sasquatch said:
"...Another 15 companies or individuals own between 10K and 99.99K domains... while 76 more own between 1K and 9.9K names. "Internet domain marketing is largely made up of 100 people who collectively own 2.2 million .com domains..."
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/07/28/domain_payperclick_services_growing_rapidly.html
Your thoughts?
The top Eight in that story would be:
-Marchex (acquisition) formerly Yun Ye - Ultimate Search
-Highland Capital (acquisition) formerly Mike Mann - Buydomains.com
-Fabulous (public Australian exchange) Australia
-Vertical Axis/Proto/DomainDeluxe/Hitfarm group (private) Hong Kong
-Name Administration Inc. (private) Cayman Islands
-Compana LLC/RentalQue (private) Jeff Baron Texas
-Domain Systems (private) Florida, Steve Obrien
-FMA.com (private) Thunyann/Elequa guy (sweet set mixed with conceptual stuff)
Lower quality big guys who grew quickly in the last year or two with expireds and linkpop crap:
-Directnic (private) New Orleans [mainly old linkpop stuff expiring from their registrar]
-QSRCH (new.net group) [aweful typo linkpop crap]
-Netster (some older stuff and then a bunch of tmish stuff)
Biggest mid-size operators who people always think are much bigger, but who have some nice portfolios include:
-Oversee.net yes they own names too
-WorldWideMedia (private) Tampa Florida
-Digimedia-Reflex Publishing (private) Texas-Oklahoma / Florida
-Dotzup (private) Spokane WA
-Modern Limited formerly Real Time Internet(private) Indiana/Carribean
-CNET.com (yes they hold some domain names to drive traffic to their properties)
-National A-1 advertising (free.com)
-Viper Holdings (SFO) Slavik V.
-Rick Schwartz (the one and only)
-Webquest (private) Modesto California
-Modern Empire Internet Ltd. (private) Hong Kong
-Ecorp.
-Strategist Research / Innovation HQ (private) Carribean
-Dot Com Agency - france
You can actually see how smart it was for Marchex to buy Ult Search. You would have to do deals with 4-5 guys from the bottom two levels to equal the quality of 1 deal at the top 8 in terms of traffic volume and quality of name.