The Man Who Owns The Internet

I am going to reprint a post that I did in June 2007. I think it provided excellent tips for building and creating wealth. The article title, "The Man Who Owns The Internet.

I was at the airport a couple of days ago, in Baltimore Maryland waiting for my flight to depart for Cleveland, Ohio so I decided to browse through the bookstore to pass some time. There was a magazine entitled, “ Business 2.0” that caught my attention. It was right there in living color and the caption on the cover read as follows:“The man Who owns the internet”. Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom Mogul you’ve never heard of. The story was by Paul Sloan.Here’s how the master of web domains built his $300 million dollar empire.

That really got my attention so I purchased the magazine. It outlined the strategy he used to accomplish that feat which basically consisted of purchasing expired domain names which were still hanging out there after the dotcom bust.Fascinating I thought. I read further. One particular day he purchased $650,000 in expired domains by way of bidding at an auction in Las Vegas.

The article goes on to say this was a cheap day. Turns out Kevin put his medical career on hold after he starting receiving income in the neighborhood of $40,000 per month from expired domain names. It was not too long afterwards that Kevin and his wife were moving out of his one-bedroom apartment. I am going to go out on a limb and say this, I don’t think he will ever treat a patient.Since 2000 he has gobbled up over 300,000 domains that generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue, which Kevin would neither confirm nor deny.

Kevin’s last sentence in this article was, “If you control all the domains, ‘then you control the internet."This article gave a lot of detail but here is the part I found amazing. Whenever you go to a browser to type in a web address and lets say by mistake you key in .cm at the end instead of .com. Well you are automatically routed to a website called Agoga.com owned by Kevin, and this site is filled with ads supplied by yahoo.

If you click on the ads Kevin makes money as does his partner.Who is his partner? You’re going to love this. It’s Cameroon which is a West African country. Why Cameroon ? It’s because .cm is the country code for Cameroon so Kevin made the trip to West Africa to work out a deal with the Cameroon government for permission to use the .cm. In return the city of Cameroon will receive an undisclosed amount of compensation.It gets even better, but I won’t go into all the details.

Looks like he came up with creative ways to attain Wealth Beyond Measure. Of course there is the usual legal issues with some major corporations claiming there is an abuse of trademark, or he thinks this could happen in the future. Those things, however are for the attorneys to decide.What was also good to hear was Christianity had long been a mainstay with his family.

Ham it says will frequently steer conversations about business back to the bible. Even as an undergrad, the article says, “he made the bible a focal point of his life.

A friend from church introduced him to the web in 1992 or 1993 and told him that there was a powerful new medium to spread the gospel.He has other ambitious goals on the horizon but you can get those from the magazine. Well until the next time……

To your Great Success
Mel Richardson - Speaker - Coach - Visionary
VisionStar Enterprises