8 ms·

Meet the 'Mann' who registered 14,962 domains in 24 hours

79 points by mjfern 14y ago

bryanh 14y ago
I've only once been able to snag a domain on the drop (everymentor.com). Though I've tried dozens of times for various domains, I always get beaten to the punch. What kind of resources do these guys have? Hundreds of EC2 instances pounding registrars for good domains? I'm surprised registrars allow it.
- personlurking 14y ago
  I accidentally let one of mine lapse and it was snatched minutes later. The Whois is private so I can't see who bought it, though one thing is for sure, they left the DNS pointing to one of my main blogs (albeit a defunct blog which I deleted yet Blogger never took offline. In turn, the defunct blog has the same name as the the right/original one). I can't get too mad since it still references the right location. Even when out of my hands, I get to stick it to the Mann.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    Beware of that. Don't accept that traffic, all you're doing is helping the current owner of the domain to increase the value of the domain and to put you in a worse position to negotiate.
- RadJacob 14y ago
  most, if not all of the big players in the industry own their own registrar(s)
- mjwalshe 14y ago
  Yep I used to work for a company that owned a Registry (.coop) and the guys that did all ICANN liaison and bidding said threes a LOT of dodgy stuff going on with bots. Domains are to cheap in my opinion.
sidman 14y ago
I dont know what to say ! i get angry when i see a domain name that i want being parked on and going to absolute waste, but on the other hand the business this guy has created and the money he has made could be viewed as a smart hack in some perverse way. He has basically seen a market where no one else did in the early days (or only few did) and has managed to capitalize of it very sweetly (all of which he did skillfully and legally).
- ishansharma 14y ago
  Surely, it is legal and indeed a hack. But still, not morally correct!
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - chevas 14y ago
    It's not amoral. I've been frustrated myself over domains I couldn't get, but I fail to understand how this is amoral. Too often we are quick to make moral judgments based on distaste (of which I share).
    - Dramatize 14y ago
      a·mor·al ( -môr l, -m r -). adj. 1. Not admitting of moral distinctions or judgments; neither moral nor immoral
  - abrichr 14y ago
    After he sold to NameMedia, of which he still owns a 15 percent stake, Mann had a noncompete that kept him away from the domain game for about four years. Instead, he worked on his many other ventures, such as SEO.com and a nonprofit called Grassroots.org. From grassroots.org: The mission of Grassroots.org is to help charities succeed by providing them with modern technologies and best practices at no cost. I don't know if it's morally correct or not, but Mann doesn't otherwise seem like a morally bankrupt individual.
cgag 14y ago
I bought a domain today, and I ended up having to come up with a bunch of synonyms for what I wanted and using a script to see if any of them were available. I guess I support the entrepreneurial spirit, but at the same time I kind of hope that guy gets hit by a truck.
- japhyr 14y ago
  Entrepreneurs build things. Domain snatchers/ squatters are not entrepreneurs.
  - RollAHardSix 14y ago
    Entrepreneurs take advantage of business opportunities. And it IS a business opportunity. Fact is people pay for those domains. Let the down-votes commence.
    - heretohelp 14y ago
      >Let the down-votes commence. In future, omit these kinds of statements. They're pointless and inflammatory and are unwelcome because of that.
    - wpietri 14y ago
      The people who inflated the mortgage-backed securities bubble also "took advantage of business opportunities". That doesn't, in my view, make them entrepreneurs; it makes them antisocial assholes. Of course, it's no surprise that the domain squatting business is populated by similar arrogant jerks. It's not like this idea didn't occur to a lot of other people; the just recognized it as society-negative BS and went and did something useful.
    - laughinghan 14y ago
      A business opportunity being legal and profitable does not make it ethical. My understanding is, the intention behind society's laws and social norms is for all legal and profitable businesses to serve the common good in some small way. What good do squatters do the world, in any way, shape, or form, whatsoever? The effect they have on the world is for good projects to be harder for people to use, by taking up all the good domains. That makes this a bug in our society, that I, at least, would appreciate being addressed.
deniszgonjanin 14y ago
I think we should institute a Homesteading Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle) for domains. You can claim a domain as long as you use it for a legitimate purpose instead of just parking on it. There would be details to hash out for sure, but in the end I think we would have a much better system in place.
- Dramatize 14y ago
  That's a terrible idea. People would just create fake purposes for the websites.. and then who would be responsible to decide if a purpose is legitimate or not?
  - rachelbythebay 14y ago
    Wouldn't it just be a return to the days when domains were free? Back in the mid-'90s, when people I knew registered vanity domains, they tended to come up with some ridiculous expansion of the name to make it look official. Nobody ever checked that "foo" really meant "fraternal otter organization" (or whatever), so those would become the top line in whois.
    - eli 14y ago
      Was that before Network Solutions? I bought a domain in maybe 1996 or 1997 and it was decidedly not free
      - rachelbythebay 14y ago
        Yep. Then it jumped to $100/2 years before competition brought the prices down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#Registry_and_registrar_business http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#Registry_and_... IP space used to be free, too, as long as you could justify it. What times those were.
- elliotanderson 14y ago
  Easily worked around: set up MX records and claim the domain is for email. Website not required
prezjordan 14y ago
Fuck this guy.
citricsquid 14y ago
Vaguely related, a lot of people seem to jump to the conclusion that a domain that is registered and is not in use is automatically someone that bought it and wants to sell it to you at an extortionate rate to "steal" money from hard working "real" entrepreneurs, but how many people here have 1 or more domain that they don't use but did register with honest intentions? I bet most people do. I bet there are people who want your domains. Assuming someone is a squatter and not someone who registered a domain but never used it is silly.
- zachallia 14y ago
  Very true. I have 40 or so domains, but none were purchased as an investment. All because of some random idea I had. Always happy to sell them for totally reasonable prices.
  - epoxyhockey 14y ago
    As someone who has approached others to buy their domain names, what do you consider as a totally reasonable price for an average domain name?
    - trentmb 14y ago
      Not OP, but however much I have already paid is the amount I've parted with a domain or two before. Edit: For example: 2 years @ $10/yr so I sell it for $20.
      - epoxyhockey 14y ago
        Thanks for that info. I usually offer a little more than that, but have never been successful.
    - zachallia 14y ago
      It all depends if i plan on using it or not. If i don't plan on using it, sometimes I'll just give them away for under $100. If I do then there is a price almost always under $1000. I do have one exception, and that is I bought sms.me which I had planned on building, but I got a good offer so that sold for many thousands, but that was their offer not mine. On the flip side, I've bought many domains that I want to use for products ranging from $100 - $30,000 depending on a number of factors.
NatW 14y ago
The article says he claims that he sometimes buys domains via GoDaddy. Why would he use GoDaddy since he can get them from cheaper (and more-ethical) domain name registrars than GoDaddy?
- citricsquid 14y ago
  Cheaper than GoDaddy, like who? GoDaddy give awesome discounts if you're a bulk buyer. You can pay close to verisign price. It can work out more economical than running your own registrar if you're willing to trust GoDaddy. They also have great support for high quantity customers.
  - NatW 14y ago
    I just researched it and fair enough! Though you can easily find cheaper prices if you're not a bulk customer, you may be right on bulk. Ok, then I guess he just doesn't care that he's supporting an ethically-challenged company that has supported SOPA, etc.. but that's not too surprising.. giving what he does for a living :).
    - true_religion 14y ago
      Go-daddy is probably a loss leader when it comes to domains. They just use domain sales to try and upsell you to other things. If you're only buying bulk domains from them, you're not really supporting their business very much.
- slamdunc 14y ago
  That was what jumped out at me as well - I could only think about the $100K that was going into GoDaddy's bank account. ALL the dozens of domains I've moved (and continue to move, sometimes one by one) hardly make a dent when compared to these bulk folks that still use GD. Oh, well, death by a thousand (hundred thousand) blows...
  - citricsquid 14y ago
    The majority of that $100K doesn't go to GoDaddy. I believe the current cost of a .com from verisign is $7.21 + $0.19 ICANN fee, then transactions fees etc... godaddy probably takes home about $0.50 per domain, so they made maybe $5k off this guy.
zachallia 14y ago
it's one thing to buy good domains, but this guys main motivation is "greed" and he literally doesn't care about how anything he is doing affects anyone or anything. Makes me sick.
pkulak 14y ago
He is contributing so much to society...
wizard_2 14y ago
I feel like we need a chance in policy that makes this practice not worth the trouble. I see no value that he gives the internet. I may be bias though, I can't grab the .com variant of a non profit school I work for because someone like him owns it and wont accept offers for less then $600 bucks.
- brico 14y ago
  some say that the future will be app-based and that domain-names and tlds will be a thing of the past, we'll see. I know a lot of people who say they hate squatters, then they have an "awesome idea" for a project, they'll register 10 domains, the project is never finished and they put their page on sedo in the hope someone clicks on an ad or buys the domain and they won't let go because it's just $10 a year and maybe they'll someday finish their page. I honestly don't get the hate for squatters, they registered the domain, they were quicker than others and why should they sell their domainname just because someone else wants it badly? that's not how business works. if you really want or even need a domainname then offer $3k and you'll get it, otherwise look for alternatives, but stop whining
  - ericd 14y ago
    Domain camping is scummy because it rewards specialization in a skill that adds no discernable value whatsoever to society. It is the definition of leeching off of other people's work. That it's legal and "how business works" is irrelevant to whether it's worthwhile. In cases where they hop on accidentally expired domains (this is popular) are effectively legal forms of blackmail.
    - brico 14y ago
      why should it be worthwhile and why should it add value to society? if registering were free i'd see your point or if not everybody were allowed to register how would you play football? for every goal a team scores you have to score an own-goal or let the others score because it would be unfair otherwise?
      - 14y ago
saddino 14y ago
I know MM personally, and although he's a bit quirky, he's not "evil" by a long shot (see grassroots.org).
- ceejayoz 14y ago
  From what I can see of Grassroots.org, it's just funneling money from well meaning donors to Mike Mann himself. Hardly innovative. Kanye West does the same thing with his charity: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/02/21/kanye-wests-charity-spends-more-than-500g-annually-donates-0-report-says/ http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/02/21/kanye-wests-...
stevenj 14y ago
I tried snatching up newmogul.com (it was a developed community like HN for business news at one point) when it expired, but was beat to the punch, presumably by someone like this guy (as it currently seems to have some fake blog parked on it now). The original owner and operator of New Mogul just shut the site down out of the blue, and I got a replacement site setup at http://forlue.com http://forlue.com and wanted to direct NM to forlue. I sure miss NM.
lathamcity 14y ago
Has anyone ever actually bought one of these domain names? I tried to once. I had a good idea one day and wanted the domain name for it. It was a somewhat out-of-the-blue idea, so I wasn't really expecting it to be taken, but it was and all the names somewhat close to it were taken as well. I went back to the original name I wanted and e-mailed the squatter asking how much he wanted, hoping it would only be in the low hundreds of dollars. He e-mailed me back asking for $6600. When I said that it was too high and I wasn't interested, I got a much less professional e-mail: "LAST 5.5 K Keep or find other domain name Bye" I said it was still too expensive, and got "LOL ... Bye" I went to the website that the e-mail was sent from and it was all Lorem Ipsum. When I went back to the domain name I wanted when I was writing this, it had a startup-y logo, a promise of something cool being built, and an invitation to follow the developers (a tech blog I had never heard of) on facebook or twitter. It was all sounding legitimate, and I was upset that someone else apparently had an idea that was probably similar to mine, until I started clicking the really random assortment of "sponsor" links (to medical and legal sites, which pay a lot for ads but which had no obvious connection to any idea that would be associated with the domain name) and some of them took me to more lorem ipsum sites. Very mysterious, and tremendously irritating.
- serge2k 14y ago
  a friend and I phoned about a domain for an idea we had. They wanted 25k. we hung up and laughed. Told other people, they laughed. At least we got a laugh.
- garethsprice 14y ago
  I've successfully negotiated a few domain purchases and unsuccessfully tried for a few more. All the unsuccessful ones are the professional squatters who won't take less than 4-figures - although they do regularly e-mail with lower and lower prices so never take the first offer from these guys. The successful purchases have all been from individuals who registered the domain at some point with an idea that they never developed. If it's useful to anyone, here's an example of the opening note I send (improvement suggestions welcome). I make an opening offer around 50-75% of what the actual maximum is, make note that the site is inactive and costing them money, make it clear we're considering other options but that we are ready to purchase quickly. Even if the purchase is for personal use I'll reference a "client" as it helps to have a man behind a curtain who just won't budge on his price. ----- Dear Sir/Madam, I see that you own DOMAIN.COM but are not currently using it for an active website. I am currently looking for a domain name for a client of mine, and your name (DOMAIN.COM) is on our short-list. We have budgeted around $250 for acquiring new domain names and my client looking to close a deal quickly. Please could you let me know if DOMAIN.COM is for sale, and if so what price?
drucken 14y ago
The link in the article to "The Man Who Owns the Internet" (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...) is far more interesting than the article itself. It almost makes Mann look like a rank amateur by comparison...
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jpalomaki 14y ago
How important is it to have the .com name, is there any research available on this topic? I known that common sense says that mydomain.com is better than mydomain.cc, mydomain.io, mydomain.to or whatever, but is this really the case and how big are the differences? (For example how much more likely users remember a .com vs .io name)
- ovi256 14y ago
  <productname>.com is considered the most important domain name to have, the reasoning being that when people hear of product X, they'll go check X.com Dropbox started on getdropbox.com, but they found out lots of people reflexively typed dropbox.com and saw a squatted domain. So later, they bought dropbox.com I tend not to agree with this 100%, I think most people google the name of the product, instead of trying X.com directly.
- codesuela 14y ago
  also .cc, .io, .co, .to, .me etc. don't rank as well in the Google SERPs, that's why it's important to have them
JohnnyFlash 14y ago
The prices on his website are rediculous. thesearchservice.com - 2 million! You don't even get searchservice.com with this domain. Simarly .org and .net are not even registered meaning after buying this you could be facing competition from similar names. I find squatters are the bane of the internet. My little brother had a small gaming message board where he and his friends would prepare for games. No seo value.. long domain name. Parents credit card expired and we didn't notice. Domain name expired briefly. Tried to register it again as soon as we noticed. Someone else pinched it. Offered to sell it back to us for $1000. It has been for sale for the past 2 years with no interest.. The squatter has got nothing from it. My kid brother lost his domain name.. I think the majority of squatters are scum tbh.
- zalew 14y ago
  Similar experience here, domain still on sale, no interest.
shalmanese 14y ago
Mike Mann also has the dubious distinction of being the first person ever banned from Quora for being abusive.
frontier 14y ago
Simple solution, just need to make the wholesale cost of domains >$100/yr then it won't be viable for the squatters to sit on "really speculative" names like the ones in this story would be.. and for a real business/service with 1 or 2 domain names, that extra cost means nothing.
- ceol 14y ago
  I agree with this. I believe it's why .io still has 3-letter domains available, because it costs about $96/yr to register one.
Tycho 14y ago
This gave me an idea. Write a program that generates random melodies. Then upload them somewhere public and timestamped like YouTube. Then write another program that detects new songs with a high degree of similarity in the melody. Then sue for copyright violation. Call it melody squatting.
matt1 14y ago
At the risk of seeming spammy, please check out my service Lean Domain Search [1] before buying a premium domain name. It pairs your search term with more than 2,000 other keywords and instantly shows you which are available, making it really, really easy to find great available domain names. Guys like this depend on scarcity to drive up the cost of domains. One of my goals with Lean Domain Search is to show people that there actually are lots of great available domain names left for whatever you're working on. The problem until now has been that there haven't been any tools that make it easy to find them. Over time, if enough people gravitate away from domain squatters, the value of their portfolios will fall, they'll stop renewing their holdings, and it can change the face of the domain name industry. [1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com http://www.leandomainsearch.com
- _k 14y ago
  Not spammy. I want more tools like this. I use domaintumbler all the time. I do wish the tools would support different languages and more extensions. I live in Europe.
- nathanbarry 14y ago
  I used Lean Domain Search after getting stuck coming up with a domain name. It revealed created 4-5 options that I would be happy with. Thanks for creating the service!
- nzealand 14y ago
  Where did you get the current list of registered domains? I wrote a script to ping domains then perform a whois if ping returned nothing, but it was really slow.
_k 14y ago
I stopped paying for a 6 letter .cn domain, and the Chinese got in touch with me, they snatched it up, thinking I was going to pay them some money for it. I once asked how much a .com domain name was worth. They replied by email, it was about $ 3,000 and I didn't email them back. They had my phone number so they made an international phonecall asking me what I was willing to pay. A few hundred bucks, tops. They didn't sell it to me.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

79 points by mjfern 14y ago

I've only once been able to snag a domain on the drop (everymentor.com). Though I've tried dozens of times for various domains, I always get beaten to the punch. What kind of resources do these guys have? Hundreds of EC2 instances pounding registrars for good domains? I'm surprised registrars allow it.

personlurking 14y ago
I accidentally let one of mine lapse and it was snatched minutes later. The Whois is private so I can't see who bought it, though one thing is for sure, they left the DNS pointing to one of my main blogs (albeit a defunct blog which I deleted yet Blogger never took offline. In turn, the defunct blog has the same name as the the right/original one). I can't get too mad since it still references the right location. Even when out of my hands, I get to stick it to the Mann.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  Beware of that. Don't accept that traffic, all you're doing is helping the current owner of the domain to increase the value of the domain and to put you in a worse position to negotiate.
RadJacob 14y ago
most, if not all of the big players in the industry own their own registrar(s)
mjwalshe 14y ago
Yep I used to work for a company that owned a Registry (.coop) and the guys that did all ICANN liaison and bidding said threes a LOT of dodgy stuff going on with bots. Domains are to cheap in my opinion.

sidman 14y ago

I dont know what to say ! i get angry when i see a domain name that i want being parked on and going to absolute waste, but on the other hand the business this guy has created and the money he has made could be viewed as a smart hack in some perverse way. He has basically seen a market where no one else did in the early days (or only few did) and has managed to capitalize of it very sweetly (all of which he did skillfully and legally).

ishansharma 14y ago
Surely, it is legal and indeed a hack. But still, not morally correct!
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- chevas 14y ago
  It's not amoral. I've been frustrated myself over domains I couldn't get, but I fail to understand how this is amoral. Too often we are quick to make moral judgments based on distaste (of which I share).
  - Dramatize 14y ago
    a·mor·al ( -môr l, -m r -). adj. 1. Not admitting of moral distinctions or judgments; neither moral nor immoral
- abrichr 14y ago
  After he sold to NameMedia, of which he still owns a 15 percent stake, Mann had a noncompete that kept him away from the domain game for about four years. Instead, he worked on his many other ventures, such as SEO.com and a nonprofit called Grassroots.org. From grassroots.org: The mission of Grassroots.org is to help charities succeed by providing them with modern technologies and best practices at no cost. I don't know if it's morally correct or not, but Mann doesn't otherwise seem like a morally bankrupt individual.

cgag 14y ago

I bought a domain today, and I ended up having to come up with a bunch of synonyms for what I wanted and using a script to see if any of them were available. I guess I support the entrepreneurial spirit, but at the same time I kind of hope that guy gets hit by a truck.

japhyr 14y ago
Entrepreneurs build things. Domain snatchers/ squatters are not entrepreneurs.
- RollAHardSix 14y ago
  Entrepreneurs take advantage of business opportunities. And it IS a business opportunity. Fact is people pay for those domains. Let the down-votes commence.
  - heretohelp 14y ago
    >Let the down-votes commence. In future, omit these kinds of statements. They're pointless and inflammatory and are unwelcome because of that.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    The people who inflated the mortgage-backed securities bubble also "took advantage of business opportunities". That doesn't, in my view, make them entrepreneurs; it makes them antisocial assholes. Of course, it's no surprise that the domain squatting business is populated by similar arrogant jerks. It's not like this idea didn't occur to a lot of other people; the just recognized it as society-negative BS and went and did something useful.
  - laughinghan 14y ago
    A business opportunity being legal and profitable does not make it ethical. My understanding is, the intention behind society's laws and social norms is for all legal and profitable businesses to serve the common good in some small way. What good do squatters do the world, in any way, shape, or form, whatsoever? The effect they have on the world is for good projects to be harder for people to use, by taking up all the good domains. That makes this a bug in our society, that I, at least, would appreciate being addressed.

deniszgonjanin 14y ago

I think we should institute a Homesteading Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_principle) for domains. You can claim a domain as long as you use it for a legitimate purpose instead of just parking on it. There would be details to hash out for sure, but in the end I think we would have a much better system in place.

Dramatize 14y ago
That's a terrible idea. People would just create fake purposes for the websites.. and then who would be responsible to decide if a purpose is legitimate or not?
- rachelbythebay 14y ago
  Wouldn't it just be a return to the days when domains were free? Back in the mid-'90s, when people I knew registered vanity domains, they tended to come up with some ridiculous expansion of the name to make it look official. Nobody ever checked that "foo" really meant "fraternal otter organization" (or whatever), so those would become the top line in whois.
  - eli 14y ago
    Was that before Network Solutions? I bought a domain in maybe 1996 or 1997 and it was decidedly not free
    - rachelbythebay 14y ago
      Yep. Then it jumped to $100/2 years before competition brought the prices down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#Registry_and_registrar_business http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Solutions#Registry_and_... IP space used to be free, too, as long as you could justify it. What times those were.
elliotanderson 14y ago
Easily worked around: set up MX records and claim the domain is for email. Website not required

prezjordan 14y ago

Fuck this guy.

citricsquid 14y ago

Vaguely related, a lot of people seem to jump to the conclusion that a domain that is registered and is not in use is automatically someone that bought it and wants to sell it to you at an extortionate rate to "steal" money from hard working "real" entrepreneurs, but how many people here have 1 or more domain that they don't use but did register with honest intentions? I bet most people do. I bet there are people who want your domains. Assuming someone is a squatter and not someone who registered a domain but never used it is silly.

zachallia 14y ago
Very true. I have 40 or so domains, but none were purchased as an investment. All because of some random idea I had. Always happy to sell them for totally reasonable prices.
- epoxyhockey 14y ago
  As someone who has approached others to buy their domain names, what do you consider as a totally reasonable price for an average domain name?
  - trentmb 14y ago
    Not OP, but however much I have already paid is the amount I've parted with a domain or two before. Edit: For example: 2 years @ $10/yr so I sell it for $20.
    - epoxyhockey 14y ago
      Thanks for that info. I usually offer a little more than that, but have never been successful.
  - zachallia 14y ago
    It all depends if i plan on using it or not. If i don't plan on using it, sometimes I'll just give them away for under $100. If I do then there is a price almost always under $1000. I do have one exception, and that is I bought sms.me which I had planned on building, but I got a good offer so that sold for many thousands, but that was their offer not mine. On the flip side, I've bought many domains that I want to use for products ranging from $100 - $30,000 depending on a number of factors.

NatW 14y ago

The article says he claims that he sometimes buys domains via GoDaddy. Why would he use GoDaddy since he can get them from cheaper (and more-ethical) domain name registrars than GoDaddy?

citricsquid 14y ago
Cheaper than GoDaddy, like who? GoDaddy give awesome discounts if you're a bulk buyer. You can pay close to verisign price. It can work out more economical than running your own registrar if you're willing to trust GoDaddy. They also have great support for high quantity customers.
- NatW 14y ago
  I just researched it and fair enough! Though you can easily find cheaper prices if you're not a bulk customer, you may be right on bulk. Ok, then I guess he just doesn't care that he's supporting an ethically-challenged company that has supported SOPA, etc.. but that's not too surprising.. giving what he does for a living :).
  - true_religion 14y ago
    Go-daddy is probably a loss leader when it comes to domains. They just use domain sales to try and upsell you to other things. If you're only buying bulk domains from them, you're not really supporting their business very much.
slamdunc 14y ago
That was what jumped out at me as well - I could only think about the $100K that was going into GoDaddy's bank account. ALL the dozens of domains I've moved (and continue to move, sometimes one by one) hardly make a dent when compared to these bulk folks that still use GD. Oh, well, death by a thousand (hundred thousand) blows...
- citricsquid 14y ago
  The majority of that $100K doesn't go to GoDaddy. I believe the current cost of a .com from verisign is $7.21 + $0.19 ICANN fee, then transactions fees etc... godaddy probably takes home about $0.50 per domain, so they made maybe $5k off this guy.

zachallia 14y ago

it's one thing to buy good domains, but this guys main motivation is "greed" and he literally doesn't care about how anything he is doing affects anyone or anything. Makes me sick.

pkulak 14y ago

He is contributing so much to society...

wizard_2 14y ago

I feel like we need a chance in policy that makes this practice not worth the trouble. I see no value that he gives the internet. I may be bias though, I can't grab the .com variant of a non profit school I work for because someone like him owns it and wont accept offers for less then $600 bucks.

brico 14y ago
some say that the future will be app-based and that domain-names and tlds will be a thing of the past, we'll see. I know a lot of people who say they hate squatters, then they have an "awesome idea" for a project, they'll register 10 domains, the project is never finished and they put their page on sedo in the hope someone clicks on an ad or buys the domain and they won't let go because it's just $10 a year and maybe they'll someday finish their page. I honestly don't get the hate for squatters, they registered the domain, they were quicker than others and why should they sell their domainname just because someone else wants it badly? that's not how business works. if you really want or even need a domainname then offer $3k and you'll get it, otherwise look for alternatives, but stop whining
- ericd 14y ago
  Domain camping is scummy because it rewards specialization in a skill that adds no discernable value whatsoever to society. It is the definition of leeching off of other people's work. That it's legal and "how business works" is irrelevant to whether it's worthwhile. In cases where they hop on accidentally expired domains (this is popular) are effectively legal forms of blackmail.
  - brico 14y ago
    why should it be worthwhile and why should it add value to society? if registering were free i'd see your point or if not everybody were allowed to register how would you play football? for every goal a team scores you have to score an own-goal or let the others score because it would be unfair otherwise?
    - 14y ago

saddino 14y ago

I know MM personally, and although he's a bit quirky, he's not "evil" by a long shot (see grassroots.org).

ceejayoz 14y ago
From what I can see of Grassroots.org, it's just funneling money from well meaning donors to Mike Mann himself. Hardly innovative. Kanye West does the same thing with his charity: http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/02/21/kanye-wests-charity-spends-more-than-500g-annually-donates-0-report-says/ http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2012/02/21/kanye-wests-...

stevenj 14y ago

I tried snatching up newmogul.com (it was a developed community like HN for business news at one point) when it expired, but was beat to the punch, presumably by someone like this guy (as it currently seems to have some fake blog parked on it now). The original owner and operator of New Mogul just shut the site down out of the blue, and I got a replacement site setup at http://forlue.com http://forlue.com and wanted to direct NM to forlue. I sure miss NM.

lathamcity 14y ago

Has anyone ever actually bought one of these domain names? I tried to once. I had a good idea one day and wanted the domain name for it. It was a somewhat out-of-the-blue idea, so I wasn't really expecting it to be taken, but it was and all the names somewhat close to it were taken as well. I went back to the original name I wanted and e-mailed the squatter asking how much he wanted, hoping it would only be in the low hundreds of dollars. He e-mailed me back asking for $6600. When I said that it was too high and I wasn't interested, I got a much less professional e-mail: "LAST 5.5 K Keep or find other domain name Bye" I said it was still too expensive, and got "LOL ... Bye" I went to the website that the e-mail was sent from and it was all Lorem Ipsum. When I went back to the domain name I wanted when I was writing this, it had a startup-y logo, a promise of something cool being built, and an invitation to follow the developers (a tech blog I had never heard of) on facebook or twitter. It was all sounding legitimate, and I was upset that someone else apparently had an idea that was probably similar to mine, until I started clicking the really random assortment of "sponsor" links (to medical and legal sites, which pay a lot for ads but which had no obvious connection to any idea that would be associated with the domain name) and some of them took me to more lorem ipsum sites. Very mysterious, and tremendously irritating.

serge2k 14y ago
a friend and I phoned about a domain for an idea we had. They wanted 25k. we hung up and laughed. Told other people, they laughed. At least we got a laugh.
garethsprice 14y ago
I've successfully negotiated a few domain purchases and unsuccessfully tried for a few more. All the unsuccessful ones are the professional squatters who won't take less than 4-figures - although they do regularly e-mail with lower and lower prices so never take the first offer from these guys. The successful purchases have all been from individuals who registered the domain at some point with an idea that they never developed. If it's useful to anyone, here's an example of the opening note I send (improvement suggestions welcome). I make an opening offer around 50-75% of what the actual maximum is, make note that the site is inactive and costing them money, make it clear we're considering other options but that we are ready to purchase quickly. Even if the purchase is for personal use I'll reference a "client" as it helps to have a man behind a curtain who just won't budge on his price. ----- Dear Sir/Madam, I see that you own DOMAIN.COM but are not currently using it for an active website. I am currently looking for a domain name for a client of mine, and your name (DOMAIN.COM) is on our short-list. We have budgeted around $250 for acquiring new domain names and my client looking to close a deal quickly. Please could you let me know if DOMAIN.COM is for sale, and if so what price?

drucken 14y ago

The link in the article to "The Man Who Owns the Internet" (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...) is far more interesting than the article itself. It almost makes Mann look like a rank amateur by comparison...

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jpalomaki 14y ago

How important is it to have the .com name, is there any research available on this topic? I known that common sense says that mydomain.com is better than mydomain.cc, mydomain.io, mydomain.to or whatever, but is this really the case and how big are the differences? (For example how much more likely users remember a .com vs .io name)

ovi256 14y ago
<productname>.com is considered the most important domain name to have, the reasoning being that when people hear of product X, they'll go check X.com Dropbox started on getdropbox.com, but they found out lots of people reflexively typed dropbox.com and saw a squatted domain. So later, they bought dropbox.com I tend not to agree with this 100%, I think most people google the name of the product, instead of trying X.com directly.
codesuela 14y ago
also .cc, .io, .co, .to, .me etc. don't rank as well in the Google SERPs, that's why it's important to have them

JohnnyFlash 14y ago

The prices on his website are rediculous. thesearchservice.com - 2 million! You don't even get searchservice.com with this domain. Simarly .org and .net are not even registered meaning after buying this you could be facing competition from similar names. I find squatters are the bane of the internet. My little brother had a small gaming message board where he and his friends would prepare for games. No seo value.. long domain name. Parents credit card expired and we didn't notice. Domain name expired briefly. Tried to register it again as soon as we noticed. Someone else pinched it. Offered to sell it back to us for $1000. It has been for sale for the past 2 years with no interest.. The squatter has got nothing from it. My kid brother lost his domain name.. I think the majority of squatters are scum tbh.

zalew 14y ago
Similar experience here, domain still on sale, no interest.

shalmanese 14y ago

Mike Mann also has the dubious distinction of being the first person ever banned from Quora for being abusive.

frontier 14y ago

Simple solution, just need to make the wholesale cost of domains >$100/yr then it won't be viable for the squatters to sit on "really speculative" names like the ones in this story would be.. and for a real business/service with 1 or 2 domain names, that extra cost means nothing.

ceol 14y ago
I agree with this. I believe it's why .io still has 3-letter domains available, because it costs about $96/yr to register one.

Tycho 14y ago

This gave me an idea. Write a program that generates random melodies. Then upload them somewhere public and timestamped like YouTube. Then write another program that detects new songs with a high degree of similarity in the melody. Then sue for copyright violation. Call it melody squatting.

matt1 14y ago

At the risk of seeming spammy, please check out my service Lean Domain Search [1] before buying a premium domain name. It pairs your search term with more than 2,000 other keywords and instantly shows you which are available, making it really, really easy to find great available domain names. Guys like this depend on scarcity to drive up the cost of domains. One of my goals with Lean Domain Search is to show people that there actually are lots of great available domain names left for whatever you're working on. The problem until now has been that there haven't been any tools that make it easy to find them. Over time, if enough people gravitate away from domain squatters, the value of their portfolios will fall, they'll stop renewing their holdings, and it can change the face of the domain name industry. [1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com http://www.leandomainsearch.com

_k 14y ago
Not spammy. I want more tools like this. I use domaintumbler all the time. I do wish the tools would support different languages and more extensions. I live in Europe.
nathanbarry 14y ago
I used Lean Domain Search after getting stuck coming up with a domain name. It revealed created 4-5 options that I would be happy with. Thanks for creating the service!
nzealand 14y ago
Where did you get the current list of registered domains? I wrote a script to ping domains then perform a whois if ping returned nothing, but it was really slow.

_k 14y ago

I stopped paying for a 6 letter .cn domain, and the Chinese got in touch with me, they snatched it up, thinking I was going to pay them some money for it. I once asked how much a .com domain name was worth. They replied by email, it was about $ 3,000 and I didn't email them back. They had my phone number so they made an international phonecall asking me what I was willing to pay. A few hundred bucks, tops. They didn't sell it to me.

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