Masters of their Domains

From CNN/Business 2.0:

On a balmy night in late October, hundreds of partiers, most sporting red or blue Hawaiian shirts, pack the Delux nightclub in Delray Beach, Fla. It’s a swank place–outdoor decks, two bars, plush, bed-size sofas scattered throughout–and the crowd arrives in chartered buses and stretch Hummers. Many head straight for the guy rolling cigars and toss back shots as if it were 1999. Which, to them, it might as well be.

They call themselves domainers. They make their living buying and selling domain names and turning their Web traffic into cash–lots of it. They have gathered in Delray Beach for a trade show called Traffic that this year boasts 300 paying attendees, more than twice the number that came for the first show, in ’04.

Comments 1

  • I read this article last week and I was so surprised that there is still money in domain names! Investment companies trade in domain “portfolios” and buy them off of these “domainers”. One thing that is making it easier for these guys is that they point all their idle domains to aggregators that create quick PPC sites. I think it said the owner of cellphones.com makes $1300/day from PPC income on this site alone, and I think he owns over 100,000 other domains. Wow. Most domains won’t get traffic/clicks like that, but the article said 15% of web surfers actually just “make up” domains and type them into the address bar…and that’s how people find some of these sites. It was a very eye-opening article. One thing it didn’t go into very much was the web services that will snap up expired domains in a second. I’ve never tried it and don’t know how I feel about it, but I think the article should have talked more about how much some people do it.

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