There’s one extremely long (but worth the read) article over at Business 2.0 magazine about a few of the big players in the domain name squatting game.

I thought that this was a business that didn’t really exist too much anymore. Apparently I was wrong. With auto-complete features of browsers and bookmarks etc I hardly ever have to type in a full domain. If I did by mistake and landed at some page full of ads I’d close it before bothering to read any of the ads. It boggles my mind to see how there’s still enough money to be made in what is effectively tricking people into visiting a page full of ads. I’m also a little bit jealous like “Why the hell didn’t I do that?”.

I registered my first domain in 1998 and back then it already seemed that all the meaningful .coms were taken. Looking at this graph it looks like either I was very very wrong, or these guys have registered 10 spelling mistakes for every legitimate domain…

The main focus of the article, Kevin Ham, has basically managed to “bribe” the country of Cameroon “.cm” into sending anything dot cm to his website and then giving them a cut of revenues. Also because he hasn’t technically registered the domains he isn’t legally squatting. Pretty damn sneaky…

I think as with most things about the internet though there’s a few success stories and probably hundreds of thousands of guys out there that didn’t make any money. So, congrats to those scumbags in the Cayman Islands and such, wish I was there too…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Web 2.0, Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.