<p style="font-weight: bold;">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. </p><p style="font-weight: bold;">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.
</p><h1 class="storyheadline">--------------------------------------------------------------------------------<br></h1><h1 class="storyheadline">The man who owns the Internet</h1><a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm">
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm</a><br><br><h2 class="storysubhead">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.</h2><div class="storybyline">By <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/mailto:psloan@business2.com;talkback@business2.com" target="_blank">Paul Sloan
</a>, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large</div><div class="storytimestamp">May 22 2007: 2:17 PM EDT<div id="storyLogo"><a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2" target="_blank"><br></a></div>
</div>
<div class="storytext"><p>(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.</p><p>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?</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://Weddingcatering.com">Weddingcatering.com</a> for $10,000.
<a href="http://Greeting.com">Greeting.com</a> is not nearly as good as the plural <a href="http://Greetings.com">Greetings.com</a>, but Ham
grabs it anyway, for $350,000.</p><p>Ham is a devout Christian, and he
spends $31,000 to add <a href="http://Christianrock.com">Christianrock.com</a> to his collection, which
already includes <a href="http://God.com">God.com</a> and <a href="http://Satan.com">Satan.com</a>. 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.)</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Try it with almost any name you can think of --
<a href="http://Beer.cm">Beer.cm</a>, <a href="http://Newyorktimes.cm">Newyorktimes.cm</a>, even <a href="http://Anyname.cm">Anyname.cm</a> -- and you'll land on a page
called <a href="http://Agoga.com">Agoga.com</a>, a site filled with ads served up by <a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=YHOO&source=story_quote_link" target="_blank">Yahoo</a> (<a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/chart/chart.html?symb=YHOO&source=story_charts_link" target="_blank">
Charts</a>, <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/snapshots/1591.html?source=story_f500_link" target="_blank">Fortune 500</a>).</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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?"</p><div class="instoryheading">Spreading the word</div><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>"Those words really struck me," Ham says. "It's the reason I'm still working."</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <a href="http://Hostglobal.com">Hostglobal.com</a>.</p><p>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.</p><div class="instoryheading">From doctor to domainer</div><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Figuring out when names would drop was tedious work.</p><p>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 <a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=VRSN&source=story_quote_link" target="_blank">VeriSign</a> (<a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/chart/chart.html?symb=VRSN&source=story_charts_link" target="_blank">
Charts</a>)).
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.</p><p>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.</p><p>He missed a lot of them, of course.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 <a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=MCHX&source=story_quote_link" target="_blank">Marchex</a> (<a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/chart/chart.html?symb=MCHX&source=story_charts_link" target="_blank">
Charts</a>), a Seattle-based, publicly traded search marketing firm, for $164 million. He then moved to Vancouver.)</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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."</p><p>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.</p><p>"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.</p><p>"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.</p><p>The system worked then as it does now: People don't always use <a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=GOOG&source=story_quote_link" target="_blank">
Google</a> (<a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/chart/chart.html?symb=GOOG&source=story_charts_link" target="_blank">Charts</a>, <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/snapshots/3967.html?source=story_f500_link" target="_blank">
Fortune 500</a>)
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."</p><p>It's a
practice known as "direct navigation," or type-in traffic, and millions
do it. Need wedding shoes? Type in "<a href="http://weddingshoes.com">weddingshoes.com</a>" -- 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Soon Ham was back working full-time on the Web. "There was just too much more to do," he says.</p><div class="instoryheading">A little taste</div>
<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. <a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=MSFT&source=story_quote_link" target="_blank">Microsoft</a> (<a href="http://money.cnn.com/quote/chart/chart.html?symb=MSFT&source=story_charts_link" target="_blank">
Charts</a>, <a href="http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2007/snapshots/879.html?source=story_f500_link" target="_blank">Fortune 500</a>)
and Neiman Marcus are just two companies whose lawyers have brought
anti-cybersquatting lawsuits, charging domainers with intentionally
profiting from variations of their trademarks.</p><p>"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."</p><p>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.</p><div class="instoryheading">New world order</div><p>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 <a href="http://Agoga.com">Agoga.com</a>. Domainers
know, of course, that .cm belongs to Cameroon. And they know that
whoever controls <a href="http://Agoga.com">Agoga.com</a> has created a potential gold mine.</p><p>What they don't know is who's behind it all.</p><p>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.</p><p>"I hear you're the guy behind .cm?"</p><p>Ham looks surprised by the reporter's question, then flashes a big smile and says, "I had help."</p><p>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 Yaoundé, the capital, to make their pitch. His
key programmer went along to handle the technical details.</p><p>"Hey," Ham says, flagging his techie down near the office elevator. "Didn't you meet with the president of Cameroon?"</p><p>"Nah," the programmer says. "We met with the prime minister. But we did see the president's compound."
</p><p>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.</p><p>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 "<a href="http://paper.cm">paper.cm</a>" and servers owned by Camtel, the state-owned company
that runs Cameroon's domain registry, redirect the query to Ham's
<a href="http://Agoga.com">Agoga.com</a> servers in Vancouver.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.)</p><p>Ham won't reveal specifics but says Agoga receives
"in the ballpark" of 8 million unique visitors per month. Fellow
domainers, naturally, are envious.</p><p>"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.</p><p>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 <a href="http://every.cm">every.cm</a> typo equally and doesn't filter out
trademarked names.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.)</p><p>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.</p><p>As for Colombia, Ham says, "we're making progress."</p><div class="instoryheading">The long view</div><p>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
<a href="http://doctordegree.com">doctordegree.com</a> ... and <a href="http://rockquarry.com">rockquarry.com</a> ... <a href="http://sunblinds.com">sunblinds.com</a>."</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Take, for
example, the $26,250 Ham paid for <a href="http://Fruitgiftbaskets.com">Fruitgiftbaskets.com</a>, or the $171,250
for <a href="http://Hoteldeals.com">Hoteldeals.com</a>. "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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Among the first he'd like to launch, not
surprisingly, is <a href="http://Religion.com">Religion.com</a>. Ham recently leased the entire 27th
floor in his Vancouver building and is now hiring more than 150
designers, engineers, salespeople, and editorial folks.</p><p>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.</p><p>The
aim is to apply a meaning-based, or "semantic," system across swaths of
sites, luring customers from direct navigation and search engines
alike. <a href="http://Religion.com">Religion.com</a> would then become an anchor to which scores of
other sites would be tied.</p><p>"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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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."</p>
<p><i>Paul Sloan, an editor-at-large at Business 2.0, covers the ever-changing Internet landscape on his blog, <a href="http://blogs.business2.com/sloan/" target="_blank">The Key</a>. </i> <a href="http://cnnmoney.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Kevin+Ham%2C+the+%24300+million+master+of+Web+domains+-+June+1%2C+2007&expire=-1&urlID=22419502&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmoney.cnn.com%2Fmagazines%2Fbusiness2%2Fbusiness2_archive%2F2007%2F06%2F01%2F100050989%2Findex.htm&partnerID=2200#TOP">
<img alt="Top of page" src="http://i.cnn.net/money/images/bug.gif" border="0" height="7" width="7"></a></p>To send a letter to the editor about this story, <a href="javascript:openWindowEmail('talkback@business2.com');" target="_blank">
click here</a>.<br>
<br>
</div><div class="magissuelink"><div class="magissuelink">From the June 1, 2007 issue</div></div>