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."

Comments

why pay 1640$ per domain?

[niall111]

when you can buy them for 4.95$ a pop!?

If you can't spell, support'em.

[purduephotog]

Visit the wrong domain and never click the ads.

Bandwidth costs eat up profit margins.

I've mistyped a few (slickdeals.com instead of .net, bensbargains.com instead of .net...) but as long as you don't click, there isn't any profit to be had.

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)...

THANK YOU!

[Quasar1999]

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?

Re:THANK YOU!

[meheler]

Not to be a bitch to a bitch, but sometimes e-mail addresses go defunct and one doesn't think to update the domain record because one doesn't realise that one needs that particular e-mail address to renew an expired domain. How many people have stopped using the e-mail address on their domain record because it was inundated with spam, or just registered with a temporary address? What happens if your e-mail address goes bad (i.e. a former free web email service decides to start charging, or an ISP goes under, or in a fit of rage you cancel all association with your ISP) and you forget your domain password? There are ways around it, but unless you've had to deal with it before, most people won't know what to do.

Please think.

Re:Price not surprising at all.

[bigtallmofo]

Sorry to reply to myself... I just found the EBay auction site again:

Whatismyip.com Auction

The final price? $386,100.00.

Astonished

[mertner]

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.

So do all of these domains point to one subnet?

[caryw]

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

Not a new idea.

[radiotyler]

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.

Re:Not a new idea.

[flabbergast]

This reminds me of a 60 Minutes report I saw probably ten years ago. A *ahem* gentleman had setup a whole bunch of long distance companies, with names like "I don't care", "Anyone" or "It doesn't matter." So, back in the day when you dialed the operator to make a long distance collect call from a pay phone, they'd ask you for your LD carrier preference. You say "It doesn't matter" and *boom*! $10 a minute. Argghh!!

Almost like store placement

[jfried]

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.

Fun with PPC adverts

[ajs318]

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.

So, can we expect...

[http101]

...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)?

Hard to find available .com domains these days

[ylikone]

I find it is almost impossible to buy a .com domain anymore, at least one that isn't just a random bunch of letters. And the problem is that almost everything you try will just end up going to a site with a load of ads and not pertaining to the subject matter of the domain name at all. Maybe there should be a rule against this... buying a domain JUST to put up ads should be illegal.

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)?

How about a new Firefox extension

[thrillseeker]

Anyone out there got an itch to write a useful extension for Firefox? One that catches any domain name that leechers (yes, they are leechers - they are capitalizing on someone's mistake, not their intent) use to take unfair advantage, and redirects it to the intended site. It'd need an easy "on/off" button so that you could visit the crap sites if you wanted.

You'd be an internet hero.

Re:How about a new Firefox extension

[fyoder]

Something that would convert what you type to something else you've specified in a list. It wouldn't be populated by default initially, since the main objection would be that you can't really assume for everyone, but lists would pop up on web sites, and those could be used rather than populating from scratch. Like adblock.

Also like adblock, it would support regular expressions. The first thing I would add to my list is conversion of a final .co to .com . That's a common typo for me. Hasn't resulted in bogus web sites, but would be nice if firefox just 'knew' that for me .co domains are actually .com .

This post constitutes prior art for any potentially patentable ideas expressed. Maybe that should be a standard sig these days.

Re:Aggghh the pain.

[StyroCupMan]

I don't mind if I happen to type in the wrong page and see a bunch of useless ads. What irks me is when I am trying to do a search and all it returns are links to those ad pages.

Solutions

[F�an�ro]

Users misspell domain names, causing actions they do not want...

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, .check, where the second-level-domain has to be a checksum for the rest?
http://zzz.Y.check

this would require no changes in current software, but would require companies to use something else but .com in their domains.

Any other ideas? What do you think?

Re:grrr

[rush22]

Happend to me too. I decided not to renew my domain name (thinking it was too obscure, and noone would buy it off me). I hadn't updated in a long time and was quite bored with it, and especially having it hanging over my head. I did have really good traffic for a while.

Long story short: A day or two after I let it expire it became a porn portal, then a redirect to a different porn portal. Then about 2 years later, a "search engine". Now it's that same porn portal again. 4 years and counting.

What I want to know is who the hell was giving out my traffic information and who the hell let these ***holes know that I hadn't renewed it?

What do they do? Search google for URLs randomly all day? Or randomly type in names into networksolutions to see if they're available??

I'm not pissed someone took it, that's fine. What I am pissed about is that now people think I turned my site into some junk spam porno crap. They even kept my folder names!