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

Sigh.

[Willeh]

For how long will bottom-feeders like this be able to profit off of laziness of others? I'm sure most of these domains are semi-hijacked (even hotmail was sort of in danger of expiring once) when the owner forgets to renew such things for even a few days.

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.

Re:Aggghh the pain.

[pizzaman100]

What irks me is when I am trying to do a search and all it returns are links to those ad pages.

Yes! Mod parent up! In addition, I would rather come across some annoying ads than a bunch of porn links that open more browser windows.