The Man Squatting on Millions of Dollars Worth of Domain Names

[bill]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-man-squatting-on-millions-of-dollars-worth-of-domain-names [motherboard.vice.com]

The Man Squatting on Millions of Dollars Worth of Domain Names

In case you haven't heard, everything is about branding these days, personal or otherwise. And one early internet entrepreneur is banking on the idea that, in order to have a strong #brand, you need a strong domain to go with it.

So, for the last 21 years, Gary Millin and his colleagues at World Accelerator have been slowly accumulating a veritable treasure trove of seemingly premium "generic" domain names. For instance, Millin owns, has sold, or has bartered away world.com, usa.com, doctor.com, lawyer.com, comic.com, email.com, cyberservices.com, and more than 1,000 other domain names that can be yours (including yours.com, which he owns), as long as you've got the startup idea to back it up.

[edited by: bill at 5:22 am (utc) on Feb 9, 2015]

[lucy24]

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Goodness. How did that sneak into the middle of a word?

It's also good for faking out Twitter's annoying URL rewriter; if you stick a ZWS in the middle of a domain name then Twitter won't rewrite your text with a t.co redirect.

It is, of course, sheer coincidence that the word involved was ... "domain".

Every time I discover that the .com version of some name I know in its .ca form is just sitting there unclaimed, I scurry to register it precisely so the dragons won't get their hands on it. Neener-neener.

[RedBar]

In case you haven't heard, everything is about branding these days, personal or otherwise.

I have to disagree but not EVERYTHING is about branding, no matter how good your branding is IF you have a crap product you still have a crap product. One may be able to fool a few however many, most probably the majority, will see through the BS.