連美國大企業家都開始投入域名事業

[哈啦]

也許還有很多版友平常遇到人問買域名做什麼時，不太會向人說是想來投資或投機獲利 ，總覺得域名投資買賣像是有點「不務正業」，不過這個觀念可能將逐漸消去了。

有一則報導指出，美國有愈來愈多的大企業家也親自投入了域名買賣的事業，當然他們買賣域名都是砸大筆錢買下許多域名，而以之賺取流量作為第一要務，遇到有人要買個別的域名再另外談。可是顯然網路時代裡，域名作為「虛擬地產」的地位已經無庸置疑了。

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/sil...l/16552993.htm

Cyberspace land grab
DOMAIN NAMES BACK IN BUSINESS AS BIG MONEY SEEKS HOT PROPERTY
By Constance Loizos
Mercury News
You might not think of generic Internet addresses like Carbs.com as the beachfront property of the Web, but plenty of financial heavy-hitters do, and they're snapping up such real estate -- fast.

Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz, billionaire Ross Perot and Richard Rosenblatt, former chief executive of MySpace and its parent, Intermix Media, are just three of those attempting to build sprawling businesses around Web domains.
星巴克主席Howard Schultz，億萬富翁Ross Perot (應該就是以前出來選過總統那個裴洛)，和myspace.com前執行長以及其母公司Intermix Media，正是三個剛投入網域名稱事業的代表人物。


And the list is growing. ``As of late 2004, it wasn't obvious to us that you could turn domains into a real business, but that's definitely proving to be the case,'' said Jeff Horing, a venture capitalist with Insight Venture Partners in New York.

Why are these properties so hot? It owes to a rapidly growing phenomenon known as direct navigation, in which people skip search engines and instead try to find things directly online. The investors are trying to transform generic domains such as Golflink.com into easy-to-find sites that will draw enthusiasts and, consequently, advertisers.

Little wonder, given the opportunity. According to the investment bank RBC Capital Markets, direct navigation was expected to generate $650 million in sales in the United States last year, and it estimates the business could hit $800 million this year. The money is largely coming from display advertising at the sites, which is shared with search giants such as Yahoo and Google.

Publicly traded Marchex, a search optimization company, first captured the attention of industry observers when it paid $164 million for the Name Development company -- owner of roughly 100,000 Internet addresses, including Debts.com -- in late 2004. Since then, a number of other, well-funded competitors have sought to roll up domain businesses.

VC interest

Houston-based Internet REIT, for example, owns more than 400,000 domain names and a growing number of overseas addresses and has raised more than $20 million from investors including Perot Investments and Maveron, the Seattle-based venture capital firm founded by Schultz, to keep buying.

Richard Rosenblatt, who sold Intermix to News Corp. in 2005 for $580 million, is also amassing hundreds of thousands of addresses, using $220 million that his 10-month-old start-up, Demand Media in Santa Monica, has raised from several venture capital firms.

Then there's Internet Real Estate Group, whose first foray into Internet addresses came in 1998, when it spent $80,000 to acquire 80 percent of Beer.com from a 20-year-old who was ``mostly posting photos of his friends throwing up beer,'' said company co-founder Andrew Miller.

Despite making more than $20 million since then -- including by selling Beer.com to a Belgian brewery for $7 million -- Internet Real Estate Group has also grown more interested in buying and keeping domains than in selling them and -- surprise -- it is now trying to raise upward of $100 million from VCs and private equity firms to do exactly that.

Hot in demand

It might want to hurry things along. Buying domains ``was a great opportunity a year ago, but the price of domains is beginning to become much more efficient,'' said Roger Lee, a venture capitalist with Battery Ventures in Menlo Park.

Another looming question about such roll-ups is whether people will keep coming.

Demand Media is building a platform that allows for user-generated content and social networking across its sundry sites. Yet most of Demand Media's sites are little more than computer-generated directories.

It's a risky strategy, says analyst Bryce Lane of the Minneapolis-based investment bank Mercati Group, who recently published a report on the feverish activity around domains. ``There's tons of demand right now for traffic, but populating these sites with B-minus content or worse could turn people off from visiting at all.''

But investor appetite for these sites doesn't appear to be disappearing anytime soon. Given direct navigation's ability to attract at least some traffic and thus some advertising revenue for practically free, it may be too efficient to fail.

``Right now, there are still a lot of people and ad dollars coming online,'' Horing said. ``I don't think this is going to play out too badly for the speculators.''

[ranit]

现在进入还不算晚

[muchunfeng]

really,it's unimaginable!