The Man Who Owns the Internet: Kevin Ham's $300m Domain Empire [2007]

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm

by gatsby • 15 years ago

21 20 15 years ago

money.cnn.com

pyre• 15 years ago

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

stanmancan• 15 years ago

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

paolomaffei• 15 years ago

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

thematt• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

shrikant• 15 years ago

Depreciation != deprecation...

ohashi2• 15 years ago

I studied 3 letter .coms as a proxy for the overall market. Domain prices haven't just gone straight up, they peaked in 2007 (funny enough when this article was published).

http://kevinohashi.com/30/12/2010/exploring-three-letter-dom...

a2tech• 15 years ago

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

ohashi2• 15 years ago

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.

antidaily• 15 years ago

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

EnderMB• 15 years ago

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

maguay• 15 years ago

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.

melvinram• 15 years ago

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.

asksol• 15 years ago

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... :)

SimonPStevens• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

nopinsight• 15 years ago

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.

selectnull• 15 years ago

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

gvnonor• 15 years ago

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.

valjavec• 15 years ago

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".

The Man Who Owns the Internet: Kevin Ham's $300m Domain Empire [2007]

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