Meet the 'Mann' who registered 14,962 domains in 24 hours | Hacker News Reader

Meet the 'Mann' who registered 14,962 domains in 24 hours

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79 pointsmjfern91 comments

I feel like we need a chance in policy that makes this practice not worth the trouble. I see no value that he gives the internet. I may be bias though, I can't grab the .com variant of a non profit school I work for because someone like him owns it and wont accept offers for less then $600 bucks.

some say that the future will be app-based and that domain-names and tlds will be a thing of the past, we'll see.

I know a lot of people who say they hate squatters, then they have an "awesome idea" for a project, they'll register 10 domains, the project is never finished and they put their page on sedo in the hope someone clicks on an ad or buys the domain and they won't let go because it's just $10 a year and maybe they'll someday finish their page.

I honestly don't get the hate for squatters, they registered the domain, they were quicker than others and why should they sell their domainname just because someone else wants it badly? that's not how business works.

if you really want or even need a domainname then offer $3k and you'll get it, otherwise look for alternatives, but stop whining

Domain camping is scummy because it rewards specialization in a skill that adds no discernable value whatsoever to society. It is the definition of leeching off of other people's work. That it's legal and "how business works" is irrelevant to whether it's worthwhile. In cases where they hop on accidentally expired domains (this is popular) are effectively legal forms of blackmail.

why should it be worthwhile and why should it add value to society? if registering were free i'd see your point or if not everybody were allowed to register

how would you play football? for every goal a team scores you have to score an own-goal or let the others score because it would be unfair otherwise?

Football is a competitive zero-sum game. Someone wins, someone loses.

The world isn't like that at all. Everyone having enough to eat is strictly better than some people starving and some people having twice as much to eat.

Football is not an end in itself. People play it because it's a fun social activity. You can easily play football in a vicious way which, while still entirely within the rules and increases your chance of winning, diminishes the enjoyment and social connection which brought people together for the game in the first place.

Similarly, economic activity is not an end in itself, and economic strategies should be critically examined for what they contribute and diminish in the communities where they're adopted.

Man buys 14,962 tickets to a football game in 24 hours. Plans on selling them later at a profit.

Man buys 14,962 acres of land in 24 hours and plans on selling it later at a profit.

I'm not sure when I am supposed to get mad.

Bank buys 14,962 shares of a company with a HFT system to sell them off 2.854 seconds later.

Yes, speculating in general is a zero-value-add activity except in that it sometimes makes markets more efficient/liquid. I would argue that domain squatters don't even make the domain market more liquid at all, because ICANN is an extremely-easily-accessible seller, and the squatters rarely provide the service of buying a domain from someone who has improved it/made it popular/etc.

But in general, I have little respect for most people who make their money via speculation due entirely to demand outstripping supply as in the case of event tickets and boom real estate markets. Basically, anytime someone is extracting money from the economy en masse without providing much/anything in return, is when you should be mad. Scalpers and people who buy a ton of land in a high-demand market just to sit on it rather than developing it definitely qualify, so yeah, I'd be mad at both.

It's not much, but domain squatters do provide 1 value.

By selling the domains closer to their true market value it means when a domain do get bought, it'll be because the domain will be part of a more profitable business.

Imagine if when thefacebook.com wanted to purchase "Facebook.com" domain because their business is expanding quickly and profitably. They ask the owner of "Facebook.com" for the domain.

One of the following two things might happen:

1. The owner is a domain squatter and sells it to thefacebook.com for $5000.

2. The owner is a 13 year old kid who bought the domain and put a couple of pictures of his cat's faces on it. as well a couple of adsense ads. Refuses to sell for anything less than 0.5 million dollars because he really likes the domain name.

Arguably in this case the domain squatter did provide some value to society. The thing with squatters is they are always willing to sell for the right price. Other types of domain owners are not so predictable. In particular, domains with established businesses are unlikely (I'm guessing) to sell for anything less than the value of the entire business, even though that business may be less profitable and less value-adding than a business proposed by a potential acquirer of the domain. If the domain was squatted instead, the less profitable business may not have bought it at all, leaving it for the more profitable business.

Whether this value is significant enough to be respected is another question, but I have no doubt that it does exist.

Heh interesting idea, but I'm pretty sure the kid could be convinced to sell for $5000, probably much less - there aren't many kids out there that would scoff at multiple years' worth of allowance and lawn mowing money just falling in their lap. I think a market composed of people actually using the resource can set fair market pricing without the involvement of speculators. Domain speculators/squatters literally only drive the price of doing real things up.

"...that's not how business works."

"It's how business works" isn't a justification. A business model being legal and profitable does not make it ethical.

My understanding is, the intention behind society's laws and social norms is for all legal and profitable business models to serve the common good in some small way. What good do squatters do the world, in any way, shape, or form, whatsoever? The effect they have on the world is for good projects to be harder for people to use, by taking up all the good domains. That makes this a bug in our society, that I, at least, would appreciate being addressed.

If you register 10 domains and your project doesn't happen, don't put it on Sedo, let the domain expire like your project did. If you put the domain up for sale, you're already committing to not use the domain to "someday" finish your project.

I've registered a healthy number of domains over the years for projects that didn't go anywhere, including most recently a brandable two-syllable domain that contained two search terms that described the business. I didn't park it, and if after it became obvious I didn't need it if anyone genuine had approached, I would have let them have it. I let it go when it expired, and it immediately got snapped up by a domainer who is now asking $K for it. I don't think your suggested approach solves the problem.

I wonder if buying lots of domains in the hope of making it big is like buying lottery tickets in the hope of making it big. Does anybody know if this business model actually works?

Both (lottery tickets, domain names) have working business models. Google it.

Not knowledgeable enough about domain names but I am certain that buying lottery tickets is lose-lose proposition to anyone, by design.

I actually had a friend in school who did this (lottery tickets) as a side business. They had an investor that provided the capital, and when the jackpot reached a certain level, they would buy up a few percent of the total number space. Believe it or not, the expected value actually worked in their favor.

The hardest part was sifting through the dozens of boxes of tickets (which he stored in his dorm room) to find the winners.

You are wrong. Lotteries are systems, systems are hackable. I bothered to Google one example cause I know many people are ignorant and make assumption without research like you.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21128264.900-lottery-w...

When I said lottery I was referring to a fair draw. You cannot beat the math.

I'm also interested in getting an explanation from someone in the business. Assuming that you are not selling something like sex.com but are confined to more modest domains, and that you pay about $10/year per domain. Out of a random group of 500 domains, you need to sell 1/year for $5000 just to break even. Sure, you might hit the jackpot once with someone who really wants that one obscure domain you hold but for most domains you will be lucky to even get one offer in 3 years.

The prices on his website are rediculous.

thesearchservice.com - 2 million!

You don't even get searchservice.com with this domain. Simarly .org and .net are not even registered meaning after buying this you could be facing competition from similar names.

I find squatters are the bane of the internet. My little brother had a small gaming message board where he and his friends would prepare for games. No seo value.. long domain name. Parents credit card expired and we didn't notice. Domain name expired briefly. Tried to register it again as soon as we noticed. Someone else pinched it. Offered to sell it back to us for $1000. It has been for sale for the past 2 years with no interest..

The squatter has got nothing from it. My kid brother lost his domain name.. I think the majority of squatters are scum tbh.

Similar experience here, domain still on sale, no interest.

Has anyone ever actually bought one of these domain names?

I tried to once. I had a good idea one day and wanted the domain name for it. It was a somewhat out-of-the-blue idea, so I wasn't really expecting it to be taken, but it was and all the names somewhat close to it were taken as well. I went back to the original name I wanted and e-mailed the squatter asking how much he wanted, hoping it would only be in the low hundreds of dollars. He e-mailed me back asking for $6600. When I said that it was too high and I wasn't interested, I got a much less professional e-mail:

"LAST 5.5 K

Keep or find other domain name

Bye"

I said it was still too expensive, and got

"LOL ...

Bye"

I went to the website that the e-mail was sent from and it was all Lorem Ipsum. When I went back to the domain name I wanted when I was writing this, it had a startup-y logo, a promise of something cool being built, and an invitation to follow the developers (a tech blog I had never heard of) on facebook or twitter. It was all sounding legitimate, and I was upset that someone else apparently had an idea that was probably similar to mine, until I started clicking the really random assortment of "sponsor" links (to medical and legal sites, which pay a lot for ads but which had no obvious connection to any idea that would be associated with the domain name) and some of them took me to more lorem ipsum sites.

Very mysterious, and tremendously irritating.

a friend and I phoned about a domain for an idea we had.

They wanted 25k.

we hung up and laughed. Told other people, they laughed.

At least we got a laugh.

I've successfully negotiated a few domain purchases and unsuccessfully tried for a few more. All the unsuccessful ones are the professional squatters who won't take less than 4-figures - although they do regularly e-mail with lower and lower prices so never take the first offer from these guys.

The successful purchases have all been from individuals who registered the domain at some point with an idea that they never developed.

If it's useful to anyone, here's an example of the opening note I send (improvement suggestions welcome). I make an opening offer around 50-75% of what the actual maximum is, make note that the site is inactive and costing them money, make it clear we're considering other options but that we are ready to purchase quickly. Even if the purchase is for personal use I'll reference a "client" as it helps to have a man behind a curtain who just won't budge on his price.

-----

Dear Sir/Madam,

I see that you own DOMAIN.COM but are not currently using it for an active website.

I am currently looking for a domain name for a client of mine, and your name (DOMAIN.COM) is on our short-list.

We have budgeted around $250 for acquiring new domain names and my client looking to close a deal quickly.

Please could you let me know if DOMAIN.COM is for sale, and if so what price?

I bought a domain today, and I ended up having to come up with a bunch of synonyms for what I wanted and using a script to see if any of them were available.

I guess I support the entrepreneurial spirit, but at the same time I kind of hope that guy gets hit by a truck.

Entrepreneurs build things. Domain snatchers/ squatters are not entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs take advantage of business opportunities. And it IS a business opportunity. Fact is people pay for those domains.

Let the down-votes commence.

>Let the down-votes commence.

In future, omit these kinds of statements. They're pointless and inflammatory and are unwelcome because of that.

The people who inflated the mortgage-backed securities bubble also "took advantage of business opportunities". That doesn't, in my view, make them entrepreneurs; it makes them antisocial assholes.

Of course, it's no surprise that the domain squatting business is populated by similar arrogant jerks. It's not like this idea didn't occur to a lot of other people; the just recognized it as society-negative BS and went and did something useful.

A business opportunity being legal and profitable does not make it ethical.

My understanding is, the intention behind society's laws and social norms is for all legal and profitable businesses to serve the common good in some small way. What good do squatters do the world, in any way, shape, or form, whatsoever? The effect they have on the world is for good projects to be harder for people to use, by taking up all the good domains. That makes this a bug in our society, that I, at least, would appreciate being addressed.

"Let the down-votes commence."

Quoth the guidelines: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Resist complaining about being downmodded. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downmod you.

Domain squatters build domain portfolios.

I think we should institute a Homesteading Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle) for domains. You can claim a domain as long as you use it for a legitimate purpose instead of just parking on it. There would be details to hash out for sure, but in the end I think we would have a much better system in place.

That's a terrible idea. People would just create fake purposes for the websites.. and then who would be responsible to decide if a purpose is legitimate or not?

Wouldn't it just be a return to the days when domains were free? Back in the mid-'90s, when people I knew registered vanity domains, they tended to come up with some ridiculous expansion of the name to make it look official. Nobody ever checked that "foo" really meant "fraternal otter organization" (or whatever), so those would become the top line in whois.

Was that before Network Solutions? I bought a domain in maybe 1996 or 1997 and it was decidedly not free

Yep. Then it jumped to $100/2 years before competition brought the prices down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#Registry_and_...

IP space used to be free, too, as long as you could justify it. What times those were.

Easily worked around: set up MX records and claim the domain is for email. Website not required

I'm pretty sure for .au domains you need to have a connexion with the domain (either it being your name or the name of a registered business you own.)

Probably the same for many other country domain suffixes. It's the same for .ie (Ireland) for example, you have to have a connection to the country as well as the domain name itself. Typical examples would be your own name or business name.

At the risk of seeming spammy, please check out my service Lean Domain Search [1] before buying a premium domain name. It pairs your search term with more than 2,000 other keywords and instantly shows you which are available, making it really, really easy to find great available domain names.

Guys like this depend on scarcity to drive up the cost of domains. One of my goals with Lean Domain Search is to show people that there actually are lots of great available domain names left for whatever you're working on. The problem until now has been that there haven't been any tools that make it easy to find them. Over time, if enough people gravitate away from domain squatters, the value of their portfolios will fall, they'll stop renewing their holdings, and it can change the face of the domain name industry.

[1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com

Not spammy. I want more tools like this. I use domaintumbler all the time. I do wish the tools would support different languages and more extensions. I live in Europe.

I used Lean Domain Search after getting stuck coming up with a domain name. It revealed created 4-5 options that I would be happy with.

Thanks for creating the service!

Where did you get the current list of registered domains? I wrote a script to ping domains then perform a whois if ping returned nothing, but it was really slow.

This gave me an idea. Write a program that generates random melodies. Then upload them somewhere public and timestamped like YouTube.

Then write another program that detects new songs with a high degree of similarity in the melody. Then sue for copyright violation.

Call it melody squatting.

Vaguely related, a lot of people seem to jump to the conclusion that a domain that is registered and is not in use is automatically someone that bought it and wants to sell it to you at an extortionate rate to "steal" money from hard working "real" entrepreneurs, but how many people here have 1 or more domain that they don't use but did register with honest intentions? I bet most people do. I bet there are people who want your domains. Assuming someone is a squatter and not someone who registered a domain but never used it is silly.

Very true. I have 40 or so domains, but none were purchased as an investment. All because of some random idea I had. Always happy to sell them for totally reasonable prices.

As someone who has approached others to buy their domain names, what do you consider as a totally reasonable price for an average domain name?

Not OP, but however much I have already paid is the amount I've parted with a domain or two before.

Edit: For example: 2 years @ $10/yr so I sell it for $20.

Thanks for that info. I usually offer a little more than that, but have never been successful.

It all depends if i plan on using it or not. If i don't plan on using it, sometimes I'll just give them away for under $100. If I do then there is a price almost always under $1000.

I do have one exception, and that is I bought sms.me which I had planned on building, but I got a good offer so that sold for many thousands, but that was their offer not mine.

On the flip side, I've bought many domains that I want to use for products ranging from $100 - $30,000 depending on a number of factors.

I've 100+ (including surround TLDs like .net, .org) domains out of which 40-50 are ones that I wanted to do something with but never did. And none of them, except for few, might be considered sellable. But then, in the past, I was able to let go off few domains and got paid good for them.

I think there's a big difference between 30-40 domains not being used for an honest reason, and 15,000 domains purchased for the specific purpose of reselling them at a higher price. And that's only 15,000 bought over a two-day period. How many does he own in total?

Given the numbers here, I'd say that any random parked domain you find is statistically far more likely to belong to a domain squatter than a legitimate "I have this crazy idea that I'm not sure if it'll take off" entrepreneur.

There are probably many more people doing the former than the latter.

The link in the article to "The Man Who Owns the Internet" (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...) is far more interesting than the article itself.

It almost makes Mann look like a rank amateur by comparison...

I know MM personally, and although he's a bit quirky, he's not "evil" by a long shot (see grassroots.org).

From what I can see of Grassroots.org, it's just funneling money from well meaning donors to Mike Mann himself.

Hardly innovative. Kanye West does the same thing with his charity: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/02/21/kanye-wests-...

Simple solution, just need to make the wholesale cost of domains >$100/yr then it won't be viable for the squatters to sit on "really speculative" names like the ones in this story would be.. and for a real business/service with 1 or 2 domain names, that extra cost means nothing.

I agree with this. I believe it's why .io still has 3-letter domains available, because it costs about $96/yr to register one.

I dont know what to say ! i get angry when i see a domain name that i want being parked on and going to absolute waste, but on the other hand the business this guy has created and the money he has made could be viewed as a smart hack in some perverse way. He has basically seen a market where no one else did in the early days (or only few did) and has managed to capitalize of it very sweetly (all of which he did skillfully and legally).

Surely, it is legal and indeed a hack. But still, not morally correct!

It's not amoral. I've been frustrated myself over domains I couldn't get, but I fail to understand how this is amoral. Too often we are quick to make moral judgments based on distaste (of which I share).

a·mor·al ( -môr l, -m r -). adj. 1. Not admitting of moral distinctions or judgments; neither moral nor immoral

After he sold to NameMedia, of which he still owns a 15 percent stake, Mann had a noncompete that kept him away from the domain game for about four years. Instead, he worked on his many other ventures, such as SEO.com and a nonprofit called Grassroots.org.

From grassroots.org:

The mission of Grassroots.org is to help charities succeed by providing them with modern technologies and best practices at no cost.

I don't know if it's morally correct or not, but Mann doesn't otherwise seem like a morally bankrupt individual.

Grassroots.org appears to just be away for him to funnel more cash to himself. The charity gives away his SEO services - i.e. donors are just paying for his salary.

Why is it not morally correct? He is just speculating as speculators do in all different industries. And kudos to him - it's technically non-trivial, carries a lot of risk and clearly requires a lot of business acumen to work.

I don't think $10/yr is a lot of risk.

So why don't you go and buy a 1,000 domains? Presumably you'll be confident you'll get at least $10/year on average from them all....

> being parked on and going to absolute waste

1st) Parking makes money (ads). 2nd) All sorts of assets are held without use for speculative reasons; land, art, patents, options e.g. to make movie based on book, metals, money, etc.

Land in particular is very close to domain names in being a limited, exclusive commodity which you can go and see is not being "used" and rail against the "unfairness" of it all.

I've only once been able to snag a domain on the drop (everymentor.com). Though I've tried dozens of times for various domains, I always get beaten to the punch.

What kind of resources do these guys have? Hundreds of EC2 instances pounding registrars for good domains? I'm surprised registrars allow it.

I accidentally let one of mine lapse and it was snatched minutes later. The Whois is private so I can't see who bought it, though one thing is for sure, they left the DNS pointing to one of my main blogs (albeit a defunct blog which I deleted yet Blogger never took offline. In turn, the defunct blog has the same name as the the right/original one). I can't get too mad since it still references the right location. Even when out of my hands, I get to stick it to the Mann.

Beware of that. Don't accept that traffic, all you're doing is helping the current owner of the domain to increase the value of the domain and to put you in a worse position to negotiate.

most, if not all of the big players in the industry own their own registrar(s)

Yep I used to work for a company that owned a Registry (.coop) and the guys that did all ICANN liaison and bidding said threes a LOT of dodgy stuff going on with bots.

Domains are to cheap in my opinion.

Mike Mann also has the dubious distinction of being the first person ever banned from Quora for being abusive.

How important is it to have the .com name, is there any research available on this topic? I known that common sense says that mydomain.com is better than mydomain.cc, mydomain.io, mydomain.to or whatever, but is this really the case and how big are the differences? (For example how much more likely users remember a .com vs .io name)

<productname>.com is considered the most important domain name to have, the reasoning being that when people hear of product X, they'll go check X.com

Dropbox started on getdropbox.com, but they found out lots of people reflexively typed dropbox.com and saw a squatted domain. So later, they bought dropbox.com

I tend not to agree with this 100%, I think most people google the name of the product, instead of trying X.com directly.

also .cc, .io, .co, .to, .me etc. don't rank as well in the Google SERPs, that's why it's important to have them

I tried snatching up newmogul.com (it was a developed community like HN for business news at one point) when it expired, but was beat to the punch, presumably by someone like this guy (as it currently seems to have some fake blog parked on it now).

The original owner and operator of New Mogul just shut the site down out of the blue, and I got a replacement site setup at http://forlue.com and wanted to direct NM to forlue.

I sure miss NM.

it's one thing to buy good domains, but this guys main motivation is "greed" and he literally doesn't care about how anything he is doing affects anyone or anything. Makes me sick.

I stopped paying for a 6 letter .cn domain, and the Chinese got in touch with me, they snatched it up, thinking I was going to pay them some money for it.

I once asked how much a .com domain name was worth. They replied by email, it was about $ 3,000 and I didn't email them back. They had my phone number so they made an international phonecall asking me what I was willing to pay. A few hundred bucks, tops. They didn't sell it to me.

The article says he claims that he sometimes buys domains via GoDaddy. Why would he use GoDaddy since he can get them from cheaper (and more-ethical) domain name registrars than GoDaddy?

Cheaper than GoDaddy, like who? GoDaddy give awesome discounts if you're a bulk buyer. You can pay close to verisign price. It can work out more economical than running your own registrar if you're willing to trust GoDaddy. They also have great support for high quantity customers.

I just researched it and fair enough! Though you can easily find cheaper prices if you're not a bulk customer, you may be right on bulk.

Ok, then I guess he just doesn't care that he's supporting an ethically-challenged company that has supported SOPA, etc.. but that's not too surprising.. giving what he does for a living :).

Go-daddy is probably a loss leader when it comes to domains. They just use domain sales to try and upsell you to other things.

If you're only buying bulk domains from them, you're not really supporting their business very much.

That was what jumped out at me as well - I could only think about the $100K that was going into GoDaddy's bank account. ALL the dozens of domains I've moved (and continue to move, sometimes one by one) hardly make a dent when compared to these bulk folks that still use GD. Oh, well, death by a thousand (hundred thousand) blows...

The majority of that $100K doesn't go to GoDaddy. I believe the current cost of a .com from verisign is $7.21 + $0.19 ICANN fee, then transactions fees etc... godaddy probably takes home about $0.50 per domain, so they made maybe $5k off this guy.

Oh, thank goodness (and thanks for the clarification - I hadn't thought it through very well).

Fuck this guy.

He is contributing so much to society...

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