I just read a great article on the Business 2.0 web site about people
making money on domain name speculation. In the past, this was mostly about buying a good domain name, and then reselling it. These days, it's about finding names that people directly type into the browser URL bar.
I know - you're thinking "these days everybody uses google or yahoo to find web sites." Not exactly true, it appears... Although google and yahoo won't discuss it, apparently somewhere in the range of 10-15% of all internet search traffic comes from people that type exactly what they're looking for into the url bar of the browser. Crazy! So, if I was looking for information on Iraq, I would type in
http://www.iraq.com.
Iraq.com happens to be a very good example - because it's some domainer with links to things about Iraq! Wonder how much money he's making... (according to the
Overture inventory tool, the term "iraq" got 324,245 searches last month, which is a VERY big market)
The trick to this market is purely finding a good domain name, or landing a newly minted term, (like "avian bird flu") before anyone else. Or, alternatively, snapping them up via automated programs as soon as someone that doesn't know what they're worth lets them expire...
Interesting stuff - domain names are the new real estate! The article is worth the read, they're covering a few people that are making millions per year off of this income stream generation method.
TG
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>> There are only 10 kinds of people in the world - those that know binary and those that don't.
Labels: entrepreneur