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Forget condos and strip malls. Domain names, the real estate of the Web, have been delivering far greater returns. How some of the savviest speculators on the Net are making millions from their URL portfolios.

By Paul Sloan
December 1, 2005

(Business 2.0) – On a balmy night in late October, hundreds of partiers, most sporting red or blue Hawaiian shirts, pack the Delux nightclub in Delray Beach, Fla. It's a swank place--outdoor decks, two bars, plush, bed-size sofas scattered throughout--and the crowd arrives in chartered buses and stretch Hummers. Many head straight for the guy rolling cigars and toss back shots as if it were 1999. Which, to them, it might as well be.

They call themselves domainers. They make their living buying and selling domain names and turning their Web traffic into cash--lots of it. They have gathered in Delray Beach for a trade show called Traffic that this year boasts 300 paying attendees, more than twice the number that came for the first show, in '04.

The man behind the conference, Rick Schwartz, couldn't be happier--and he isn't even around when midnight strikes and bikini-clad women take to the dance floor to raffle off prizes and peel off their tops. Schwartz, 52, began buying up domain names 10 years ago. Like many early players, he gravitated to where the money was: porn. He snapped up names like Ass.com, Makeout.com, and Porno.com, to name a few. It was a quick path to riches: Adult sites were paying handsomely for the traffic; mainstream sites were not--at least not yet.DominiosIDN.com ||

That's why some domain names are commanding six- and seven-figure price tags and attracting big-money players. Private money manager Stuart Rabin is cutting those sorts of checks to domainers two to three times a week. In November 2004, Marchex shelled out $164 million for a single domainer's portfolio. Even a few venture capital firms are now placing bets. Earlier this year, Boston-based Highland Capital paid $80 million to acquire BuyDomains, a company with 500,000 names, according to people familiar with the deal. Says Highland principal Richard de Silva, who wouldn't confirm the price, "These are profit machines."

Domainers have their heroes, and one of the most mysterious is a man named Yun Ye, a Chinese citizen living in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is credited with boosting the entire market when he sold his portfolio of more than 100,000 domains to Marchex. His names were bringing in more than $20 million a year in revenues--and $19 million in profits--when Marchex paid the equivalent of 8.6 times annual earnings, based on figures provided in SEC documents.

"He is our god," says domainer Michael Bahlitzanakis the moment he hears Ye's name uttered at a Delray Beach party. Every domainer knows of Ye, but few have ever met him. He's the domainers' Keyser Soze. "My attorney happens to be his attorney, but that's as close to him as I can get," says Bahlitzanakis, 29.

A onetime hotshot programmer, Ye used his software chops to build the bulk of his domain empire in the late '90s and early 2000s. He became a master at what's known as "catching," or buying up domains that were dropping because people gave up on them or forgot to pay the annual registration fee. At the time, the system was secretive, and domainers were trying to figure out what names were expiring and when. In the dark of night, Ye would sit before a bank of computers and, like a conductor, launch programs he wrote to shoot rapid-fire requests to purchase names.

His prowess quickly became clear. Chad Folkening, a domainer in Indianapolis, was disorganized in those years and sometimes missed renewal deadlines. He noticed that Ye was grabbing his expired names with lightning speed. After Ye had snapped up 100 of them, Folkening decided he needed to talk to Ye. "I was eating, sleeping, and drinking Yun Ye," he says. E-mail drew no response. Nor did phone calls. So in late 2001, Folkening traveled to an address near San Jose listed on Ye's domain registrations. "I figured I was going to walk up to his front door, knock, and say, 'Yun Ye, I just had to meet you,'" says Folkening, who now owns 7,000 names. Instead, the address led him to a Mail Boxes Etc. outlet. Folkening stuck Post-It notes on Ye's box asking him to call. Ye sent Folkening an e-mail a couple of days later, but the two never met up. Two years later, some acquaintances of Folkening's set up a get-together with Ye in a Los Angeles bar. "I did most of the talking, then he left," Folkening recalls. It wasn't until the next day that it dawned on Folkening that the man he'd had drinks with was probably an entirely different Yun Ye, which the real Ye confirmed to him in an e-mail. (Ye's attorney, John Barryhill, says Ye won't talk to the press, and he adds, "I don't answer questions about him.")

When Ye was building his portfolio, there was really only one way to make money from names--reselling them. That began to change in 2003 as paid search--developed and pushed by Overture, now part of Yahoo, and current market leader Google--started to take off. The technology powering the whole thing is complex, but not the basic business model: Advertisers pay only when someone clicks on their ads. And to get their links listed high in search results--or on a domainer's page that someone lands on by typing a name into a Web browser--they bid on keywords.DominiosIDN.com ||

One of those suitors is Rabin, a soft-spoken man who keeps a white handkerchief tucked into his suit jacket pocket. Rabin runs a private fund called Jacobson Family Investments from the 56th floor of Carnegie Hall Tower, a suite with sweeping views of Central Park and uptown New York City. It's a fitting view, since the Internet in 2005 looks to Rabin a lot like Manhattan 100 years ago--awash in real estate opportunities.

Rabin teamed up a year ago with a Harvard-trained finance whiz named Bob Martin and domain speculator Marc Ostrofsky. They named their company Internet REIT and, according to Ostrofsky, are spending $250 million, probably far more, buying out domain owners as fast as they can find good names. (Ostrofsky, for the record, was the man who pulled off the much-publicized sale of Business.com for a reported $7.5 million in December 1999.)

When Martin and Ostrofsky approached Rabin about forming a business, Rabin knew little about domains. Then he did some research and was astounded. Type-in traffic is a growing phenomenon, the fixed costs are minimal, and U.S. advertisers are expected to spend $26 billion on the Internet by 2010--roughly double the current level. He immediately thought of the billboard industry a decade ago, before Clear Channel and Viacom bought up the small operators. "We've only just begun the roll-up phase," says Rabin, 39. "This market will likely be in the billions."

The team of Martin, Ostrofsky, and Rabin is working the Delray Beach conference hard. Ostrofsky, the salesguy, dives right in: "What are your names? What's your monthly traffic? What kind of multiple are you looking for?" Ostrofsky pulls aside Bahlitzanakis, the Ye worshiper. Bahlitzanakis, who works from his apartment in Queens, N.Y., owns fewer than 100 names, but at least one is a gem: Cellphones.com. The site--a plain page with relevant links--makes an average of $1,300 a day.

Bahlitzanakis spends his last night in Delray Beach at an Internet REIT party, tossing back Grey Goose vodka and tonics. He returns to his hotel room in the early morning to find a contract under his door. Total price: $4.2 million. He paid $90 for the name in 1996. "I just went to my 10th high school reunion, and I thought to myself, 'Who's laughing now?'" Bahlitzanakis says.

Ostrofsky talks about fuzzy concepts like "mindshare" when it comes to evaluating a name. But like all the top domainers, he and his crew also analyze traffic data. Internet REIT figures it will run some of its sites, like Officesupply.com, as virtual stores, with links to suppliers and products. But they're expecting that the pay-per-click model will drive the business.

From his office in Houston, Ostrofsky trolls the Web late each night to find prospective sellers. That's how he ended up negotiating with Marie and Bob Benz at their home in Philadelphia one evening in September. The couple, both doctors, began buying names in 1995 as a hobby. They bought some they liked--Heartdisease.com, Highbloodpressure.com, Athletesfoot.com. In some cases, they developed the sites and added content; in others, they set them up as simple landing pages with relevant advertising links.

After an evening of talk, Ostrofsky and the Benzes reached a deal, and Internet REIT is paying $3.6 million for their 101 names. Says Bob Benz, who specializes in kidney diseases, "It's a lot more lucrative than being a doctor."

Plenty of things could spoil the domainers' party. Internet advertising could turn south. Click fraud, in which someone writes a program that repeatedly clicks on paying links, could become a bigger problem for the paid search industry, making advertisers reluctant to spend. The model itself could change entirely. Or sites could become so commercial that Web surfers sour on them.DominiosIDN.com ||

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