L.A.-based Oversee.net, which hosted this week's conference, is headed in the other direction. Chief Executive Lawrence Ng said that the more empty a site was, the more likely visitors were to click on an ad.
"Intuitively, people believe you make more money putting up a building than you do leaving something as a parking lot," Oversee Executive Vice President Jeff Kupietzky said. "But you can usually make more from parking lots."
Oversee this month brought in a $150-million investment round from Oak Hill Capital Partners, and Ng suggested that the next round would come from the public markets. Marchex Inc., a competitor, has already sold stock to the public, and NameMedia Inc. of Waltham, Mass., filed papers in November to raise $172.5 million in an initial public offering of stock.
Such companies are now leading the industry and in many cases have bought the portfolios of the colorful band of entrepreneurs that started things going.
Although the icons and the big companies were represented at DomainFest, the average attendee had a portfolio of about 1,000 names, organizers said.
Matt Rossi, a Web software expert from Huntington Beach, bought Forless.com for $10,000 years ago. Now, the scarcity of great cheap domains plays to his advantage: He is renting out such "subdomains" as Cars.forless.com and Mortgages.forless.com.
Pointing at the auction underway in the hotel ballroom, he said, "None of those names can touch Forless.com."
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joseph.menn@latimes.com
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
Going, going, gone
Some of the Web addresses,
known as Internet domains,
sold at auction during
Oversee.net's DomainFest convention in L.A. this week:
Porn.net, $400,000
Bookmarks.com, $300,000
Intimate.com, $80,000
Alimony.com, $75,000
Fishing.net, $52,500
Butcher.com, $50,000
Drinkrecipes.com, $35,000
Cemetaries.com, $30,000
USmarine.com, $25,000
Offers.net, $19,000
Groundbeef.com, $16,000
Organicfarmers.com,
$15,000
Stallions.com, $12,000
Food.la, $11,250
Satinpanties.com, $10,000
Wrestlers.net $7,500
Source: Oversee.net
