Despite what you may have heard, the domain name business is definitely not dead. Just ask Frank Schilling, who owns more than 380,000 domain names and runs a development and brokering business worth $350 to $500 million or more from the Cayman Islands.
( i I9 k2 y. n- M- @- p- n/ ?0 ~& t* x# y! ~5 b1 O* e. k: |
When Schilling was a newbie in 1999, he decided to get in the business of driving traffic towards gambling sites. At the time, aggregators were earning $25 per click for gambling site clicks. Schilling figured he would push enough traffic to other sites to eventually earn enough to start an online casino of his own.Things backfired when regulators banned online casinos and cracked down on Internet gambling. That』s when Schilling realized he could make solid money off of non-gambling domain names through type-in-traffic. That』s the traffic that comes from users who enter in their search phrases as an address rather than into Google. When the site comes up, if it has been developed by an aggregator, it links users to many other related sites. These aggregators earn cash for every click-through.4 M: u9 @+ {' D! w/ U$ y: P4 `
0 H+ U# c3 g) r% h
Schilling came across names as simple as CeilingFans.com, learning that ceiling fan companies would pay as much as $1 for every referred click.
- P- O4 g% G% p: U- R5 FThen fate smiled on Schilling. The dot-com bust of 2000 caused many to conclude that the Internet had gone the way of the CB radio. Companies began dumping their domain names at super cheap prices. Schilling swooped in to buy them.
' W0 b4 @0 H" ^$ ]
6 q; b* M6 v: q' t4 dSchilling decided to go beyond seeking one-word blockbuster domains, opting for two and three-word compound terms. He picked up names like DrugProblem.com, AntiguaHotels.com and DiamondWeddingRings.com. Perhaps his best compound-word domain belongs to his own site, DomainNameSales.com.
: ^* P9 T% P& c+ z D; p8 K5 ~- \/ v2 g7 F; P& T! ~- r9 Q, Y
Schilling』s domain name portfolio business – which totals four employees and three computers – monetizes domain names, brokers them and aggregates traffic. And Schilling says there』s plenty more room for new domainers.
: n' g- S" i$ y# v$ t
+ J) ]- I4 O) N2 t0 k" g「If you understand marketing and television, pop culture and how the psyche of people sort of works, I think you could easily carve out a six-figure income today in the domain business.」
; d I! B7 |1 u7 SSchilling himself recently purchased JailBroken.com, keeping in mind all of the iPhone jailbreak applications out there. |
|