Who Makes $100,000 A Day Online?

– Update: My domaining book/eBook has been released. Check out “The Art of Domaining: A Comprehensive Guide for Domainers” today! –

Have you ever heard of the domainer Yun Ye? Probably not. He is widely regarded as the grandfather of domain monetization. If you are familiar with me, you will know I do quite a bit of domaining as a hobby, but $100,000 a day is staggering.

In 2004, Ye sold his domain empire for $164 million to Marchex, a publicly traded company. His portfolio consisted of over 100,000 domains which was making him $20 million a year in revenues. Since then, Ye has never been heard from again. How did he find such profitable domain names? Simple. He waited for other people to lapse on their renewals.

What happens when you don’t renew your domain name? It gets placed back into the pool or available names to be registered after anywhere from 15-60 days or you failing to pay for another year (it is different based on the registrar). What Yun Ye did was write a program, something that would be pretty simple in visual basic today, which would go out and check what names were about to ‘drop.’ Then his software purchased the names exactly when the name was about to re-enter the public database. This was in the mid 90′s.

Since then, major companies have formed which let you do the same thing, but by bidding. You can go to any one of the various ‘drop catching’ services and see what domain names are about to lapse, and bid on them. The highest bidder gets the name. The costs are quite a bit more than your average domain name registration, but if that domain name is getting traffic, it is now yours to capitalize on.

What would it be like to make even $1,000 a day? I don’t know, but that is an awefully good life…

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