Kevin Ham: The Man Who Owns The Internet
Before the current issue of Business 2.0, very few people had heard of Kevin Ham. And yet he is a giant among domainers. His domain enterprises generate approximately $70 million a year and he holds a portfolio of roughly 300,000 domain names. Still, it’s what many do not know about this man that may interest domainers the most.
Like many in this field, Kevin, originally a family doctor, had no idea that domaining would become his career. Having achieved initial success with a webhost directory (originally a part-time venture), Kevin started offering domain registration services and provided his clients with lists of available domain names. At the the time of the dot com bust, thousands upon thousands of registered domain names were not being renewed. That was good news for Kevin's domain list business, but made it difficult to keep track of things manually. So he built a better mousetrap.
Network Solutions, the sole retail registrar of .com domains at the time, published a root zone file twice daily. This file contained approximately 5 million names and did not show when domains would be expiring. Kevin soon found a way to turn this list into a list of domain names that would soon be available. He wrote a script to compare the current lists contents to the previous one. He determined that names that disappeared from the list would become available 5 to 6 days later in the middle of the night on the West Coast of the United States.
Armed with this exclusive knowledge, Kevin would spend the night attempting to register these domains, typing in multiple browser windows on multiple computers to improve his chances. Many times, he was successful. However, many times he was beat to the punch by other domaining pioneers. He discovered that programmers like Yun Ye (Ultsearch) had developed scripts to register desired domain names instantly upon expiration. Not to be outdone, Ham wrote his own scripts. His success rate increased, but he still felt he could do better.
Kevin Ham made a bold move by going directly to registrars to seek assistance. He helped them write software to grab domains quickly after expiration. In exchange, he paid registrars up to $100 for their help in padding his portfolio.
Kevin was amassing quite a selection of domain names. Most of those were simply blank pages, earning him nothing unless sold in the aftermarket. But then Frank Schilling told him about GoTo.com (later bought by Yahoo!), a search engine that would pay him to place pay-per-click ads on his sites. His first day with GoTo, he made $1,500.
In early 2002, Kevin Ham was bringing in more than $1 million a year. Still, there was more he could do. He began domain tasting, returning the domain names with little traffic for free and registering the most visited domains. In an effort to streamline the whole enterprise, he pulled his domain names from registrars and set up his own. He then founded HitFarm, an ad company designed to do what Yahoo! was doing for him, without the commission.
Kevin’s software was also grabbing plenty of trademark typos for him as well, resulting in claims of typo-squatting by trademark holders. Concerned about legal risks with tasting and typo-squatting, he has since abandoned the practices. He’s found a better way.
Many domainers may be aware that entering almost any domain name followed by the ccTLD .cm results in a search page full of pay-per-click ads. (Example, www.dailydomainer.cm) This, of course is a clever use of Cameroon’s .cm ccTLD to essentially typo-squat every .com domain name in existence, and even those not yet registered. What many domainers did not know until last week is that Kevin Ham is the man behind the curtain.
Cameroon, an African nation of 18 million with just 167,000 computers, was using a very small portion of its virtual real estate. Like hundreds of other domainers, Kevin Ham saw that .cm is a reasonable typo for .com. But Kevin was the only one to seize the opportunity - and he succeeded: His team worked to negotiate a deal with the government of Cameroon, which in turn created a wildcard DNS record to reroute any .cm domain name to Agoga.com. Of course, .cm domains that have actually been registered are not subject to the rerouting, but all other possible combinations of letters, number and hyphens are. Kevin then pays the government of Cameroon an undisclosed portion of his pay-per-click windfall.
The true genius of the system? He did not have to go out and register the millions of domains he is effectively parked on by using the wildcard. Since he does not own those domains, his legal liability to trademark holders is hazy at best. Noted domaining attorney John Berryhill agrees. "You can't really say that [wildcarding] is targeting trademarks. It captures all the traffic, not just trademark traffic."
It’s a scheme so innovative, Kevin Ham took out a patent on it. He’s currently working on deals to make similar arrangements with Colombia (.co). Oman (.om), Nigeria (.ne) and Ethiopia (.et).
What’s next for Kevin? He’s now working on developing some of his most marketable domains. He has started Reinvent Technologies to turn his top domains into valuable companies of their own. His first choice? Religion.com.
Read Paul Sloan's entire article here or get the current issue of Business 2.0.
Daily Domainer comments
The Man Who Owns The Internet is clearly a landmark story for the domain industry, second only to Masters of Their Domains (Dec. 2005), which had introduced Richard Rosenblatt and thousands of new domainers to the power of domains. While several commentators have focused their attention almost exclusively on the .cm stunt (mostly in a negative/jealous way), the article has already started attracting new capital and new faces to the domain industry.
intersting read definately. that man has the brains and definately scored a first mover advantage
Absolutely Incredible! This man has strong control over the net!
I just dropped by to see why I haven't been getting my newsletter…! Perhaps the site owner is on vacation…
Anyway, I was amazed, angered, and inspired by this article.
I was amazed that someone could work that hard and be that clever and be so well-rewarded for all his hard work. To be in a position to get ad revenue from all those domains AND that typo traffic is really something!
I was angered mostly due to envy. He's not "stealing" but I wish all the TLD typo revenue was going to the country that owns the TLD. Most might make better use of it than a private citizen. And envy that he was able to do what he has done.
And I was inspired that you can still do things in Cyperspace and make some good money. Following Kevin Ham's example, I went out and registered 7 domains with variations of his name and set up one as a "Fan club blog". I will take offers on most of the domains (of course) and I also have some choice Yun Ye domains for sale as well.
Chris Nielsen said:
"He's not "stealing" but I wish all the TLD typo revenue was going to the country that owns the TLD. Most might make better use of it than a private citizen."
If you think government officials of corrupt Third World countries would put the money to better use than Kevin Ham, you are dreaming. Even if Kevin spends it all on prostitutes and weed, he wouldn't be doing too much worse than they would.
All I can say is someone please register http://www.GreenEggsandKevinHam.com
I am fascinated by this man being able to use his brains and foresight to make money. God Bless Him!!
[...] more entrepreneurial minded than that. A link on the web site peaked my interest, it read 'Kevin Ham: The Man Who Owns the Internet' so naturally I clicked it. I was quite impressed with Kevin Ham's story of ingenuity [...]
Impressive and inspiring story!
[...] Similarly, people who register misspellings of brand domains are typosquatters, not legitimate domainers. The majority of each group tend to denounce the black sheep and create distinctions, but the broad [...]
*You don't have to post this.
Hi I just would like to say I enjoyed your blog, I have a fast question
if you can answer. Is there a way to tell if someone had your domain
previously. Not having to know their info, but just to know if your
present domain was occupied previously. Is there a website to look this
up? I've tried. Thanks for any response. Sorry I am out of topic.
Check out the Wayback Machine
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php
Browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible.
Hope this helps.
Bob
You can also go to http://www.domaintools.com/ and use the "Whois Lookup" by entering in your domain ("yourdomain.com") and it will tell you a lot of information about the domain.
While it doesn't provide exact information it will tell you if the domain was registered before and then dropped, and how many times the information in the domain WHOIS has changed.
on the other hand, I just typed in KevinHamster.cm and sure enough, came to the website http://www.Agoga.com
But what surprised me when I thought about it was that I had never seen that particular parking page before. I guess I don't make the .cm mistake. I wonder how many do.
Why "Absolutely Incredible!",I have a friend he holds about over 5000 domains.He parked all and posted adsense,He can get nearly 7000 $ every mon.Except that,he can sell some domain to get money.This man start domain business so early,he absolutely can get so many domains,also i think most of domains are valueble.So why you think it's incredible?
I think they are impressed like most of us are at how he got there and the fact that he is makeing almost $8M a month. $7k a month with 5k domains is great. $8M with 300k domains is amazing!
I have about 250 domains and make less than $100 a month and I have trouble keeping track of all the domains and sites I have…
[...] $3.50 to $3.85. I say "bring it on." I'd gladly pay $100 a year if it would keep squatters out of the [...]
I have been reading with great interest all of the above and more and look forward to future info as I am new to this ecommerce.
I came here on another quest which is: does anyone know why the registration fees and renewal fees charged by certain domain registries for domain names with a country designation suffix such as .co.uk, .co.nz etc are charged at significantly higher rates than say .com. I have names names registered which attract fees from $40 annually to $9.95 with the country designated ones being the higher. The variation does not seem to be due to a currency adjustment rather it is the suffix.
Whatever happened to the Daily Domainer?! Earlier this year, I used to read the newsletter and visit the site quite regularly, but then I had to focus on other topics for a while. Now this place is looking rather deserted, with no new articles published for many months… Such a shame!
Looks like somebody reged GreenEggsandKevinHam.com
Wow..his story is amazing and impressive…but I believe now is much harder to achieve the same results he did at that time.
On on Aug 24th, 2007 at 9:25 am Chris Nielsen wrote:
Chris Nielsen on Aug 24th, 2007 at 9:25 am
I think they are impressed like most of us are at how he got there and the fact that he is makeing almost $8M a month. $7k a month with 5k domains is great. $8M with 300k domains is amazing!
I have about 250 domains and make less than $100 a month and I have trouble keeping track of all the domains and sites I have…
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I agree completely, we have about the same amount of domains and a graet number of traffic, the problem we have is the click through rates are low and the PPC's are even lower. I don't think Kevin Ham is still earning those numbers. I beg to differ, but even with the best of domain names with type in traffic the parking sites and adsense are not paying out what they used to it seems. I have no problem keeping track of the sites because we have 20 sales reps. assigned to approx. 12 each. We have competitions to see who gets the best returns and who monetizes better with keyword and design changes for the click throughs. I guess the future will tell us if it's better to hold and park or buy and sell. I, like you will stay tunes..
Brad
Credit repair home business
The drawback with just about every home business is it's either ,too costly to set up, takes too long to become profitable, or is too difficult to learn.
Nice Ham has built such a big portfolio with his partner with in his 37 th age. i saw mostly all of his domains are parked, Not only his. Mostly all domainers who have a big portfolio parked their domains. But i dont know whether they could earn for their renewal. Even if we choose very nice keyword, there will be a small amount of type-in traffic. more over conversion rate will be just with in 10%, i think. The only chance is resale value of domains increases day by day at after markets.
Best Regards,
Looks like Someone saw my above comment and registered http://www.GreenEggsandKevinHam.com
People like this guy are the ones who do well in life. Most peopl could not dream of thinking up an idea like this.
It's a shame that today, in our world we have such craziness as this. Especially when you look at the small businesses with their little domains that don't rank. Or the larger businesses that put such effort into their domain to build it up and end up losing it all because they simply didn't have the time or no one saw their domain expiring.
I think there should be a way for an owner of a domain to get that domain back after it expires. It all just seems terrible that some automated process can come in and scoop up huge lots of high ranking domains, place them in park mode and make a ton of money off the backs of hard working people.
Visit my locksmith friends website if you get the chance.
I think government officials of corrupt Third World countries would put the money to better use than Kevin Ham, you are dreaming. Even if Kevin spends it all on prostitutes and weed, he wouldn't be doing too much worse than they would.
good Ham has built such a big portfolio with his partner with in his 37 th age. i saw mostly all of his domains are parked, Not only his. Mostly all domainers who have a big portfolio parked their domains. But i don't know whether they could earn for their renewal. Even if we choose very nice keyword, there will be a small amount of type-in traffic. more over conversion rate will be just with in 10%, i think. The only chance is resale value of domains increases day by day at after markets.
Best Regards,
Autocorrection
You type "cm" and the browser autocorrects to "com"
People start to wake up and realise some "internet entrepreneur" is getting pennies everytime they click blindly on a commercial link that leads them nowhere except to another link, another click and more pennies for the "internet entrepreneur".
This is wasting people's time. Time is not an unlimited resource for anyone.
I think we need more doctors, not more of these "entrepreneurs". But that is only my opinion.