Sold The whole point of this post is to make you think of your end goal, where you want to go with your online business. Every day your working on your business, don’t just think about how much you made that day but how much your going to make for investing an additional day into your business when you go to sell your blog/company. Some of these guys were worth $30,000 a day – now that’s what gets me excited about blogging. In my head, I have already decided I’m going to sell my blog network for millions of dollars. Here’s the clever thing about what I’m doing: Here in the UK, if I make over £150,000 a year, I have to pay 50% (actually 51%) of anything over that to the government which makes it quite an easy decision to not take the money out of the company but instead to invest it in it. So my whole game plan is not take a big salary, live within my means and invest every penny into my business so that I can grow it to the point where it gets millions of visitors every month and ideally make me 7 figures a month also. If I keep reinvesting, growing my business for a few short years I will then be in position to sell the company for lets say a cool £10,000,000. On the first £2 million I have to pay 10% tax and then 18% after that. For me, the best part of this isn’t so much the financial side, it’s the fact that I would of built something amazing, something to be proud of, the money is just a bonus! This reminds me of this saying:

Quote:Entrepreneurship is about living a few years of your life like most won’t, so that you can live the rest of your life like most can’t!

Now think big and get inspired! #1 Ugo.com – Sold For: $100 million Founded: 1997 Year of Sale: 2007 Approximate Daily Worth: $27,397 The website Ugo was founded in 1997 as Unified Gamers Online (UGO) by Chris Sherman.Action World Inc. bought them very early on and decided to rename the business. They changed the name to UGO Networks, however the name didn’t stick for long as it was once again changed to Online Underground. Eventually it was sold on to the Hearst Corporation approximately $100 million. * #2 Fotolog – Sold For: $90 million

Founded: 2002

Year of Sale: 2007 Approximate Daily Worth: $49,315 Fotolog was founded by Scott Heiferman, in 2002, and unfortunately the site began to have problems just 3yrs later in 2005 when the amount of visitors and members started to become too much for the websites servers. The website itself currently receives over 20 million unique visitors each month and was sold to Hi-Media Group for the tidy sum of $90 Million. * #3 Consumersearch – Sold for: $33 million Founded: 1999 Year of Sale: 2007 Approximate Daily Worth: $11,301 Consumersearch was founded by co-founders Derek grew and Carl Harmaan in 1999, the pair also owned a privately held corporation at the time. The website sold for a huge $33 million and the news was first released by the New York Times Co. The buyers, About.com are also owned by the New York Times Co. In 2009 the website was honored in the 13th annual webby awards competition. * #4 TechCrunch – Sold for: $30 million

Founded: 2005

Year of Sale: 2010 Daily Worth: $16,438 TechCrunch is a very well-known website publication, which is well grounded within the technology and gadget niche’s. The blog was first founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington, and the first time it was published live online was on June 11, 2005. It’s astonishing that in just five years Michael had created such a unique website which was full of valuable content and managed to sell the website for a total of $30 million to AOL. * #5 PaidContent – Sold for: $30 million Founded: 2002 Year of Sale: 2008 Daily Worth: $13698 Paidcontent was founded by Rafat Ali, in 2002, and was basically an online resource for; information, analysis and news. Rafat Ali the founder of the website, was a journalist and so the website itself was a natural progression for him. In the end the website was eventually brought out by Guardian Media Group $30 Million (2008) Ali Rafat however is still part of the website, and is currently working for the company as an editor. * #6 Tatter and Company – Sold for: $30 million Founded: 2002 Year of Sale: 2008 Approximate Daily Worth: $13698 Tatter and Company or TNC as it is also known, was founded by Chang-Won Kim and Chester Roh, they formed the company in 2002. Tatter and Company itself was and still is a blogging platform for the Korean nation. I’m sure it is not a major surprise that the company was purchased by Google for the sum of $30 Million, in 2008. * #7 Ars Technica – Sold for: $25 million Founded: 1998 Year of Sale: 2008 Approximate Daily Worth: $6849 Ars Technica was founded by Ken Fisher, in 1998 and quickly became one of the top and most authoritative blogs with the technology industry. The site provided a great amount of news and sometimes reviews on their chosen niche. The website was purchased by Conde Nast Publications for $25 Million in 2008, a decade since the year it was founded. * #8 Weblogs.com – Sold for: $25 million Founded: 2003 Year of Sale: 2005 Approximate Daily Worth: $34,722 Weblogs Inc was created by Brian Alvey and Jason Calcanis in 2003, with the help of an investment from Mark Cuban. In the early days the business was initially set up for professional readership, they also had a number of other websites running alongside Weblogs, in fact there were approximately a dozen websites in total. Weblogs was purchased in 2005 by AOL to the tidy sum of $25 Million. * #9 Livejournal.com – Sold for: $25 million Founded: 1999 Year of Sale: 2007 Approximate Daily Worth: $8561 LiveJournal just as the name suggests was a virtual community where users could keep a blog or an online digital diary, through their free open source server technology. They didn’t stop there though, they had the software allowing users to easily create blogs and diaries online they even allowed for calendars, polls, and even have guest writers. The website sold for approximately $ 25 million to Six Apart in 2007. * #10 Bankaholic.com – Sold for: $15 million Founded: 2006 Year of Sale: 2008 Approximate Daily Worth: $20547 Bankaholic is the creation of founder John Wu who also created CB Land Investments. The website itself was an online banking marketplace which basically provided its customers with credit card offers as well as interest rates and personal financial advice. The website eventually sold for $15 Million to BankRate and now has a hefty team of banking and financial professionals behind it so who knows where it could go? maybe it will be worth double the amount in a year or so. * #11 Deadline Hollywood – Sold for: $14 million Founded: 2006 Year of Sale: 2009 Approximate Daily Worth: $5479 Deadline Hollywood started off as a column in the LA weekly, in 2002 by Nikki Finke. The column itself was basically an informative entertainment column based around the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Nikki decided to take her now well-known columnto the online world, and the site first went live in 2006 as a blog. She decided upon calling it the ‘Deadline Hollywood Daily’. It was so popular that in 2009 the Mail Media Corporation bought it from her in a lucrative deal with $14 million. The website has since been changed to deadline.com. * #12 Wonkette – Sold for: $12 million Founded: 2004 Year of Sale: 2006 Approximate Daily Worth: $16438 Wonkette is a website that was established in January 2004, it was part of the Gawker Media Network, and it’s founding editor was Ana Marie Cox, who has also been the editor of the well known website suck.com. Gawker Media thought a downturn in the internet boom was on the horizon, and not wanting to lose all the money they had poured into the website they sold it. The buyers were Ken Layne and his business partners, paying $12 Million in 2006. It’s also worth mentioning that Ken Layne was also the editor of the site at the time he and his partners bought it. #13 Celebrity baby blog -Sold for: $10 million Founded: 2004 Year of Sale: 2008 Approximate Daily Worth: $6849 Celebrity Baby blog was created by Danielle Friedland in 2004, and as you can see from the name of the blog, the topic is pretty obvious. Yes that’s right it’s another blog about famous babies. With celebrities a current trend at the time (when are they not, right?) and her website gaining a very steady stream of visitors, She managed to sell the blog to Times Inc in a deal worth $10 Million. Not bad for a blog based on babies, the blog has also changed names since to babyrazzi.com. * #14 Tree Hugger – Sold for: $10 million Founded: 2005 Year of Sale: 2007 Approximate Daily Worth: $6849 Tree Hugger was the brainchild of Graham Hill, an environmentalist entrepreneur who knew how to use technology to his advantage. He managed to sell the blog to the Discovery Communication for a neat and tidy sum of $10 Million in 2007. You got to admit there’s probably not that many tree huggers out their worst $10 million! * #15 Freakanomics -Sold for: $8 million Founded: 2005 Year of Sale: 2007 Approximate Daily Worth: $10958 Freakanomics, was founded by Stephen J. Dubner, in the year 2005 and was sold just two years after it was first created. Stephen was a professional journalist for the New York Times, when he started the blog, which was actually created after the huge success of Dubner’s book, which was also called ‘Freakanomics’ . The website was eventually bought out by the New York Times the sum of $8 million. * #16 The Consumerist – Sold for: $7 million Founded: 2005 Year of Sale: 2008 Approximate Daily Worth: $7305 The Consumerist, is yet another website which was developed by the Gawker Media Group, there doing quite well aren’t they? Anyway, Joel Johnson was the editor-in-chief although the site was originally the idea of Nick Denton and Lockhart Steele both of whom are highly ranked within the Gawker Media Group. They decided to sell the consumerist to Consumer Media LLC when they were offered around $7 Million. I think I may have sold for that price too! * #17 World Hum – Sold for: $6 million Founded: 2001 Year of Sale: 2007 Approximate Daily Worth: $2739 World Hum is a very highly regarded and award-winning magazine-style blog which was created by Jim Benning and Michael Yessis. The pair were obsessed with travel and decided to create the blog as an outlet for their passion. Within the blog they had all sorts of various categories; how-to sections, question-and-answer sections and where the best places to travel were, as well as how to get there and where to stay once you arrive. Eventually the Travel Channel decided to make them an offer in 2007 to the tune of $6 Million, which they just couldn’t turn down. I can’t say I blame them though. * #18 Arseblog – Sold for: $5 million Founded: 2006 Year of Sale: 2007 Approximate Daily Worth: $13698 Arseblog, yes I know you’re properly all sniggering, well at least those of you in the UK as it is a bit of a naughty word but anyway, the website was created by Andrew Managan in 2006,m due to his undying loyalty to the football team Arsenal FC (Soccer to all of you reading this in the US). In 2007 Andrew was made an offer god-father style, one he definitely could not refuse $5 million by the company Ole Ole. The site has since changed it’s name to Ole Ole. * #19 GardenRant – Sold for: $1.3 million Founded: 1996 Year of Sale: 2007 Approximate Daily Worth: $395.73 GardenRant was formed in 1996 by gardening enthusiast Susan Harris, mainly as a way to share her thoughts, tips and advice as well as sharing event details and special promotions. Though you may think that there wouldn’t be much value in a gardening blog it actually did amazingly well and was eventually bought out by the company GardenWeb for a rough figure of around $1.3 Million, not bad for a blog talked mostly about flowers. Never underestimate the power of any niche community, big or small! * #20 Politicshome – Sold for: $1.3 million Founded: 2008 Year of Sale: 2009 Approximate Daily Worth: $3561 Politicshome was founded just two years ago in 2008 by Stephan Shakespeare, who is also the founder and CEO of YouGov, which is basically an Internet-based market research company. After just one year of the blog being online, Stephan managed to sell the business in a very successful deal with Conservative politician Michael Ashcroft. The deal was worth an approximate $1.3 million.

The man who owns the Internet

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.

 

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- Kevin Ham leans forward, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type -- into the air. He's seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas's Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block. As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It's the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it's a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner? When Ham wants a domain, he leans over and quietly instructs an associate to bid on his behalf. He likes wedding names, so his guy lifts the white paddle and snags Weddingcatering.com for $10,000. Greeting.com is not nearly as good as the plural Greetings.com, but Ham grabs it anyway, for $350,000. Ham is a devout Christian, and he spends $31,000 to add Christianrock.com to his collection, which already includes God.com and Satan.com. When it's all over, Ham strolls to the table near the exit and writes a check for $650,000. It's a cheap afternoon. Just a few years ago, most of the guys bidding in this room had never laid eyes on one another. Indeed, they rarely left their home computers. Now they find themselves in a Vegas ballroom surrounded by deep-pocketed bankers, venture-backed startups, and other investors trying to get a piece of the action. And why not? In the past three years alone, the number of dotcom names has soared more than 130 percent to 66 million. Every two seconds, another joins the list. But the big money is in the aftermarket, where the most valuable names -- those that draw thousands of pageviews and throw off steady cash from Google's and Yahoo's pay-per-click ads -- are driving prices to dizzying heights. People who had the guts and foresight to sweep up names shed during the dotcom bust are now landlords of some of the most valuable real estate on the Web.

UPWARDLY MOBILE: Kevin Ham's kitchen-table business now inhabits the 27th floor of a skyscraper in Vancouver.

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The man at the top of this little-known hierarchy is Kevin Ham -- one of a handful of major-league "domainers" in the world and arguably the shrewdest and most ambitious of the lot. Even in a field filled with unusual career paths, Ham's stands out. Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. (Like all his financial details, Ham would neither confirm nor deny this figure.) Working mostly as a solo operator, Ham has looked for every opening and exploited every angle -- even inventing a few of his own -- to expand his enterprise. Early on, he wrote software to snag expiring names on the cheap. He was one of the first to take advantage of a loophole that allows people to register a name and return it without cost after a free trial, on occasion grabbing hundreds of thousands of names in one swoop. And what few people know is that he's also the man behind the domain world's latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name. Try it with almost any name you can think of -- Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm -- and you'll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500). Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad -- as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code -- just as Germany runs all names that end with .de. The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well. "It's in the works," Ham says over lunch in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. "That's why I can't talk about it." He's nearly as reluctant to share details about his newest company, called Reinvent Technology, into which he's investing tens of millions of dollars to build a powerhouse of Internet businesses around his most valuable properties.

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Given Ham's reach on the Web -- his sites receive 30 million unique visitors a month -- it's remarkable that so few people know about him. Even in the clubby world of domainers, he's a mystery man. Until now Ham has never talked publicly about his business. You won't find his name on any domain registration, nor will you see it on the patent application for the Cameroon trick. There are practical reasons for the low profile: For one, Ham's success has drawn enemies, many of them rivals. He once used a Vancouver post office box for domain-related mail -- until the day he opened a package that contained a note reading "You are a piece of s**t," accompanied by an actual piece of it. Bitter domainers are one thing, lawyers another. And at the moment, Ham's biggest concern is that corporate counsels will come after him claiming that the Cameroon typo scheme is an abuse of their trademarks. He may be right, since this is the first time he's been identified as the orchestrator. When asked about the .cm play, John Berryhill, a top domain attorney who doesn't work for Ham, practically screams into the phone, "You know who did that? Do you have any idea how many people want to know who's behind that?"

Spreading the word

Kevin Ham is a boyish-looking 37-year-old, trim from a passion for judo and a commitment to clean living. His drink of choice: grapefruit juice, no ice. His mild demeanor belies the aggressive, work-around-the-clock type that he is. Ham frequently steers conversations about business back to the Bible. Not in a preachy way; it's just who he is. The son of Korean-born immigrants, Ham grew up on the east side of Vancouver with his three brothers. His father ran dry-cleaning stores; his mother worked graveyard shifts as a nurse. A debilitating illness at the age of 14 led Ham to dream of becoming a doctor. He cruised through high school and then undergraduate work and medical school at the University of British Columbia. Christianity had long been a mainstay with his family, but as an undergrad, he made the Bible a focal point of his life; he joined the Evangelical Layman's Church and attended regular Bible meetings. Ham recalls that it was about this time -- 1992 or 1993 -- that he was introduced to the Web. A church friend told him about a powerful new medium that could be used to spread the gospel. "Those words really struck me," Ham says. "It's the reason I'm still working." After he graduated from med school in 1998, Ham and his new bride took off for London, Ontario, for a two-year residency. By the second year, Ham had become chief resident, and when he wasn't rushing to the emergency room, he indulged his growing fascination with the Net, teaching himself to create websites and to code in Perl. Information about Web hosting at the time was so scattered that Ham began creating an online directory of providers, complete with reviews and ratings of their services. He called it Hostglobal.com. From there it was a short step to the business of buying and selling domains. About six months after he launched Hostglobal, Ham was earning around $10,000 per month in ad sales. But when one of his advertisers -- a service that sold domain registrations -- told him that a single ad was generating business worth $1,500 a month, Ham figured he could get in on that too.

From doctor to domainer

It made sense: People shopping for hosting services were often interested in buying a catchy URL, so Ham launched a second directory, called DNSindex.com. Like similar services operating at the time, it gave customers a way to register domain names. But Ham added the one feature that early domain hunters wanted most: weekly lists of available names, compiled using free sources he found on the Web. Some lists he gave away; others he charged as much as $50 for. In a couple of months, he had more than 5,000 customers. By the time he finished his residency in June 2000, his two small Web ventures were pulling in more money in a month -- sometimes $40,000 -- than Ham made that year at the hospital. That was enough, he reasoned, to put off starting a medical practice for three more months, maybe six. "It just didn't make sense not to do it," he says. With a new baby in tow, Ham and his wife moved back to Vancouver, settling into a one-bedroom apartment. Ham's timing, it turned out, was spot-on. Tech stocks were tumbling, dotcoms were folding left and right, and investors were fleeing the Web. More important to him, hundreds of thousands of valuable domain names that were suddenly considered worthless began to expire, or "drop." Ham and a handful of other trailblazers were ready to snap them up. Figuring out when names would drop was tedious work. At the time, Network Solutions controlled the best names; it was for a long time the only retail company, or registrar, selling .coms. It didn't say when expiring names would go back on the market, but twice a day it published the master list of all registered names -- the so-called "root zone" file (now managed by VeriSign (Charts)). It was a fat list of well over 5 million names that took hours to download and often crashed the under-powered PCs of the day. So Ham wrote software scripts that compared one day's list with the next. Then he tracked names that vanished from the root file. Those names would be listed briefly as on hold, and Ham figured out that they would almost always drop five or six days later -- at about 3:30 a.m. on the West Coast. In the dark of night, Ham launched his attacks, firing up five PCs and multiple browsers in each. Typing furiously, he would enter his buy requests and bounce from one keyboard to the next until he snagged the names he wanted.

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He missed a lot of them, of course. Ham had no clue that there were rivals out there who were way ahead him, deploying software that purchased names at a rate that Ham's fingers couldn't match. Through registration data, he eventually traced many of those purchases to one owner: "NoName." Behind the shadowy moniker was another reclusive domain pioneer, a Chinese-born programmer named Yun Ye, who, according to people who know him, operated out of his house in Fremont, Calif. By day Ye worked as a software developer. At night he unleashed the programs that automated domain purchases. (Ye achieved deity status among domainers in 2004 when he sold a portfolio of 100,000 names to Marchex (Charts), a Seattle-based, publicly traded search marketing firm, for $164 million. He then moved to Vancouver.) Ham went back to the keyboard, writing scripts so that he, too, could pound at the registrars. Ham's track record began to improve, but he still wasn't satisfied. "Yun was just too good," he says. Then Ham did something brash: He bought his way to the front of the line. Since registrars had direct connections to Network Solutions's servers, Ham's play was to cut out the middleman. He struck deals with several discount registrars, even helping them write software to ensure that they captured the names Ham wanted to buy during the drops. In exchange for the exclusivity, Ham offered to pay as much as $100 for some names that might normally go for as little as $8. Within weeks Ham had struck so many deals that, according to rivals, he controlled most of the direct connections. "I kept telling them to hit them harder," Ham says in a rare boastful moment. "We brought down the servers many times." During one six-month period starting in late 2000, Ham registered more than 10,000 names.

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Rival domainers, locked out of much of the action, didn't appreciate Ham's tactics. It was one of them, most likely, who sent him the turd. "Kevin came in and closed the door for everyone else," says Frank Schilling, a domainer who figured out what Ham had done and sealed similar deals. "There was a ton of professional jealousy." Ham, in fact, owes a lot to Schilling. Both men lived in Vancouver at the time, and after Ham sought out Schilling in November 2000, the two met at a restaurant to compare notes. "How much traffic do you have?" Schilling asked. An embarrassed Ham replied that he had no idea. Schilling mentioned that he was experimenting with a new service, GoTo.com, that would populate his domains with ads. Ham spent the next week figuring out how much traffic his sites were generating, and he was amazed by the initial tally: 8,000 unique visitors per day from the 375 names he owned at the time. "From then on," Ham says, "I knew that what I was building would be very, very valuable." He soon signed up with GoTo (which was later purchased by Yahoo). On his first day, Ham made $1,500. The system worked then as it does now: People don't always use Google (Charts, Fortune 500) or Yahoo to find something on the Web; they'll often type what they're looking for into a browser's address bar and add ".com." It's a practice known as "direct navigation," or type-in traffic, and millions do it. Need wedding shoes? Type in "weddingshoes.com" -- a site that Ham happens to own -- and you'll land on what looks like a shoe-shopping portal, filled with links from dozens of retailers. Click on any one of those links, and the advertiser that placed it pays Yahoo, which in turn pays a cut to Ham. That single site, Ham says, brings in $9,100 a year. Small change, maybe, but the name cost him $8, and his annual overhead for it is about $7. Multiply that model several thousand times over, and you get a quick idea of the kind of cash machine that Ham was creating from his living room. By early 2002, roughly $1 million a year was pouring into Ham's operation, which he ran with the help of his high school friend and current partner, Colin Yu. But again he felt the tug of his conscience. He occasionally left Vancouver to do medical missionary stints, helping patients in Mexico, the Philippines, and China. He found the experience rewarding, but the development boom he saw taking off in China just reminded him of the virtual real estate boom he was leading back home. Soon Ham was back working full-time on the Web. "There was just too much more to do," he says.

A little taste

There was no looking back. The next few years were among Ham's most aggressive. One of his most valuable tricks was one he had experimented with in the early days, a practice called domain "tasting." Tasting takes advantage of a provision that allows domain-name buyers a free five-day trial period. Intended to protect customers who mistakenly purchase the wrong name, it handed aggressive domainers another means with which to expand -- and exploit -- their portfolios. Ham cobbled together new lists of domain words in every combination, registering hundreds of thousands of new names for free, monitoring the traffic, and then returning the duds. By 2004, Ham had amassed such a deep portfolio that he pulled his names from third-party registrars, launched his own registrar, and then created another company, appropriately named Hitfarm, that could do a better job than Yahoo of matching ads with domain names -- for himself and 100 or so other domainers. Like any shopping spree, though, Ham's tasting binge didn't last. It brought in so many names -- offbeat strings of letters, names with too many dashes, and other variations that humans would be hard-pressed to think of -- that Ham saw the quality of his portfolio dropping in proportion to its growing size. For every few thousand names he'd register, he'd toss back all but a hundred or so.

The hunt for typo-squatters

Tasting exacerbated another problem too: Ham's software grabbed all kinds of typographical variations of trademarked names. Called typo-squatting, it's a practice now coming under the same intense scrutiny long faced by cybersquatters. Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500) and Neiman Marcus are just two companies whose lawyers have brought anti-cybersquatting lawsuits, charging domainers with intentionally profiting from variations of their trademarks. "Tasting changed everything," says Ham, who has since abandoned the practice, though he concedes that Hitfarm still holds some problematic names. "I said, forget it," he says. "Generic names are already too hard to come by. And the legal risks are too great." The legal risks should diminish, however, if you don't own the domain names at all -- and that's the secret behind the Cameroon play.

New world order

The domain confab in Vegas is like any other trade conference: The real intrigue happens at cocktail hour. One subject in the air is Cameroon. Late last summer, domainers began noticing that something odd happens to .cm traffic: It all winds up at a site called Agoga.com. Domainers know, of course, that .cm belongs to Cameroon. And they know that whoever controls Agoga.com has created a potential gold mine. What they don't know is who's behind it all. At one of the meet-and-greets, Ham is standing drinkless, as usual, sporting a polo shirt, chatting with a few people he knows and some he's just met. In this crowd, it seems, everyone wants to know Ham. Finally, he is alone. "I hear you're the guy behind .cm?" Ham looks surprised by the reporter's question, then flashes a big smile and says, "I had help." Over a series of conversations a few weeks later in Vancouver, Ham shares some details about a deal that, despite his innate reticence, he's clearly proud of. About a year ago, he says, he worked his contacts to gain connections to government officials in Cameroon. Then he flew several confidantes to Yaound�, the capital, to make their pitch. His key programmer went along to handle the technical details. "Hey," Ham says, flagging his techie down near the office elevator. "Didn't you meet with the president of Cameroon?" "Nah," the programmer says. "We met with the prime minister. But we did see the president's compound."

Typo-squatters hit banks

It's an odd scene to picture: a domainer's reps in a sit-down with Ephraim Inoni, the prime minister of Cameroon, to discuss the power of type-in typo traffic and pay-per-click ads. And yet, as with most of the angles Ham has played, the Cameroon scheme is ingeniously straightforward. Ham's people installed a line of software, called a "wildcard," that reroutes traffic addressed to any .cm domain name that isn't registered. In the case of Cameroon, a country of 18 million with just 167,000 computers connected to the Internet, that means hundreds of millions of names. Type in "paper.cm" and servers owned by Camtel, the state-owned company that runs Cameroon's domain registry, redirect the query to Ham's Agoga.com servers in Vancouver. The servers fill the page with ads for paper and office-supply merchants. (Officials at Yahoo confirm that the company serves ads for Ham's .cm play.) It all happens in a flash, and since Ham doesn't own or register the names, he's not technically typo-squatting, according to several lawyers who handle Internet issues. The method is spelled out in a patent application filed by a Vancouver businessman named Robert Seeman, who Ham says is his partner in the venture and who also serves as chief adviser at Reinvent Technology. (Seeman declined to be interviewed for this story.) Ham won't reveal specifics but says Agoga receives "in the ballpark" of 8 million unique visitors per month. Fellow domainers, naturally, are envious. "As soon as it started happening, there was a huge sense of 'Why didn't I think of that?'" says attorney Berryhill, who represents Schilling and other domainers. Still, several companies have already tracked down Ham's attorneys, claiming trademark infringement. Ham argues that his system is legally in the clear because it treats every.cm typo equally and doesn't filter out trademarked names. Berryhill concurs. "You can't really say that [wildcarding] is targeting trade-marks," he says. "It captures all the traffic, not just trademark traffic." Moreover, the anti-cybersquatting statute applies only to people who register a trademarked domain; using a wildcard doesn't require registering names. Clever though it may be, .cm is "a very small part of our operations," Ham says. He won't disclose how much he pays to the government of Cameroon, whose officials could not be reached for comment. The partnership has been a rocky one so far, and the system has sporadically shut down. But .cm is only one of several country domains where the typo play can work. According to Ham, he and his team are working with other governments. The dream typo play -- .co -- belongs to Colombia, to which Ham says Seeman paid several visits long before they began working on Cameroon. (Citing safety concerns, Ham hasn't yet made the trip. "I would only go if the president requests to meet me," he says.) As for other countries he might soon invade, Oman (.om) is an obvious target. Niger and Ethiopia are out there too, but since they would play off less lucrative .net typos, they might not be worth the trouble. As for Colombia, Ham says, "we're making progress."

The long view

Ham leans over his office PC to check on a domain auction. Steven Sacks, a domainer based in Indianapolis who works for Ham, is telling him about some names up for sale. Ham shoots back an instant message: "I like doctordegree.com ... and rockquarry.com ... sunblinds.com." The days of figuring out the drop are long over. Everything's open now. Lists are easy to obtain. You can preorder a name before it drops and hope to get it. Or, like Ham, you can shell out five or six figures in online auctions. The only great deals, at least for .com names, tend to happen privately, when a domainer manages to find an eager or naive seller. Ham still buys 30 to 100 names a day, but he's no longer getting them on the cheap. In fact, he and Schilling, who today maintains a $20 million-a-year portfolio from his home in the Cayman Islands, are often accused of driving up prices. Take, for example, the $26,250 Ham paid for Fruitgiftbaskets.com, or the $171,250 for Hoteldeals.com. "The amount he will pay is crazy," says Bob Martin, president of Internet REIT, 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. Nonsense, Ham says. The names are expensive only if you value them the way people like Martin do. The VCs and bankers, who were late to the domain gold rush, assess names by calculating the pay-per-click ad revenue and attaching a multiple based on how long it would take to pay off the investment. Viewed that way, Ham's personal portfolio alone is worth roughly $300 million. But some of Ham's recent domain purchases would also look silly: They'd take 15 or 20 years just to justify the price, and that assumes continuation of the pay-per-click model.

How to scale Mt. Google

But Ham is taking a longer view. The Web, he says, is becoming cluttered with parked pages. The model is amazingly efficient -- lots of money for little work --but Ham argues that Internet users will soon grow weary of it all. He also expects Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to find ways to effectively combat typo-squatting. Some browsers can already fix typos; Internet Explorer catches unregistered domains and redirects visitors to a Microsoft page -- in effect controlling traffic the same way that Ham is doing with .cm. "The heat is rising," Ham says. When Ham buys a domain now, he's not doing pay-per-click math but rather sizing it up as a potential business. Reinvent Technology aims to turn his most valuable names into mini media companies, based on hundreds of niche categories. Among the first he'd like to launch, not surprisingly, is Religion.com. Ham recently leased the entire 27th floor in his Vancouver building and is now hiring more than 150 designers, engineers, salespeople, and editorial folks. Much of that effort is going into developing search tools based more on meaning and less on keywords. "Google is only so useful," Ham says. The aim is to apply a meaning-based, or "semantic," system across swaths of sites, luring customers from direct navigation and search engines alike. Religion.com would then become an anchor to which scores of other sites would be tied. "It's time to build out the virtual real estate," Ham says. "There's so much more value in these names than pay-per-click." Seeman's patent application even mentions the possibility of turning Web traffic from Cameroon and other future foreign partners into full-fledged portals. It's all part of the master plan, as Ham aims to become the first domainer to move from the ranks of at-home name hunter to Internet titan. Smaller players have been selling out to VC-backed groups, and Ham expects that the best names will eventually be owned by just a handful of companies. If he bets right, he might very well be one of them. "If you control all the domains," he says, "then you control the Internet." Paul Sloan, an editor-at-large at Business 2.0, covers the ever-changing Internet landscape on his blog, The Key. To send a letter to the editor about this story, click here.

From the June 1, 2007 issue