Internet Real Estate Mogul
Ever wondered who owns the most internet real estate aka: web addresses or domain names? Well the Internet Real Estate Mogul is a fellow by the name of Kevin Ham. For years, Ham has been snatching up available domain names with value, & adding them to his portfolio of money makers. Kevin makes a very good living purchasing domain names. Since 2000, Ham has acquired over 300,000 domains, which when added to his other business ventures generates over $70 million dollars $ a year for this internet real estate king. And John Chow thinks he\’s a dot com mogul.
It\’s one thing to own a handful of a big money making sites, but when you own over 300,000 of them, you have quite a bit of control on the internet playing field. Being he\’s a devout Christian, Ham has purchased many religion based domains such as God.com, Religion.com & Satan.com. During Ham\’s journey to the top, he occasionally left his home in Vancouver to do missionary work in China, Mexico & the Philippines.
By the year 2002, Ham was making approx. $1 million a year & was just warming up. With help from his high school friend & now partner, he made the next few years his most aggressive. This is when he tried out a trick of his called \’tasting.\’ Domain purchasers were given a 5-day trial period on the domains that they purchased. This was intended to let them test the waters with the traffic on the domain for a few days & toss it if they were not satisfied. Mr. Ham used this provision to purchase thousands of domain names & discard all but maybe 100 or so that showed potential. Ham no longer practicing tasting due to the overwhelming number of unreliable domains he was ending up with.
Domain auctions are a big part of Ham\’s purchasing strategies. Domainars, venture capitalist & investment bankers all take part in the bidding of various domain names. At these auctions, upwards of $150, 000 or more. Ham has paid $171,250 for HotelDeals.com.
Since the tasting days, Ham has moved on to bigger & better methods. He current searches for typo-squatter domains. Have you ever attempted to enter the URL of one of your favorite sites & mistakenly left out the \’O\’ in the .com? Well, you may have ended up with www.google.cm. It just so happens that .cm belongs to the Republic of Cameroon. Ham began purchasing the popular names with the .cm & had the traffic forward to another one of his sites. There is more. This page contained PPC links that when clicked, would generate cash for guess who? That\’s right, Kevin Ham! Ham & his crew are not stopping at .cm. He also has his eyes on (.om) which belongs to Oman & (.co) which belongs to Columbia.
Sean M. Lightfoot has been blogging & writing articles for 2 years. At Sean\’s View there is free business information & resources to help take your business to the next level. At http://www.seansview.com There\’s videos, featured blogs, product reviews & more!
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October 26th, 2007 at 7:50 am
Don’t forget about Rick Schwartz aka The Domain King. He’s a legend in the the domaining world.