Millions of Addresses, Thousands of Sites, One Business

An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times piece looks at a rising power in the 'new internet bubble' that you may not have heard of before. The business, an outfit called NameMedia, has made a concerted effort to quietly purchase vast tracts of 'real estate' on the internet. The ultimate goal is to provide additional advertising and page views for content sites. 'Behind this suddenly active business category -- which includes companies like iREIT in Houston, Marchex in Seattle, and Demand Media in Santa Monica, Calif. -- is the recognition that not all Internet users turn to a search engine when they are confused about where to find something online. Rather, 5 percent to 10 percent of people will simply type in a name that sounds as if it might suit their needs. The so-called direct search or direct navigation approach is seldom fruitful for users, nor has it been particularly profitable for owners of the sites that they visit. An obscure Web address may have four or so visitors a month, and perhaps half will click on an ad.'"

Comments

Click Through Rate

[klingens]

and perhaps half will click on an ad

To which Devil did they sell their soul to get click through rates like that?

Re:Click Through Rate

[Anonymous Coward]

You DO realise that these are the same people who navigate their way around the internet by typing the subject in the url bar and putting a www. on one side and .com on the other...

Bah, scammers

[tomstdenis]

The only reason you buy thousands of domains is in the hopes that one of them becomes really popular and you can extort^Wscam^Wsell it to someone who will do something with it. I dunno about the rest of you, but when I google for hard to find products and I land on search engine bait websites, I just hit the back button, I don't click on the ads or worse, buy anything from them.

Tom

What about "The Man Who Owns the Internet"?

[1u3hr]

From this TFA:

What weve wanted to do, quietly, is amass the largest real estate position on the Internet, which we feel we have, Mr. Conlin said.

A week ago we had the story of a similar scumbag, Kevin Ham. from that FA at CNN Money:

The man at the top of this little-known hierarchy is Kevin Ham -- one of a handful of major-league "domainers" in the world and arguably the shrewdest and most ambitious of the lot.

So they're both the biggest. Journalisic exaggeration aside, it's disturbing that these parasites are celebrated by respectable financial reporters. These assholes are filling up the web with automatically generated pseudo-content, polluting search results to the point of uselessness. They're web-spammers with the same line of justification that email spammers used to use, they're "offering products that people might be interested in". A pest on both of them.