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Brett Tabke of WebmasterWorld interviewed Rick Schwartz about domain parking, live domain auctions, the .cm ccTLD, web traffic and other domain-related subjects.
Archive for the 'People' Category
There is a nice piece on Fabulous.com’s Dan Warner in the Sydney Morning Herald today. Another domain-related article that has been published in the mainstream press in the recent weeks.
Dan Warner, chief strategy officer at Brisbane-based Dark Blue Sea Limited, is used to watching multimillion-dollar sales of domains such as Diamond.com and Vodka.com take the headlines. His story of a slow and steady accumulation of domains, bought for less than $7 and sold for thousands, day in and day out for several years, lacks get-rich-quick appeal. Yet this measured approach to domain accumulation has grown a $5 million initial investment into a company with a market cap of $68 million.
His company holds the world’s second-largest portfolio of domain names, with more than 550,000. NameMedia Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, has about 725,000. Together, these two companies hold more than 1 per cent of the world’s domains.
Read the whole story:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/masters-of-their-domains/2007/06/04/1180809431843.html
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:
Paul Sloan’s new article, which I wrote about in an earlier blog post, has now been made available online at Business2.com. It’s about Kevin Ham of Reinvent Technology and the title is “The Man Who Owns The Internet”.
I’ve done business with Kevin Ham myself and I can say it’s been a pleasure dealing with him. He’s a very active buyer of generic .com domains. His latest coup is that he partnered with Cameroon to monetize the tons of daily typo traffic of the country’s unregistered .cm domain names.
Read the full story on CNNMoney.
Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons on online copyright infringements:
The Googles of the world, they are the Custer of the modern world. We are the Sioux nation. They will lose this war if they go to war. The notion that the new kids on the block have taken over is a false notion.
Read the full article here: Old media turns combative against new media
Ron has a new cover story out at DNJournal.com. As always, Ron has written a great and highly interesting article which I urge you to read. It’s about domain investor and web developer Sahar Sarid. Many well-known domainers, including Frank Schilling and Rick Schwartz, say Sahar is one of the smartest and most successful domainers in the world. After he had moved from Israel to the USA, Sahar worked on an ice cream truck before he read about the $7.5 million business.com sale after which he decided to invest in domain names.
DNJournal.com Cover Story: When You Wish Upon A Star: How Domains Made Sahar Sarid’s Dreams Come True
FYI, Sahar has a blog at Conceptualist.com, which you should check out, too. You’ll find some thought-provoking posts there!
Ron Jackson wrote an excellent cover story about Demand Media’s Richard Rosenblatt, who helped sell MySpace.com to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $580 million, iMall to ExciteAtHome for $565 million and GreatDomains to VeriSign for $100 million. In 2006 Rosenblatt founded Demand Media, Inc., a company which quickly became one of the biggest players in the domain space, owning companies such as domain registrar eNom, eHow and Hillclimb Media and managing the .TV top-level-domain.
Here’s the official press release for Rick Schwartz’s domain blog:
Rick Schwartz Opens Domain Name and Traffic Blog
Rick Schwartz, aka “Domain King” announces RicksBlog.com which he says “is a place that will ruffle some feathers and challenge the staus quo.”
Boca Raton, FL (PRWEB) April 6, 2007 — Rick Schwartz aka “Domain King” has announced the opening of his new blog, http://www.ricksblog.com/. He says “it is a place that will ruffle some feathers and challenge the staus quo.” In Rick’s new blog he will disclose things he has learned over the last 12 years on the net.
Schwartz is a pioneer in the domain name business and is considered largely responsible for igniting the space with his $1.3 million sale of Men.com back in 2003. Since then Rick Schwartz has CO-Founded the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. tradeshow http://www.TargetedTraffic.com which is the premiere tradeshow of the domain channel. The show is by invitation only and some 600 of the “Biggest and the best” attend. Rick is also a “Founding board member” of the Internet Commerce Association http://www.internetcommerce.org/ an association created to protect Domain Owners Rights, and founder of eRealesate.com.
Schwartz says, “Many have yet to understand the lead and customer generating power that a great domain with type in traffic can provide. Imagine an endless supply of qualified customers with no cost other than the cost of acquisition.”
Rick has a knack for predicting big trends and getting it right. He may have been the first to recognize the value of “Type in” traffic which is now commonly referred to as “direct navigation” - the most potent and targeted traffic on the net. Rick has a prime portfolio of one and two word domains, and is considered by many to be among the leading experts on domain names, traffic, website flow and valuation. Besides his active websites Rick owns domains like Candy.com, Properties.com, Tradeshows.com, Cheating.com, ChristmasCarols.com and some 5000 others,
Rick is also an accomplished businessman in several other industries including furniture, lighting and advertising. He ran one of the most profitable and efficient home based businesses with no employees back in the early 1990’s out of a 10 x 10 bedroom. He sold it for over 7 figures freeing his time to devote exclusively to the internet in 1998. It also cemented his main theory that “Domains would go up faster in value than any commodity ever know to mankind.” Laughed at in 1995 and 1996 it is FACT today. No stock, no land, no gold, no jewel has ever gone up faster and further in value. He also sold “PartnerCash.com in July 2006 for $110,000 and then 2 other un-named domains for an additional $180,000 in December that had cost him a whopping $105 for the three names. that were purchased around 1996-1997. In August 2005 he bought Property.com for $750,000 to match up with Properties.com that he bouight in 1998 for $61,000. He has turned down multi million dollar offers in lieu of developing it himself when the time is right.
In the last year Schwartz has purchased cd.com for $275,000, Flowers.mobi for $200,000 and eat.mobi for $6750 along with dozens of other domain buys.
Rick also runs the premiere domain forum on the net in which the top domainers and sponsors in the world are invited to participate and join. His members read like the Who’s who of the domain channel. It is known as the hardest website on the net to get into. While others beg for traffic, Rick and his members screens every applicant before they are accepted. Thus the basis for T.R.A.F.F.I.C. being a tradeshow that is by invitation only. Attendees agree that this is one of the most important features of the show as it guarantees a productive investment of their valuable time as they break bread with the “Biggest and the Best” in a warm and cordial environment.
Schwartz says “My blog will challenge failed mainstream thinking and their lack of understanding that the Internet is the great sales tool ever invented.”
Ron Jackson of DNJournal.com has made a guest post on Sahar Sarid’s blog Conceptualist.com. First Ron shares his opinion on the latest additions to the domain blogosphere (referring to Frank’s, Rick’s and Sahar’s blogs) and talks about his short and long term view on the domain business. Ron is in a very good position to write about this subject, because he is the editor and publisher of the popular DN Journal and releases weekly domain sales reports.
Short and long term view on domains - Guest Post by Ron Jackson of DNJournal.com
“Domain King” Rick Schwartz has a new domain-related blog at RicksBlog.com.
You should visit the blog regularly, because you will not want to miss the valuable advice from Rick. He is one of the earliest and most successful domain investors and organizer of the TRAFFIC domain conferences.
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