Slashdot Mirror
100,000 Domains Sold for $164 Million
miller60 writes "Here's a news item that puts some hard data on the domain typo millionaires post from a couple weeks back. Marchex Inc. just paid $164 million to buy Name Development Ltd., an obscure company that displays pay-per-click keyword ads on 100,000 domains. It's not a stock swap, either, as $155 million of that was in cash. The seller reportedly built the portfolio by scarfing up expiring domains (including hardware-update.com, previously owned by Microsoft and linked from within the Windows 2000 OS) and replacing the content with pay-per-click ads."
Or is there something else regarding their business?
when you can buy them for 4.95$ a pop!?
Do a Google search for "web traffic" and look at all the AdWord advertisements. Almost all of them are sites that buy expired domain names or common misspellings of domain names, and for the low-low price of $2 they'll send thousands of people to your web site via such domains.
Also, for anyone that has used the site... www.whatismyip.com was up for an EBay auction that ended at about 11:00 pm EST last night. Last I checked the bidding was $55,000. Not sure what it ultimately sold for.
I'm a big tall mofo.
I really really hate these people. In my version of the internet these people would be shot. Note that my old domain keeps getting bought by company after company. I intended to buy it back when it expired this past June, but another domain hijaker got to it first. It's really pathatic.
Jeremy Logan's Website.
Visit the wrong domain and never click the ads.
.net, bensbargains.com instead of .net...) but as long as you don't click, there isn't any profit to be had.
Bandwidth costs eat up profit margins.
I've mistyped a few (slickdeals.com instead of
Of course, if you're like my fiancee and have trouble spelling any word... well, I can only hope those sites are limited to advertising only (and not phishing)...
Now I remember who the hell it was that stole my domain from me... 3 years ago I was late renewing by one single damned day, and lost my domain to that damned company... and ain't a damn thing I could do about it... although now that I was reminded of the name, I have this need for revenge... who's with me?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
How about microsoft.co.uk?
I guess part of it is they probably were making a decent amount of money from the ad revenue as well.
Sure wish I thought of it :-( Not claiming that I could have done the same thing, but lots of things you think about, I never would have thought would have been so popular... like free web-mail - but that was before everyone and their grandmother had net access.
I'm just astonished that this kind of thing actually works. Does *anyone* ever click on any of the ads when you arrive at one of these hijacked places?
For me, it's ctrl-W or backspace, every time.
-- As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
Just cheked eBay and the final bid ended up at $257,000. Not bad for a site doing 3GB/day of bandwidth.
Hmmm.
But hey, i'm sure users who go to hardwareinfo.com or any of the other "hijacked" sites will be more than happy to click on a few porn banners like a caffeine addled squirrel.
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
I work at an ISP. If all these domains point to the same class C or something I'll just block it at the router if it's purely advertising junk.
Anyone know details? Thanks.
- Cary
--Fairfax Underground: Where Fairfax County comes out to play
I wonder how much this will sell for?
http://slsahdot.org
If they wernt making money they wouldnt be doing it ...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
i think ill start by gettin micro5oft.com
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
If it walks and barks like a dog, it's a dog, no matter what you call it.
Have you ever called 1-800-COL-LECT? Have you ever called 1-800-COL-MECT? Same thing. You get a "collect call long distance provider". Just not the one you wanted. Profiting off of other peoples' errors isn't exactly a new idea. This is just a variation on a theme.
On a funny note, I originally heard about this 800 number scheme while reading Jenna Jameson's autobiography, "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale". Her husband apparentally made quite a bit of money in the mistyped 800 number business.
hi mom!
The fine folks at BuyDomains.com still have the SlashDot.Net for sale, and "The quoted price will be at least $688 and may be over $10,000." Valid business model or what?
(I intentionally left out all AhRefs, if you really want to see it, type away, I don't endorse domain stealers.)
Just
What does this have to do with these guys? Because they're little better than the Ferenghi, and probably twice as ugly.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
yeah i would like to block these cunts at the firewall too, these sites are responsible for distributing spyware and i would like to protect our customers as well
I was told a story that McDonalds spends millions on strategic restraunt locations, where it would see the most traffic, and the condition of the neighborhood and all kinds of good statistics. what ever it takes to find the perfect store location.
Then burger king builds across the street.
You couldn't pay me to own a bunch of typo. domain names. It sounds like a thousand lawsuits waiting to happen.
I wonder - do all of these domains go to the same set of IPs?
Has anybody created a blacklist of those IPs?
Has anybody created a blacklist of those domains?
I'd apply a blocklist on my proxy just to deny these assholes any chance to get anything.
www.eFax.com are spammers
You can have tremendous fun with other people's pay-per-click adverts if you have an ADSL connection and spend time not using it every day {like when you're at work, or asleep}. All it takes is a list of open proxies and a list of known PPC adverts. Then you write a little script that goes around "clicking" on PPC adverts via various proxies. Of course, you don't have to do anything useful with the "data" you retrieve.
One day, I might even write a screensaver that does exactly this.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I had the impression that the buy-a-domain-to-be-rich story was over, not only due to NASDAQ, but also because of google! I can't imagine anyone who wants to update its hardware typing www.hardware-update.com, instead of googling "hardware update" (and at least in the first 20 pages of results that I checked, hardware-update.com does not appear!). Personally I even type "apple" in the google bar sometimes, its easier than www.apple.com).
Apparently domain sales prove me wrong.
If there were a list of these 100 000 domains somewhere I would be interested in adding it to mail server's spamassassin.
hardware-update.com
Registrant:
Moniker Privacy Services
20 SW 27 Ave
Suite 201
Pompano Beach
FL
US
33069
Privacy Services... Nore like invasion of Privacy Services.
...yet another hotfix from Microsoft to remove the coded BSOD link to www.hardware-update.com since it contains ads, possible spyware, and not to mention Marchex Inc. might start charging Microsoft just for using their name in the OS they sell for $249.99 (US)?
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
But I suppose when one is googling, the easiest thing to do to find good results is to NOT click on .com links, instead go for the .org links which usually contain actual information.
Hey, since we're on the topic of domain sales, I own customalbum.com and it's for sale. Never did anything with it. Anyone have ideas for what I could do with this domain (other than try to sell it)?
Meh.
http://www.dashslot.co.uk/
Visit whatismyip.com...
Address reported: 213.107.x.x...
Actual address: 81.98.x.x
Visit other "whatismyip" type web pages...
Address correctly reported as 81.98.x.x
Conclusion: someone paid a lot of money for crap
Same thing happened to my old domain, but luckily I was able to snag one close enough not to matter. Still, you have to wonder about all the asshats holding on to "DorothyLSmith.com" or whatever. I guess they're in it for the long haul. In a way, it's like Old West stakeholders -- just stake your claim and you get the property rights forever and ever, providing you keep paying your taxes (registration). Forget to make a payment, and all the jackals come out of the woodwork.
They must be running some kind of automated system that spiders URLs, puts them in a database, then looks up the registration expiration date, puts that in the database. Then you just have a script running all the time. Sort the data in reverse chronological order by expiration date, then when the time comes, run a "register" script that attempts to automatically register the domain.
Thing is, this has to be extremely expensive. I guess the profit margins on people trying to buy back their domains is high enough to offset the loss of all the useless domains you purchase. You could mitigate the cost by going through the database and flagging URLs that don't look like they'd generate any profit.
This is basically your textbook definition of bottom-feeding.
You'd be an internet hero.
About Warren Buffet: Buffett believes that much of the problem with the economies of the United States and other industrialized countries in recent years results from the proliferation of persons and organizations who produce nothing directly but are compensated based on the volume of business which they transact. He feels that most stock trades are recommended and made primarily to benefit the brokers rather than the investors and has stated that he feels that the world would benefit if each person had a lifetime maximum of twenty stock trades. He steadfastly refuses to split Berkshire Hathaway stock because the purpose of this would be to facilitate trading, which he has no desire to do. -Wikipedia entry on Warren Buffett Read that passage, then read it again..and when you're done reading it, read it one more time. Then you'll understand why some knucklehead will pay 160 million clams for absolutely nothing of real hard value.
Yea, domains never mattered much anyway, since a link is a link, and the URI beneath it is generally hidden. The net was designed to be independent of such things; people who treat domains like personal license plates just don't get it.
As long as at least 50% of them contained "Britney"
how long it will take all those domains to be put on the spybot host file list
By reading this, you have given me brief control of your mind.
nothing new, i know someone that bought a domain for 500$ because the domain was owned by a add company,and this is another biz, to buy good domains to sell them at 100x more expensive after
This made a light go off for me -- the other day I did a Google search and the first several pages of results were to 'regular' domain names but they all want to an ad site.
I think the other use for collecting expired domain names is to fill Google with ad links.
This is why you trademark your domain name. Using a mark that's so similar to yours that it's just a typo is infringement, if the typo domain is marketing to the same market. Even if it isn't, which is usually the case with these typo domains, it can be easier to get them to cease & desist, and move on to cheaper prey to vulture.
--
make install -not war
Users misspell domain names, causing actions they do not want...
.check, where the second-level-domain has to be a checksum for the rest?
.com in their domains.
so, what technical solutions could we use for this problem?
We could of course leave it as it is, a la survival of the fittest. Or we could try educating users not to mispell (fat chance). But are there other options?
Credit card companies and banks have been dealing with somewhat similar probems, their solution usually involves checksum digits included in each number
Could we apply a simmilar system to domain names?
i.e advertise a www address as
httX:/Y/zzz.com
where httX tells the browser that the next character is a checksum, and Y is the one-digit checksum for "zzz.com"?
users of older browsers would still be able to visit such a domain by leaving out the checksum
Or, make a new top level domain,
http://zzz.Y.check
this would require no changes in current software, but would require companies to use something else but
Any other ideas? What do you think?
Or you could save yourself from having to use both hands (can be useful on occasion), by typing "apple" in the address bar and hitting "enter". This does a 'Google I'm Feeling Lucky' search, which also gets you to the same webpage.
;)
Works in Firefox, not sure about the others.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
So I take spam that I pay $400 for, and swap it out for spam I get for free. Sounds good.
Well, GEE! $386,100.00, damn! My groundmother could do a better website, I mean doest seems to be something wrong? something illegal behind the scenes? What makes a web site been selled for so much money like that?
Back in the mid-nineties I worked at APple Technical Support here in Austin. We'd frequently get people on the phone who would say, "Did you know that if you dial 1-800-SOS-APPL with a zero in SOS you get a porn line?" I would usually tell people that was a service provided by Apple for people without internet connections.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I remember these days too. In 1995 I paid a dollar per megabyte (no typo) download plus phone plus monthly fee. Download rates were often below 100 bytes/s. Netscape had a button in the main toolbar to switch image downloading on and off. Many people considered it bad behaviour to have the images in webpages switched on.
Today I pay 30$/month for 2Mbit ADSL flat. And that's even expensive. Yes, some good things have gone since then - but nevertheless I don't want to have the 1995 internet back. And I rather doubt that more than 0,01% of all users want to have it restored... ;-)
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =5754382679
What I find funny is that they more often than not ask you if you would like them to be your start page! Really as if this sad little link farm is a service to anyone but the owner of the domain.
not really. Also not
* freshmeat.com
* freshmeat.org
That might be worth a fundraiser.
I just registered slsahdot.com, which was also amazingly still available. I have put up a page with links to slashdot, and my own google adsense bar at the top. Now sit back and see if it actually makes any money. Ehhh, if you can't beat em, join em I say.
Meh.
Son, looks like you shot a blank.
It's just another form of spam. No more, no less.
Don't tell me about losing domains. In 1994, I registered several very good domains:
snell.org (Me of course)
cjs.com (Me again)
eleet.com (I thought I was...)
grateful.com (I was into the Grateful Dead)
bikeworld.com (for my dad's co.)
When NSI took over registrar duties for
Biggest. Mistake. Ever.
Here's a little snippet from the WHOIS record for grateful.com:
Administrative Contact:
Reflex Publishing Inc.
Internet Admin (not for sale) (admin@reflex.com)
+1.8133544500
Fax: +1.8133544500
1971 W. Lumsden Rd. #110
Brandon, FL 33511
US
"not for sale"
I get sick to my stomach every time I think about this.
With the revenue from this, they bought a collection of domain names of marginal value. It looks like they actually paid out only only $24.6 million on cash upfront for Name Development. And even that goes into escrow for 18 months. Name Development's income for 2004 was $4.6 million.
Name Development seems to be one guy operating out of the Virgin Islands who sold click-throughs to Yahoo:
Marchex is the target of spyware/adware litigation:
I don't see how this adds up to a company with a market cap of $761 million. This looks more like a dud dot-com.
I type "google" in the google bar...it's easier than typing google.com
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
Warren Buffett is an idiot with a large investment in Coca-Cola. He's not god.
He should split his stock, too, because he limits the value of the company as a whole by not doing so. Perhaps a split would inflate the price, but the refusal to split, deflates it -- a move which undervalues his company and presents the average investor from purchasing shares.
Also, Buffet's comapny consistently beats the market, aside from a brief NASDAQ spike at the end of the dot-com madness in early 2000. If he's an idiot, how come his company is able to perform like that?
Free Hans!
How are you going to remember the checksum? Wouldn't it be a lot easier to have a bookmark?
Really, I'm not trying to be clever with my signature.
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
BRK is one of those investments that still goes up even when the market goes down. If the market has a good year, it can beat BRK for that year. But over a longer period, the bear markets more than make up the difference.
Free Hans!
McDonald's and BK are both franchises. A small(ish) business investor builds them both. If Mr McD investor wants to buy across the street (and I'm sure some do) he will, but it's not exactly a rule.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
How about a browser mod that does something like Google's "did you mean:" and intercept URLs that are similar to the ones you normally use. It could also be used to intercept crafted URLs like www.micorsoft.com@1.2.3.4.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
the concept of buying a domain and monetizing any resulting traffic is known as "domain parking". there are numerous companies who provide this parking service. these companies host a domain, optimize keywords related to the domain and then pull in PPC ad feeds like Overture. The parking company splits the PPC revenue with the domain owner. The consumer is directed to a web site that they have chosen. If a domain is not hosted by the owner or "parked" a user would see a 404 page. So if someone types in careerinfo.com, whch a domain owner has not developed, a "parked" page shows PPC links related to "Careers" which would seem to be a better user experience than a 404 error page. there are domain owners earning as more than $5,000/day via this method. serious $$$.
n/t
This is because that some investors think that following trends (I.E., pop-culture/management theory-type trends) are good to invest in.
I don't see what all the rush is unless you're trying to make a quick buck. If you're trying to make a quick buck (and that is the only goal) then knocking over a few liquor stores might be a better short-term solution to the desire for immediate gratification and reasons to celebrate often.
Maybe the "investor class" has been co-opted and is now so filled with people focused on wanting a yacht with no brainwork effort that they have lost all touch with reality.
I have requested domain price for slashdot.net!
----
Thanks for choosing Buy Domains!
* required information
* Email: FUCK
* First Name: YOU
* Last Name: FUCK
* Company: YOU
* Your main URL: FUCK
* Phone: YOU
*When will you be purchasing this domain?
FUCK YOU
*What is your intended use for this domain?
FUCK YOU
* Comments:
FUCK YOU
(x) Check here to be added to the Domain News email list (sure!!)
--I don't think /etc/hosts can be that big.
http://www.hostip.info/ is a community project to geo IPs and the site is listed in rdf.dmoz.org
... I don't get it, and I wrote it. Mods on crack?