The cover story, “The Man Who Owns the Internet” on the latest issue of Business 2.0 offers some fascinating insight into how a small group of savvy businessmen dominate the business of buying, selling and managing domain names. It turns out that many of them, including the leading domainer, Kevin Ham, live in Vancouver – or used to live there before moving to a tropical island. It’s pretty interesting considering the .ca domain world was tightly controlled during the dot-com boom, while the .com business exploded. What’s particularly interesting about Ham’s business is his new strategic focus on evolving from a domainer into a media mogul. He figures that since he owns thousands of popular domain names, why not add some content to the adds so you can make into a full-featured destination/portal. “It’s time to build out the virtual real estate,” Ham said in the article. “There’s so much more value in these names than pay-per-click.” By the way, Ham’s estimated to be worth $300-million.
Update: The New York Times has a story today (May 28) looking at NameMedia, which raised $120-million last year and owns 725,000 domain names.
Great article. Thanks for sharing.
This .cm thing is real genius. So simple yet makes perfect sense. Not sure however why come public with that in such a high profile public way when the .om and the .et deals are not finalized yet. I have a feeling that these deals may not as easy as expected as it is now guaranteed that hundreds of big players will jump on that bandwagon and make any deal far more expensive and with no guarantees as to who they will be awarded. Maybe Mr. Ham has more than this plate full and thus went for the big PR strategy. Landing the cover Business 2.0 is no simple feat.
Good job Mr. Ham. You make all of us Vancouverites proud.
Mark