Great article on domainers in Business 2.0:
Masters of Their Domains
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.
The man behind the conference, Rick Schwartz, couldn?t be happier -- and he isn?t even around when midnight strikes and bikini-clad women take to the dance floor to raffle off prizes and peel off their tops. Schwartz, 52, began buying up domain names 10 years ago. Like many early players, he gravitated to where the money was: porn. He snapped up names like Ass.com, Makeout.com, and Porno.com, to name a few. It was a quick path to riches: Adult sites were paying handsomely for the traffic; mainstream sites were not -- at least not yet.
Today, Schwartz owns about 5,000 names, with less than a third falling into the ?adult? category. He?s the industry?s biggest promoter, preaching the power of domains to anyone who will listen and bringing domainers together with moneymen and execs from the likes of Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO). He sports a $65,000 Rolex on his left wrist, a $32,000 diamond bracelet on his right, and is astounded that he -- a community college dropout -- is living like a king in a waterfront house in Boca Raton.
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http://www.business2.com/b2/web/arti...132510,00.html