Yun Ye - Best Blogs Asia
Profile of Yun Ye and how he made $19 million in profits per Year from his domain portfolio!
I did some research on one of the biggest domain owner’s in the early 2000’s (last count he owned 100,000 domains!) and found out how he got so rich from his sites by earning $19 million profit per year.
About Yun Ye
He was a programmer and used custom software to buy domains in the 1990’s to early 2000s’. He and his company, Ultimate Search Inc managed to get the best domains by employing a system of “Drop Catching” which involves buying up sites which people gave up on or forgot to pay the fees on (Something which sites like Pool and Snapnames are doing today). He bought single keyworded domains, typos to random worded domains.
At the beginning he was making money from buying and selling domains, until paid searches and domain parking was introduced which is a system where an advertiser pays only when someone clicks on an advert on your site. He then later sold his portfolio to Marchex.
About Marchex
Marchex has developed from a series of investors to a local search company. They bought the domains, linked them up with advertisers who support local information services, Yelp and Localese sites to match relevant data to their domains.
What sites did he own?
Yun Ye and his practices were notabily well hidden. He operated under the site of noname.com and owned sites such as:
childabuse.org, traditions.com, Beijing.com, cuisine.com, MiamiMotels.com, DetroitResorts.com, oscarnet.com…
How to make money from Domains?
I touched on this at the Most Expensive Domains, but there is a prestige in owning a single keyworded preferably dot.com domain. The secret of how they make money is from type-in traffic, using the example of:
“Looking to buy candy? Type in Candy.com, a page filled with links to candy-related products comes up. Click on one of the ads and the advertiser pays Google, which in turn sends a share to the Candy.com owner.”
There’s also domain parking facilities such as Sedo, which don’t require any web site design at all – just point the domain to their servers and wait for the payments.
Conclusion
He later sold his domain portfolio to Marchex, who paid $164 million back in 2005. The reason why he sold his portfolio could have been due to the pressure he faced from companies/individuals who felt he was “cyber-squatting” names. He’s now become a recluse, but is probably still based in Vancover, Canada or in Hong Kong.
Reading about him makes me want to jump on the bandwagon also, although my feeling is most of the unique keyworded domains have already been snapped up, there is potential for buying mis-spelt names and country specific names also.
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