Reglikedomain industry desk

Forbes article mentions domain name firms

The October 16 issue of Forbes has an article that mentions a number of domain firms.

The most recent edition of Forbes has an article titled “The Google Industrial Complex” that mentions a number of domain name firms:

Firms such as Internet Real Estate (sic) and IREIT buy up thousands of Web sites with commonplace domain names such as africanamericans.com and mutualfunds.com, then load them with Google ads. They’re valued on total expected return, just the way Wall Street treats bond portfolios. At DigiPawn you can even hock your site’s name.

Unfortunately, the author didn’t appear to research this portion of his story and just pulled in some info from other sources. I assume the first firm he mentioned is supposed to be Internet Real Estate Group (IREG). Most of their business is developing sites, not buying portfolios of lower-value domains for ads. Indidentally, I think that MutualFunds.com is actually owned by Marc Ostrofsky, not iREIT, despite its mention in a number of publications and a press release as being owned by iREIT. It’s also interesting how the author refers to it as “buying Web sites” and “hock your site’s name” as opposed to just domain names.

Also on the wire

Other reporting from the domain desk.

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