Didn't someone ask who this guy was?Fr

[Amateur]

I read this article on the guy who scoops all those domain names when you're not looking...well, here's the article on him. He even wrote a program to do it for him!!

From - http://money.cnn.com/magazines/busin...0989/index.htm

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.

By Paul Sloan, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large
May 22 2007: 2:17 PM EDT


(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? .....

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.

Read the full article at the link above.

[WinYourWayKyle]

Crazy story.... but I give the guy a lot of credit for building on empire on something so simple...

Cool read though.... Thanks for posting...

[big fish]

very interesting story. thanks for the post. time to go find some more domains...lol

[joeyl]

I decided to check urls for .cm until I found one not redirecting to agoga. I must be losing my last marble.

Took me 10 minutes to find one.

Can't knock the guy atall.

[big fish]

that is crazy.

the 1st 3 i checked all went to agoga

viagra.cm
pharmacy.cm
loans.cm

all VERY VALUABLE terms

[ogpaper]

You should buy them if available - he is redirecting the traffic from domains NOT registered already.