Internet Real Estate Mogul

Published by Sean M. Lightfoot on Tagged Business

Ever wondered who owns the most internet real estate aka: web addresses or domain names? Well it’s a fellow by the name of Kevin Ham. For years, Ham has been snatching up available domain names with value, and adding them to his portfolio of money makers. Kevin makes a very good living buying 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 several religion based domains such as God.com, Religion.com and Satan.com. During Ham’s journey to the top, he occasionally left his home in Vancouver to do missionary work in China, Mexico and the Philippines.
By the year 2002, Ham was making approx. $1 million a year and was just warming up. With help from his high school friend and 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 and toss it if they were not satisfied. Mr. Ham used this provision to purchase thousands of domain names and 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 and 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 and better methods. He current searches for typo-squatter domains. Have you ever tried to enter the URL of one of your favorite sites and 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 and had the traffic forward to another one of his sites. This page contained PPC links that when clicked, would generate cash for guess who? That’s right, Kevin Ham! Ham and his crew are not stopping at .cm. He also has his eyes on (.om) which belongs to Oman and (.co) which belongs to Columbia.

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