Technical.ly, just covered ledgency domain investor Mike Mann In a story entitled “Meet Mike Mann DC’s Pioneering Domain Squatter”
Its the second non-domainer publication today to cover a domain investor (click here to read the other one)
“Before him, there was cybersquatting. Now, there is domain speculation.”
“When the business went mainstream, driving up the competition, he developed a new technology to make domain searches more efficient called WhoisPlus/NameFind. After a lot of hard labor and luck, he sold off BuyDomains.com in 2005 for $80 million, from an initial investment of $200,000. “I practically started the industry,” he said. “Whether I like it or not that’s my specialty.”
Mann’s secret is that he is a “human robot.”
“He can browse through tens of thousands of domain names and buy hundreds every day, he says. “Usually I hit some threshold on Google — it cuts me off and makes me prove I’m human,” Mann said. With these superhuman powers, he broke a world record selling Sex.com (NSFW) for $13 million and once bought 14,962 domain names in 24 hours.
Funneling cybersquatting riches into the nonprofit world.
Btill, “the business gets harder and harder every day,” he concedes, what with the appearance of a new generation of pioneers in the alternative domain extensions space.
Mike Mann’s take on the new gTLD’s “They’re only cycling backwards to catch up with him: if a domain name with a novel extension abruptly rises in value, that will only make its dot-com alternative’s value shoot up as well.
“Dot-com will last for ever.”
todd says
The writer of the article, Lalita Clozel, better jump on Godaddy and register her name before Mike Mann registers it and sells it to her for 2 grand. 🙂
Michael Berkens says
Todd
Good point