JuliannaA group of Vancouver-based domainers have been receiving a lot of media attention lately. For those of you not familiar with the term, ‘domainers’ are domain name investors in the business of buying, selling, and monetizing traffic on parked domain names. And according to Nathan Vanderklippe’s article in last weekend’s Financial Post, “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”. 
The article came on the heals of Business 2.0 Magazine’s cover story about Vancouver resident Kevin Ham, proclaiming him “the most powerful dotcom mogul you have never heard of”. Arguably the most successful domainer in the world, little was known about Ham until recently. A medical doctor and devout Christain who owns the domains god.com and satan.com, Dr. Ham’s domain empire is estimated to be worth 400 million dollars and potentially billions in coming years. Other notable British Columbian’s who have built fortunes through domaining include Penticton’s Gary Chernoff who owns virus.com, a domain envied by both the pharmaceutical and software industries and numerous others who bring the total worth of BC’s domain investors to a conservative billion dollars.
Generic, non-trademarked names – like virus.com, or laptop.com and attorneys.com owned by Dr. Ham – are the biggest money makers. Why? Because people frequently type them directly into their browser – called direct navigation – instead of search engines like Google. And every time a link or ad gets clicked on these parked pages, the domain owner gets paid. Each of these domainers has a portfolio of names years in the making, some fortuitously registered in the early days, others bought off other domain investors for their traffic potential.
As to why so many successful domainers call Vancouver home, Jay Westerdal at DomainTools Blog speculates its because “the top domainers in Vancouver starting talking early on … as everyone was figuring things out the hard way, 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.” And who said networking was a waste of time?
Read the Article:
Business 2.0 Magazine’s “The Man Who Owns the Internet”
The Financial Post’s “BC’s Domain Masters”