
Spending over $60,000 a year to run a one-man web business may seem high, but it’s peanuts compare to what those names bring in. He also pays over $50,000 to renew the domain names every year. He pays $1,000 per month to host the domains across a half dozen different ISPs. He owns over 6,000 domain names that pulls in over 1 million unique visits per month. I had a little chat with a domainer on my AIM list. Google doesn’t advertise their domain service much because domainers seem to operate in some kind of shadowy world. The money comes from park domain PPC services like Google AdSense for domains. For example, makes an average of $1,300 a day just from people typing in the URL. A good domain name can make hundreds, even thousands of dollars per day for its owner. How does a domainer make money? They rely on the 15% of web users who don’t use search engines but instead just type in a web address. However, people like Ye soon discovered that almost any domain name could become a money maker thanks to PPC companies like Google and Yahoo. In the mid ’90s, the domain market was all about speculation – buying desirable Web addresses, such as, in the hopes that one day a big company would buy it for a huge amount. Since then, Ye has never been heard from again. Ye sold his domain empire in November 2004 to publicly traded Seattle-based Marchex for, get this, $164 million. Ye holds over 100,000 domain names that was making him more than $20 million a year in revenues – $19 million in profits. Yun Ye is a “domainer.” He is, in fact, the world’s most successful domainer, a pioneer in a highly lucrative industry based on buying, selling and developing domain names. That’s why you may have never heard of him. While Markus makes many news headlines, Yun Ye avoids the press like the plague. While Markus claims to be pulling down over $10,000 a day, Yun Ye pulls down over $100,000 a day. The difference is the size of the checks. Both Frind and Ye make their incomes online.

Like Markus, Yun Ye is also a one-man operation. However, there is another local Vancouverite who makes Markus’s online income look like pocket change. Markus likes to point out the fact that he is a one-man operation and the biggest individual Google AdSense earner.
DOMAINER DOT COM FREE
He is the owner of Plenty Of Fish, the biggest free dating site on the Internet. If you are a regular reader of this blog then you will know the name Markus Frind.
