Making Money With Domain Names

[Robert Guerra]

Thought this might be of interest...

regards

Robert

--

http://www.johnchow.com/making-money-with-domain-names/

Making Money With Domain Names

October 25th, 2006 by John Chow

If you are a regular reader of this blog then you will know the name
Markus Frind. He is the owner of Plenty Of Fish, the biggest free dating
site on the Internet. Markus likes to point out the fact that he is a
one-man operation and the biggest individual Google AdSense earner.
However, there is another local Vancouverite who makes Markus’s online
income look like pocket change. His name is Yun Ye.

Like Markus, Yun Ye is also a one-man operation. Both Frind and Ye make
their incomes online. The difference is the size of the checks. While
Markus claims to be pulling down over $10,000 a day, Yun Ye pulls down
over $100,000 a day. While Markus makes many news headlines, Yun Ye
avoids the press like the plague. That’s why you may have never heard of
him.

Yun Ye is a “domainer.” He is, in fact, the world’s most successful
domainer, a pioneer in a highly lucrative industry based on buying,
selling and developing domain names. Ye holds over 100,000 domain names
that was making him more than $20 million a year in revenues - $19
million in profits. Ye sold his domain empire in November 2004 to
publicly traded Seattle-based Marchex for, get this, $164 million. Since
then, Ye has never been heard from again.

In the mid ’90s, the domain market was all about speculation - buying
desirable Web addresses, such as business.com, in the hopes that one day
a big company would buy it for a huge amount. However, people like Ye
soon discovered that almost any domain name could become a money maker
thanks to PPC companies like Google and Yahoo.

How does a domainer make money? They rely on the 15% of web users who
don’t use search engines but instead just type in a web address. A good
domain name can make hundreds, even thousands of dollars per day for its
owner. For example, Cellphones.com makes an average of $1,300 a day just
from people typing in the URL. The money comes from park domain PPC
services like Google AdSense for domains. Google doesn’t advertise their
domain service much because domainers seem to operate in some kind of
shadowy world.

I had a little chat with a domainer on my AIM list. He owns over 6,000
domain names that pulls in over 1 million unique visits per month. He
pays $1,000 per month to host the domains across a half dozen different
ISPs. He also pays over $50,00 to renew the domain names every year.
Spending over $60,000 a year to run a one-man web business may seem
high, but it’s peanuts compare to what those names bring in.

My AIM contact say owning domain names is the perfect web business
model. Once the domain is purchased and the Google parked page is set
up, there is nothing left to do except to collect the money. Some of his
domains rake in over $20 eCPM. Very few websites and blogs can match
that. And unlike a site/blog, a domain page never needs to be updated.

He does say the game is getting harder however. With the $164 million
sale of Ye’s domains and other high dollar acquisitions, cost of buying
new domain names have been skyrocketing. While the increasing cost of
buying new names slows down his domain buying, it also increases the
value of the domain names he currently holds.

Domainers are also a good reason you should have your domain names set
to auto-renewal. Failure to do so may result in a domainer taking your
name. I hold a few dozen domain names myself and right now, they just
have a GoDaddy parked page on it. I think it’s time to switch them to
Google AdSense for domains. If you wish to get into the domain business,
then check out this Site Point article on how to find money-making domains.