Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of. You could actually say that he owns the internet. Weddingcatering.com. Hoteldeals.com. Laptop.com. These are only a few of the domain names the multi-millionaire has acquired over the years. Between 2000 and 2007, he quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, at its peak, generated an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. Kevin Ham saw a window of opportunity in the early days of the internet that no one else saw, and he pursued it aggressively. Between 2004 and 2007 alone, the number of dotcom names grew by more than 130%—to 66 million domains. Every two seconds, a new name joined the list. And Ham was there to buy up all the good ones. Here are three incredibly clever …show more content…
For example, a web surfer looking for an HDTV box might type HDTV.com into the address bar, or someone looking for Spanish lessons might type “Spanish” and the browser would add the .com. Weddingshoes.com—which Ham owns—takes you to a shoe-shopping portal filled with ads and links to shoe retailers. If you click on one of those links, Ham gets a cut of the revenue. He bought that site for $8. Now it brings him $9,100 a year, which might not seem like a huge sum to you. But when you consider how many domains Ham has set up this way, you start to get an idea of how profitable the business really is. Ham realized the value in buying URLs with searchable names early on. He developed software that generated massive lists of domain words in every possible combination. He registered the ones that sounded right to him. For example: Greetingcards.com seemed more likely to attract traffic than