Agoga.com would have been absolutely unremarkable website, if not for two minor details, it has about one million US visitors and it belongs to domain mogul Kevin Ham (The man who owns the Internet). How comes that boring website got attention of millions? Very simple, Kevin Ham cooked up some shadow deal with some corrupted Cameroon official that made him effectively king of Cameroon domain space (.cm). Any .com domain mistyped as .cm is re-directed via “wild-card” DNS server to Kevin’s site - agoga.com. Where is the profit? Agoga.com is typical domain parkng site showing ads, any click on these ads contributes to Kevin’s wealth estimated at $300 million. Maybe not exactly clean but definitely brilliant scheme.
Article about Kevin Ham, domainer who took under his control Cameroon domains, has created real buzz and revived interest to Cameroon domains. A lot of domainers asked themselves maybe it’s worth to buy a few Cameroon domain names to profit from traffic when somebody mistypes .cm instead of .com. A few days ago Compete Blog has published an interesting statistics (see A Look at Domain-Squatting) that answers this question.
I would say that this statistics is rather discouraging unless you intend to buy Cameroon domains in numbers, which is prohibitively expensive and fussy considering steep price of about $800 per domain and lack of established registers working with Cameroon domain names. If mistyping Amazon.com brings in only about 7,000 monthly visitors, buying a few generic keyword domain names will hardly make you a millionaire overnight. Just like wife said “Try to touch it less with your hands”.
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