I distinctly remember reading this Business 2.0 Magazine piece published back in May 2007 about Kevin Ham, ‘the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of’. If you’re interested in the domain name business (lovingly called the nasty cybersquatter rat nest by some), I suggest you read it in full.
Here’s an interesting passage just in case you’re a little time-stressed:
And what few people know is that he’s also the man behind the domain world’s latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type “.cm” instead of “.com” at the end of a domain name. Try it with almost any name you can think of — Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm — and you’ll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo.
Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad — as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code — just as Germany runs all names that end with .de. The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic.
Notably, this was after Cameroon set up its own scheme to make money off typo traffic: in August 2006, word got out that the operators of the domain name extension (state-owned Camnet) had wild-carded its ccTLD and was monetizing all the incoming traffic using ad-filled pages. Every single time someone accidentally typed in “.cm” instead of “.com”, Camnet was collecting.
That was then, and this is now: millions of people are, of course, still mistakenly typing “.cm” instead of “.com” at the end of a domain name, and they’ll probably keep doing that for a very long time, too. But beer.cm, newyorktimes.cm and anyname.cm don’t resolve any more, although you’ll notice google.cm, microsoft.cm, ebay.cm and amazon.cm don’t exactly lead you to where you’d assume they would.
And today someone pointed me to a page on eNomCentral stating that eNom and its partner, domain name aftermarket auction company NameJet, have exclusively started accepting pre-orders for .cm domains. From what I can gather, you can pre-order .cm domain names starting next week (July 15) until the end of the month (July 31st), free of charge. After this so-called land-rush period, the first auctions will start on Tuesday, August 4th and continue on a schedule that will be communicated via email with the participants in those auctions. Each auction will be 3 days in length.
They’re not even trying to hide the fact that you’ll likely register them for the type-in traffic:
The .CM registry has previously only allowed registrations under .CO.CM, .COM.CM and .NET.CM, meaning this is your chance to register a second level .CM domain name. Although best known for being just one letter and keystroke away from a few of the most highly recognizable domains, .CM provides many potential benefits.
Note that eNomCentral customers who see their domains successfully awarded through auction will be charged $350 (including a minimum 2 year registration), so even though the actual pre-ordering is free, the registration is not.
On the list of featured and popular .cm pre-orders, you’ll find recognizable (and trademarked) names like YellowPages.cm, Slide.cm, 37Signals.cm and Ask.cm. Very curious to find out what will happen to those after July 31st.
Also wondering what impact the public availability of the .cm domain name (starting August 1) will have, if any. If I’d have to venture a guess, I’d say people who dislike people who are in the ‘domain name real estate business’ will have one more thing to complain about real soon.
What’s your opinion about all of this?
“What’s your opinion about all of this?”
Your article pretty much states everything already: there’s a big fishy spammy smell from .cm’s that I would not invest a dime in..
Kinda reminds me of the once free .tk reputation..
I think a better way of profiting from domain names is this:- http://bit.ly/TK87r
Mine is http://lol.go/tcha
This one is good too for cashing in on domain names. Check it out:- http://bit.ly/VPerl
Would be interesting if we have some statue of limitation, similar to the 3G license. Like, if you don’t rollout your service within certain period, they revoke your spectrum & auction it back.
worthless extensions. start making money on typos? you have got to be kidding right?
I got google.cm
That is so effed up.
I hate those turds that register typos and put all their damn ads and pseudo-search engine crap on them.
This sounds like a phishing disaster. If people can’t figure out they’re on paypal.com.blablablbalbab.com, how will they figure out they’re on paypal.cm/ — they might even distrust their browser and assume its a typo.
doooooffff
I could register; But there are two issues:
1) I don’t know who is getting that money. The local cameroonian economy won’t benefit from this although it could hugely. The corrupt politicians will likely share those dollars with the greedy spammers.
2) $350 is beyond anything reasonable.
but maybe that will help keep the spamming down…
.CMis a scammer’s dream
There has to be legal recourse against this. You invest millions of dollars building your brand and some yahoo (not to be confused with Yahoo!) comes along and nabs all the misspells and .cm domains and parks ads.
I liken this whole practice to a scumbag waiting by an ATM for someone to drop a bill.
Trademark law.
ICANN does not look enjoy being hit with lawsuits for trademark infringement. eNom enjoys it even less, since they’ve been forced to settle so many times over this type of crap.
I wonder how this work once ‘.com’ buttons become standard on every keyboard
It’ll never happen (the .com button) at least not in a popular way. Ctrl-Enter works fine, and who wants extra keyboard clutter? Perhaps on some mobile devices.
cool story bro
Who believes the hype? Why do people think that there are hundeds of thousand of people typing in example.cm, when there is no proof that it’s really alot of traffic going that way?
DON’T spend these 350$ – better register some exotic typos under .com such as exampel.com, ixamle.com, etc. before considering your own .cm…!
“What’s your opinion?”
if you’re such a lowlife to be in the domain “business”, you know that if you try to reserve a real trademark e.g. facebook.cm, facebook can sue you and get the domain, even if you’re in cameroon
so, the ‘typo’ argument applies to smaller sites who won’t bother to sue you.
Domain names are dirtiest business on the planet and ICANN are a mob that allows all this to happen.
I will be happy if all browsers by default enable routing of anything.cm to anything.com to kill this cashcow and this would be helping the 99.999% of browsers users that would never ever want to visit a Cameroon-based website!
i would vote to completely eliminate top level domains.
totally agree with you – these things should be illegal
(no pathetic comparisons with real estate business please)
Yes. Names are ridiculous anyhow. Use a numbering system already and lets kill the whole domain business.
It’s not funny! Any such threat to consumers and businesses should be eliminated.
Top level domains are now meaningless anyway .to, .ly, .us, .io, .fm, .at and so many others are totally abused. If it was up to me, I would remove the .com, still keep it for backward compatibility though. I would also leave all other top-level domains, but not allow new registrations. The price for those I would increase drastically so that only people that really use them should keep them; otherwise switch over to the new .com.
Those TLDs are just a backdoor for hackers, marketers, and trademark abusers. They don’t serve the vast majority of the Internet users in a positive way! That’s why somebody needs to take action! Yeah, many businesses will have to shut down, but the abuse has to stop!
For example, without a TLD, what’s the difference between pepsi-germany, pepsi-de and pepsi.de? I think most people get the dash better than the dot, which is a totally a geek’s thing.
Dugg for interesting idea. I’m not a big fan of squatters anyway
I always wondered what drives a person who mistakenly typed google.cm to take the stupid IQ quiz anyway.
ctrl+enter
And, anyone that uses OpenDNS (as we do) can block all .cm domains automatically. See http://www.opendns.com. (No interest except satisfied customer!)
+1 on OPENDNS to prevent .cm mistypes! OPENDNS RULEZ!
Randolf,
Um, Google.cm gets 300k uniques a month. Don’t you know how to look this stuff up.
Some of the facts you mentioned are incorrect.
CAMNET.cm is not a company it is a website, the company is Cameroun Telecommuncations short CAMTEL.
By the time the deal with Dr. Ham was signed CAMTEL wasn’t in charge anymore (according to Iana database they still are, but according to government in CM they are not), ANTIC took charge of .CM
what’s gonna happen when someone grabs etrade.cm or bankofamerica.cm or chase.cm etc. etc. etc.
so what i am curious about is what’s kevin ham doing about this? it looks like he’d stand to lose a shit ton of $ from this unless he is brokering these domain sales, then he will be banking like crazy. is he behind this too?
Netcom.cm Sarl is behind it. look at http://www.register.cm
I distinctly remember reading that article you mentioned on .cm and am very interested in getting some domains.
Sheesh. Does nobody use Ctrl+Enter for “http://www.” + $name_here + “.com/” ? It works since Internet Explorer 5 at least. I am an average guy, and I have typed “.com” some 5 years ago last time. Same for “.org” (Ctrl+Shift+Enter in Firefox) and “.net” (Shift+Enter in Firefox).
Am sure Michael has his hands on techcrunch.cm already
Yes well to really protect the public from their input errors we should ensure that no telephone numbers are similar – so we can do away with wrong numbers and other scams.
Or why not make browsers predictive, so if I mistakenly type in “softwar” I end up at Microsoft.
problem is, if you grab a cm domain of a well known company, you will have to give it away sooner or later when they want to have it. that happened many times in the past, so you cant just go and register google.cm or amazon.cm and whatnot, that just wouldnt work for a long time.
That’s it, I’m registering TechCrunch.cm
what about google.cm
Some of these typos get some very serious traffic and would make back their $350 fee within a month.
I’m all for registering generic .cm names that might get traffic (like Soccer.cm, Football.cm – totally legit), but trademarks are a big no no.
$350 fee within a month. How about in a few hours.
Long live “business 2.0″!
Is there a Firefox plug-in to block this crap?
OpenDNS will do it for you.
For those who don’t believe in the .cm profit, check the alexa stats for google.cm. it’s about 287,479 single hits per month. Convert that in ads money.
Im from Cameroon, and registring a domain there cost about US$300.
Didn’t TechCrunch’s own Michael Arrington start Pool.com, a company in the “cybersquatter rat nest?”
Hmm… looks like you can bid on gems like bidmicrosoft.com at Pool along with plenty of other trademark cybersquatter names.
Here’s what real domain name investors think about the .cm extension: http://www.thed...ain-typos-soon/
Honestly, most of us think it’s every bit as much of a moneygrab as TechCrunch. This kind of stuff is shady and cybersquatters investing in it give domain investors a bad name…
“if you’re such a lowlife to be in the domain “business”, you know that if you try to reserve a real trademark e.g. facebook.cm, facebook can sue you and get the domain, even if you’re in cameroon”
Don’t knock it. I once registered “buySalviaDivinorum.com” for 7.50 and sold for $36. It’s a linguistic challenge to flip these things.
Reece Berg is right. Cybersquatting is a problem that professional domain investors themselves are aware of and want to stand up against.
There is, unfortunately, a group of people in the domain industry registering and making money from trademark-infringing domains. Those people are often difficult to get hold of, because they’re based in certain countries around the globe where it might be more difficult to take legal actions against them.
But I can assure you that those serious about their businesses agree that cybersquatting/typosquatting is a practice that must be stopped as soon as possible.
You people are a joke. The internet is nothing but crap anyway. Facebook, myspace, it’s all “social” mindfarting. And whoever uses the oxymoron “professional domain investors” is an idiot.
I own http://www.amazon.vc does it mean that amazon can get the name if they want it ?
People , have you noticed the prices these folks are selling a .cm domain name ? Incredible …. Pls don’t waste your hard earned money trying to buy a .cm domain because you will lost money at the end ..All these are just hype as in Hype .the people out there in Cameroon netcom.cm sarl are all dreaming ok Anything cameroonian attached to it has a lot of fraud and non transparency