DomainTools Blog

Sevan Derderian joins HitFarm today. This is a huge announcement because Sevan was famous for being the best sales person at DomainSponsor. Of the several Parking companies in the industry, DomainSponsor is the most well known because they sponsor so much and send teams of people to any event that has domainers. Sevan knows how to bring in customers and keep them happy. As a senior sales person he did such a good job that he kept meeting all his objectives and always earned his maximum bonus. Sevan and DomainSponsor went different ways because Sevan was too successful and kept hitting ceilings. He was given higher and higher goals and always met them. This sounds like a problem I would love to have as an employer.

Sales people work on commission and work their asses off and keep hustling all the time. You tell a sales person, go find $10 dollars and we will give you $1 dollar. This formula should scale for a long time. The worst thing you can tell a sales person is, you have met your goals, now do the rest for free. They tend to store those new leads for the next quarter or sit on their hands. I met Sevan last night and he was unemployeed and looking for a new company to join. Within an hour he came back over and told me the good news, HitFarm made him an offer and the two are now married. Congratulation Sevan, something tells me he will be the top preforming Sales Person at HitFarm within a few months.

HitFarm is part of the Reinvent company that Kevin Ham and Colin Yu own. Reinvent was made famous when Kevin was featured on the June Cover of Business 2.0. Good hiring decisions like this will keep Kevin on track to own the Internet.

The Canadian Financial Post has an article on how many domainers there are in Vancouver which is titled, “B.C.’s masters of their domain” by Nathan Vanderklippe. It turns out that I have a few quotes in the article. After Paul Sloan’s Kevin Ham cover story in Business 2.0, it seems like everyone in Vancouver that collects domain names is getting more attention. I was asked the question, “So what brings so many domainers to Vancouver?” and I responded “I think it’s something in the water there”. But I think the real answer is the networking the leaders in the space did early on. The top domainers in Vancouver starting talking early on and this gave them a leg up on the rest of the world. Information is the key to building an empire on new technology like domain names. As everyone was figuring things out the hard way, we see those that networked and talked got an information advantage because they may have learned something from a peer before they figured it out on their own.

VANCOUVER -To those not in their tight circle or familiar with the hidden underpinnings of the online world, British Columbia’s domainers are the anonymous nouveau riche. They have none of the star power of their real-world brethren, the Donald Trumps and fellow billionaire property developers whose dealings the world follows with tabloid interest.

But over the past decade, they have quietly made Southern B.C. into the world’s Internet ownership capital, a sort of virtual Manhattan that is home to some of earth’s most valuable addresses. One, who lives in Vancouver, owns god.com, a name so lucrative one fellow domainer said “everybody on Earth” will visit it at one time or another.

A Penticton man owns virus. com, whose value to both the pharmaceutical and software worlds makes it nearly as valuable as a Park Avenue penthouse in New York. Another owns a swollen bank account, after selling his portfolio of 100,000 addresses for US$164-million.

Altogether, B.C.’s Internet owners are worth at least US$1-billion, estimates Jay Westerdal, the president and chief executive of online research firm Name Intelligence Inc.

Read the Full article at the Financial Post.

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.