DomainTools Blog

It is an extremely rare case when Business 2.0 puts an anonymous unknown person on the cover, but the editor just did it for the month of June 2007. Kevin Ham is the biggest person on the Internet that no one knows about. Kevin had been under the radar for such a long time that even other famous domainers did not know who he was. Kevin’s portfolio is huge and throws off more cash than even Frank Schilling’s. To put that in perspective, Frank is currently the most well-known domainer in the world with some 320,000 domains and several million dollars in income a month.

I wrote about Kevin’s company Reinvent Technology in April as did Frank, but I didn’t go into a lot of detail. Paul Sloan has done an awesome job in his cover story on Kevin.

The headline is “Here’s how the master of Web domains built his $300 million empire”. When I saw the headline I was shocked that Paul had given Kevin such a low evaluations. I talked with Paul and he said if he had it to do over he would have changed the headline from $300 Million to $400 Million. Even that is an understatement. I would put Kevin between $500M to a Billion. But the value of his company in the future will be worth Billions and not Hundreds of Million like the article says.

Kevin’s Business partner Colin Yu was not touched on much. I think if I wrote the article, I would focus more on the two of them - they are a good team and founded the company together. Everyone wants to talk about Bill Gates and Batman, but Paul Allen or Robin deserve credit as well. I can see a follow up story on Colin one day.

Kevin is a devout Christian and his domains show it, He owns God.com, Satan.com, ChristianRock.com, and several other Christian related domains. Kevin has some great names and they get traffic. I think the reason Kevin came out of the closet was because he wants to take his business to the next level. I have talked with Dr. Ham a few times and the thing that always impresses me is how humble he is. For a man that is worth so much, you would never guess it if you met him in an elevator or saw him in a cafe. The best Domainers are very down to earth - I think that is why I love this industry so much.

Name Intelligence was asked to provide some color for the article so we supplied some registration stats on the growth of dotcom and other TLDs. It goes to show that the space is young and the registration rate is not slowing. In the chart to the right, we can see the cooling effect that the dotcom crash had on the market. But what people don’t realize is that millions of domain names were artificially inflating numbers in 2000. Network Solutions was invoicing clients for domains rather then charging for the domains, so some domains were existing on the Internet for free. After the registration process switched completely over to Verisign and the 1990’s invoicing practice stopped, we can see the registrations volume started to turn back up and there was sort of a second boom.

I have already predicted we will crack 100 Million dotcoms in the next few years. There is no signs things are slowing down. A lot of people wonder how many domains can be left to register, but I have to remind people there are millions upon millions of them. Just today I registered the three names. Some of the people that enter the market today will be millionaires in a few years. There is always room for smart people in this Industry. I like to remind people this is the 1880s of domain names and that we have decades in front of us. Domains that trade for 10K today will be trading for Millions in a few years. Porn.com failed to sell for $7.5 Million in March and one month later it sold for over $9 Million. We saw Sahar Sarid start from nothing after reading about Business.com in a magazine. It proves that anyone can start late and make it big.

The value of generic domain names is going up and the registration rate on city names, suburbs, local names, and new concepts is spiking. I find domains that are still unregistered and often wonder how so many people missed the name.