Kevin Ham The man who owns the Internet

Kevin Ham The man who owns the Internetb

Much has been made of Kevin Ham, The man who owns the Internet. Paul Sloan did a front page spread about him in the June 1 2007 edition of CNN Business 2.0.


While the article is focussed on the value of his 300,000 domains and the current revenue from a wild deal with the Cameroon government, from the perspective of Metis Internet Partners, the end of the article is the most interesting.


Ham is now focussed on creating value from his internet real estate, as Sloan writes:

When Ham buys a domain now, he's not doing pay-per-click math but rather sizing it up as a potential business. Reinvent Technology aims to turn his most valuable names into mini media companies, based on hundreds of niche categories.


Among the first he'd like to launch, not surprisingly, is Religion.com. Ham recently leased the entire 27th floor in his Vancouver building and is now hiring more than 150 designers, engineers, salespeople, and editorial folks.


Much of that effort is going into developing search tools based more on meaning and less on keywords. "Google is only so useful," Ham says.


The aim is to apply a meaning-based, or "semantic," system across swaths of sites, luring customers from direct navigation and search engines alike. Religion.com would then become an anchor to which scores of other sites would be tied.


"It's time to build out the virtual real estate," Ham says. "There's so much more value in these names than pay-per-click." Seeman's patent application even mentions the possibility of turning Web traffic from Cameroon and other future foreign partners into full-fledged portals.


It's all part of the master plan, as Ham aims to become the first domainer to move from the ranks of at-home name hunter to Internet titan. Smaller players have been selling out to VC-backed groups, and Ham expects that the best names will eventually be owned by just a handful of companies.


If he bets right, he might very well be one of them. "If you control all the domains," he says, "then you control the Internet."


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