Kevin Ham - Vancouver.com

[jasdon11]

Where has the info originated? $5 to $10 Mil is a wiiiiide range, no?

And I believe that Mr Ham has roots in Vancouver - maybe nothing else (to excite him) available at the mo to soak up a few tax dollars.....

I don't see this as a sale (if correct) based strictly on market conditions.

 

[PRED]

Where has the info originated? $5 to $10 Mil is a wiiiiide range, no?

And I believe that Mr Ham has roots in Vancouver - maybe nothing else (to excite him) available at the mo to soak up a few tax dollars.....

I don't see this as a sale (if correct) based strictly on market conditions.

I tend to agree. I see both sides. This is unsubstantiated, also with Ham, we will never know what he's up to. Also, it's a business he's buying by the sounds, the domain & site at the core, but a lot of hardwork not just a domain sale, the business with it.
Having said that, we are on a surge at the moment, no doubt.
Makes me wonder why the sales section on this forum seems so dead.
I for one am developing at the moment, thats where the real 'honey' is :smilewinkgrin:

 

[tonyfloyd]

screw Kevin Ham...........you wanna impress me.....buy the country of Cameroon....instead of the .cm.......and then i'll be impressed...

 

[Bill Roy]

Hey, don't give him ideas!

I am sure he has even looked into it, especially with some of the small island domain suffixes.

 

[PalmBeach]

BUSINESS 2.0 article he Ham predicted the future as he saw it:

Ham is taking a longer view. The Web, he says, is becoming cluttered with parked pages. The model is amazingly efficient -- lots of money for little work --but Ham argues that Internet users will soon grow weary of it all. He also expects Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to find ways to effectively combat typo-squatting. Some browsers can already fix typos; Internet Explorer catches unregistered domains and redirects visitors to a Microsoft page -- in effect controlling traffic the same way that Ham is doing with .cm. "The heat is rising," Ham says.
When Ham buys a domain now, he's not doing pay-per-click math but rather sizing it up as a potential business. Reinvent Technology aims to turn his most valuable names into mini media companies, based on hundreds of niche categories.

Vancover.com may be gone but [FONT=arial, helvetica, sanserif]VANCOVERSENIORS.COM is not
[/FONT]

 

[tonyfloyd]

vancover???:?:

 

[PRED]

BUSINESS 2.0 article he Ham predicted the future as he saw it:

Ham is taking a longer view. The Web, he says, is becoming cluttered with parked pages. The model is amazingly efficient -- lots of money for little work --but Ham argues that Internet users will soon grow weary of it all. He also expects Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo to find ways to effectively combat typo-squatting. Some browsers can already fix typos; Internet Explorer catches unregistered domains and redirects visitors to a Microsoft page -- in effect controlling traffic the same way that Ham is doing with .cm. "The heat is rising," Ham says.
When Ham buys a domain now, he's not doing pay-per-click math but rather sizing it up as a potential business. Reinvent Technology aims to turn his most valuable names into mini media companies, based on hundreds of niche categories.
[FONT=arial, helvetica, sanserif][/FONT]

agreed. thanks for posting.
i think this is what most domainers have thought for a while. it's commonsense.
i for one would never buy a typo, certainly never pay more than regfee.
there are that do, pay fortunes. traffic can come, it can go. for all the reasons mentioned above, they are deadmans shoes
i won't be weeping for domainers who just park or owned typos & never had an idea in their life. develop or sell your best domains to someone who will dvelop, it benefits us all.
development is the key to more fulfillment & stacks more cash imo. pick something you know about & are interested/passionate in, or it will soon find you out.
anyway, must fly.
just Pred's 2 pennies worth :smilewinkgrin:

 

[RazorNF]

Keep in mind, the entire world will be looking up Vancouver in a few years with the upcoming winter Olympics.... I'm sure this was a big factor in the decision to purchase...

 

[PalmBeach]

I’m a terrible speller. A little dyslectic I think. I have lost come great domains because I did not check the spelling;-( In any case VancouverBoomers.com is available. I think GEO Domains hold a lot of potential.

Kevin Ham
"It's time to build out the virtual real estate," Ham says. "There's so much more value in these names than pay-per-click." Seeman's patent application even mentions the possibility of turning Web traffic from Cameroon and other future foreign partners into full-fledged portals.

 

[DomainsInc]

What everyone seems to miss is that these huge sales are few and far inbetween, sure they might come in clusters but just because x sold for 1 mil, doesn't mean y's value will increase (or should increase). A large part of prices being the way they are is due to resellers. Resellers make meaningless LLL's worth 5-10k even when they have no real means to end users. A market can't live on reselling forever and end user sales here and there. Prices will go up, sometimes go down. Thats how it see it anyways.

 

[Bill Roy]

We are not on about your basic ru-of-the-mill reseller here!

If you look at the results so far this year you will already see a massive jump in prices generally. It is now recognised (I feel) by more and more domainers - and especially the real big guns - that keyword domains that can be developed will sell for xx times cost of present purchase and all development costs. This is what is now fuelling the markets.

Develope, Develope, Develope! From here on in forget parking, make a site from a keyword domain and if promising then invest in it to build more and more traffic.

Also remember that most big sales do not get reported, we only see the tip of the iceburg.

 

[DomainsInc]

We are not on about your basic ru-of-the-mill reseller here!

If you look at the results so far this year you will already see a massive jump in prices generally. It is now recognised (I feel) by more and more domainers - and especially the real big guns - that keyword domains that can be developed will sell for xx times cost of present purchase and all development costs. This is what is now fuelling the markets.

Develope, Develope, Develope! From here on in forget parking, make a site from a keyword domain and if promising then invest in it to build more and more traffic.

Also remember that most big sales do not get reported, we only see the tip of the iceburg.

I am not talking about people like Kevin Ham, there are only a handful of people like him who could buy and sell the entire domaining world if they wanted to but there will not be many more people like him in the coming years. People like him got to where they are by getting in before anyone even knew what a "domainer" was. Those people are locked in.

There is a much larger number of "average" people chasing the dream that was achieved by Ham in todays market, which is just that..a dream. These people will pay over inflated prices thinking that prices will only continue to rise and its the only way to get the domain so they do it without thinking about much else. As time goes on more and more of these kinds of people will be priced out of the market but is the rising market price really built on something solid? I don't know. Resellers are largely creating these prices themselves. And yeah, many big sales go unreported but there are only so many companies who will continue to think paying these huge prices is a good idea. If they don't see return on these investments, the end user market could sour to some degree.

 

[Bill Roy]

DomainsInc (DI), the price rises are generally built upon advertising revenue hitting the internet, this is the solid foundation that you enquired about. This is the same solid foundation that supported newspapers, radio, and television in the past. Now the advertising dollars are streaming toward the internet and away from traditional media (see above).

This source of income for domainers/website owners has generally only been given lip-service in the past as especially domainers just accepted the few cents parking companies paid them. Now though domains are being developed as more and more domainers realise that they have been giving money to the parking companies for basically very little in return. Let us say conservatively that a domainer who develops simply doubles his income from his domain, this immediately doubles (or more) the value of that domain. Now also increase the amount of advertising dollars being spent on the internet (annual average increase of 30+% per year recently) and you will see that again this will again add more value to a domain name.

Reselling is all well and good but it becomes, as you point out, inevitably unsustainable. Look to the future with what is available in advertising, and you may well be surprised just how many Kevin's there end up being. It is therefore not the end-user market that will sour but the reseller-reseller market that will sour.

 

[Giode]

Of course there is still opportunity out there! Like everything in life, those that succeed want it more than you do--plain and simple!

When Christian Chena started getting into domains in 2002, it was also thought to be "to late". You think he cared?

Seeing what Kevin Ham is doing just excites me! He still owns a very, very small portfolio of domains when you look at the big picture.

 

[GT Web]

Kevin Ham is the guy who controls the .cm registry. Traffic from the vast majority of .cm typos is monetized by the Ham-man himself. He made a deal with the government of Cameroon which generates hundreds of thousands of visitors per day to his "search engine" (parked page).

That's how he is able to finance a deal like this.

 

[whitebark]

I personally don't like the idea of the big boys developing their generics into websites instead of parking. Because now they are just more competition on the search engines where the small players at least stood a chance of earning nice dollars. When they keep them parked they keep open avenues for others. But being that development pays more, and they know it, it's only a matter of time before they are all developed.

Larger problem comes down the road when every good domain is owned by the same couple hundred people. Once that happens, like every other industry they will start to buy each other up and only a few very large players will remain.

 

[typist]

there must be a reason some people will pay high prices for some names, what do they know? people like ham and schilling must have a good feel for the domain business by having stats on so many names.

Very true.

Most of us are essientially in the dark, while people like Frank S., Vaxis and Bonkers have gathered data which support seemingly excessive bids.

(...and here I wanted to write something about Kevin Ham porking out. lame, isn't it).

 

[BonkersTwo]

People on a domain board accused me on not knowing what a domain is worth when I paid $25k+ for artichoke.com

So kevin paid more than $1 million for a city name like vancouver, so what is next?

I know someone is buying DigitalCameras.com from Rick Godwin for $560k, Kevin owns the singular, so I assume it is Kevin.

 

[PalmBeach]

Hello
Their are lots of good domains that businesses want to purchase and can be developed. Think about all the possibles..... All the Geo domains that are available around the world..WORLD. YOU are on the frontier of a Global Market. You all have an inside track. You are way ahead of the curve .........Imagen the potabilities and prosper @ 1K at a time;-)

 

[Bill Roy]

BT, don't worry what others think, a few of us realise that domains are generally undervalued and realise that a big swing upward is about to take place.

We are seeing the beginning of the domaining industry growing up and understanding the financial principles involved in domaining and website development and internet marketing. Up till now we belonged to a type of Gentlemans Club (and Ladies club of course) where values were generally set by artificial agreement between the members, now the real world is starting to take effect upon the market. In the real world where could you purchase a business for 1 - 3 years annual profit?

By the way this is not another DotCom bubble as many would have you think (especially those ignorant of the facts), this time it is based on cold hard cash advertising revenue!

By the way Artichoke.com was a fair price paid, but not excessive as long as you have plans for it (definately please do something, anything, just so long as you do not just park it).

PalmBeach - Well said.