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I finally got the chance to see the actual clip on CNBC’s On The Money and I’m disappointed to say the least. The clip has been titled “He makes millions on typos” and it talks about nothing but typosquatting. After all, the clip is pretty bad press for the domain industry, because people from outside the industry might have been confirmed in their views of domainers as tricksters and cybersquatters. Having also re-read the Business 2.0 article several times, I must say it contains many negative points too and only adds to the bad image of domainers as people making money from the trademarks of other companies.
This is so untrue! There are only very few black sheep in the industry and it’s them who feed the bad image domainers are having in the public. Don’t get me wrong. Paul Sloan’s article is well-written, but it certainly leaves a bad aftertaste. Kevin Ham owns a very nice generic domain portfolio and he is not cybersquatting with his .cm scheme, because he’s only monetizing domains that are not registered. Though, the article is the cover story of Business 2.0’s June edition and most people who will read it are not into domain investing. Therefore, many of these people do not see the difference between monetizing generic domains and earning money from typos and I believe many of the readers will think Kevin is running some kind of shady business, which he is not. He’s only having a wild-card refresh the URL of unregistered .cm domains to point to a specific page. This is legal and both Microsoft and Google have been doing this for a long time with unregistered domains, domain extension typos (e.g. .xom, .cpm) and domains that cannot be reached by having their browser (Microsoft: Internet Explorer; Google: FireFox) forward the typo traffic to a parking page. In fact, the Microsoft/Google scheme goes a step further than Kevin Ham, because Microsoft and Google make money from TLDs that do not even exist. On the other hand, .cm belongs to Cameroon and it has been the country’s decision to monetize the typo traffic arriving at their domain extension.
Link to the clip on CNBC:
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