The real estate investors packing the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in Los Angeles this week don't have to worry about interest rates, exploding mortgages and foreclosures. The addresses they buy and sell are on the Internet, where a good name might attract millions of people and pull in big bucks from advertising.
As with real-world property speculation, the Internet domain name business is built on limited supply and high hopes. It has booms and busts, rising corporate powers and rookies who wished they'd bought in the 1990s. Two of the biggest practitioners, Oversee.net and Demand Media Inc., are based in the Los Angeles area and have collectively received more than $450 million in venture capital investment to fuel domain name buying sprees.
The bidding paddles flew Tuesday and Wednesday in the hotel ballroom at DomainFest, a yearly gathering of participants in this highly specialized and lucrative business.
Individual speculators and deep-pocketed companies snapped up domains such as Porn.net for $400,000, Bookmarks.com for $300,000, Alimony.com for $75,000, Butcher.com for $50,000 and Satinpanties for $10,000.
The more than 600 people who paid as much as $995 to attend the conference also got to hear from one of the "domainer" idols: college dropout Frank Schilling of the Cayman Islands, who started buying Internet addresses with credit cards and eventually amassed 300,000 addresses valued by some would-be buyers at more than $100 million.
"I'm a super-normal guy," said the unfailingly polite Schilling. "Guys like me don't get chances like this."
Schilling works out of his beach house, where he watches what was until recently the largest TV in the world, and clears about $20 million a year from sites as varied as Homeforeclosure.com and Crosswordpuzzles.com.
Such success stories are drawing an increasing number of people from all walks of life. Attendees at DomainFest included engineers, management consultants and mortgage industry refugees.
"I've got religious names, nasty names, sporty names," seller Patrick Desper, a 60-year-old retired yacht broker from San Diego, said in his handmade booth. "I've got Worldchampion.com."
They came to pick up tricks of the trade while debating the emergence of such .com alternatives as .mobi (for access from mobile phones) and the awesome power of Google Inc. to deliver Internet searchers to their ad-laden pages -- and to take them away if it doesn't think the sites are worthy of a high search-engine ranking.
