Article On Domainers in Business 2.0
 

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.

Article continued here http://www.business2.com/b2/web/arti...132510,00.html

see signature and you can become the next rick schwartz

Damn good publicity for Webfather. Congrats!

Good read there!!!

Nice article. Here's another one in the same subject published on macleans.ca recently:

Masters of our domain (names), the cash cows of the Internet

Meet the kings of those ugly websites full of ad links that are a multi-billion-dollar industry

COLIN CAMPBELL

Yun Ye is one of the most elusive, and successful, businessmen in Canada. His fortune is worth over US$150 million. Yet he has no known address, office or employees. Even his former lawyer refers to him as more myth than man. People have spent years trying to secure a business meeting with him. The few who do leave wondering if it was really Yun Ye that they met. For all that's known about Ye, a Chinese citizen rumoured to have been living until recently with his family in a modest condo in downtown Vancouver's Wall Centre, he might just run his affairs from a laptop computer and a lawn chair. He's what's known as 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 Web addresses, or domain names.

Outside his shadowy world, almost no one has heard of Ye -- though anyone with an Internet connection is likely familiar with his stock-in-trade: those simple websites that, like snippets ripped from the Yellow Pages, offer nothing but lists of links to advertiser sites. The sites may seem purposeless, but behind them lies a multi-billion-dollar industry.
More on http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/bu..._122704_122704

Boca Raton? That is nothing... I live in a rented house in Chino!

Chino Sur!

veery nice:thumbsup

yes it is. If only I knew about this business model sooner....:Oh crap

There is still time to get into the industry. It is growing everyday.

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