Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains (2007)

money.cnn.com

On a related note, can anyone recommend a good registrar with a decent API? I'd like to offer domain registration as an add-on to my customers. I'm almost ready to go with OpenSRS, but I thought I'd ask the HN community first.

I don't know about you, but I always kick myself for missing the gold rush to buy hot domain names. It is so obvious in retrospect.

I'd much rather be known for doing something vaguely worthwhile, than being the guy who grabbed all the domains.

Grabbing domains, not using them, and trying to sell them is pretty much blackmail. It's certainly not a nice way to behave IMHO.

The issue though is that domain names are pretty much free to register, but obviously have a far higher value to some people - a loophole that people exploit to make a quick buck.

The other funny disconnect is how little traffic some "premium" domains get.

>> "Greetings.com, but Ham grabs it anyway, for $350,000."

Quantcast says it gets 8,100 US visitors a month.

I think the reason it gets a low amount of visitors is because it redirects to another website so if someone bookmarks the website, they aren't bookmarking the greetings.com domain. So those 8,100 US visitors a month are probably all new visitors. It sure doesn't hurt Hallmark to get new visitors that way.

Looks like Hallmark owns it now. He must have sold it to them for a tidy profit:

Whois Record

   Registrant: 
      Hallmark Licensing Inc.
      Hallmark Domain Administration
      2440 Pershing Rd. MD 339
      Kansas City, MO 64108

No, Ham grabbed "Greeting.com" not "Greetings.com".

I dont, I like to spend my time actually creating wealth and helping people.

not taking advantage of a system that was just too well meaning from the start to try and screw people out of a few million. how nice would it be if the domain hoarders werent around now.

"this is why we cant have nice things"

how about instead of thinking about all the things you have already missed, think about what you could be missing right now.

there is always a new opportunity - better to take part in them than to read about them in retrospect.

DNS was an elegant idea from more civilized times. Domain squatting should be punished in some way.

yeah. i could have registered "sex.com" for FREE at the right moment in time, and i would be set for life.

It should probably be noted that this article is from June 2007.

Anytime you hear some hack start babbling about some semantic nonsense search engine that will beat Google, you know the guy is a moron.

That's when you know the guy is gonna lose money. Stick with what you know.

With google and bookmarks, are domain names really that important? A lot of sites I visit regularly, I'm not even sure what the name is exactly, which doesn't matter, since I have them bookmarked, or I can just feel lucky on google.

This needs to be approached at the browser level.

It's not unfair for a browser to automatically redirect you if you accidently type .cm, or even to ask you if you really want to go to www.weddingshoes.com, since it's a spam site.

Of course, this benefits Google. But at least for the .cm loophole, it's a no brainer.

Or use OpenDNS: http://www.opendns.com/support/article/5

They're rather vocal about this hack: http://blog.opendns.com/category/cctlds/

Why isn't this illegal, and why does Yahoo serve ads to this clown?

The answer, unfortunately, is simple. Yahoo and Google make a lot of money from these practices. They've enabled all this to happen. Do no evil, eh?

on a side note. where is the best price for domain renew? I have about 50 domains need to renew. Gogaddy is about 9$ per renew.

Very old article glorifying domain squatting. Flagged.

I disagree. It's valuable for hackers to see where money's being made on the web. Just 'cause the article is a couple years old doesn't mean that the practice still isn't happening.

  > I disagree. It's valuable for hackers to see where money's being made on the web.

I know many (probably most) hackers figured this out early on.

  >  Just 'cause the article is a couple years old doesn't mean that the practice still isn't happening.

I didn't say that. Of course it's happening. We're reminded of this mess every time we need to register a domain.

In my case, a domain squatter registered the domain with my name and lastname dot com and had it in ransom-style for years asking 4 digit numbers to transfer it. Network Solutions lives off this scammers and didn't even bother to help. Luckily I got one of the more tame scammers and he didn't put an offensive page. After enduring this for 8 years they let it go and I could register.

It would be good if the big names stop linking and buying domains from this scum. It would be better if the domain name system is redesigned to prevent this behavior.

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