Virtual Entrepreneur

A $300 Million Domain Name Empire

CNN:
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.

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.