• Business 2.0 Magazine, Wednesday, May 23, 2007 11:30 AM

Kevin Ham is the most powerful dot-com mogul you've never heard of. He is a master of the game that Google vowed recently to clean up: Ham buys domain names, often typos or ones you would think belong to a major company, or those whose registration recently expired. He writes software, in fact, to ensure that he buys those domains as soon as they become available. To make money, Ham either resells them for a profit, or in the case of typo domain names, he sells Yahoo pay-per-click ads that often direct users to the Web site they intended on going to in the first place.

Google recently informed its publishers in the AdSense network that it would be cleaning up this "unsuitable business model." Ham, a devout Christian, doesn't see it that way. He benefits from traffic generated by the millions of Web users who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" each day. He owns Newyorktimes.cm or Beer.cm, all of which direct users to a site called Agoga.com, a Web portal composed of Yahoo ads. Incidentally, Ham shares the revenue earned from ".cm" with the tiny African nation of Cameroon, which owns ".cm" as its country code. If he has his way, Ham will soon partner with Colombia (".co"), Niger (".ne") Oman (".om") and Ethiopia (".et.")

Ham's business exists in the gray area of Internet law--which is partly why it's thriving. Because some of his practices aren't useful to contextual networks operators like Google and Yahoo, it could jeopardize its future. That said, Ham probably won't worry much--he's already amassed an estimated fortune of $300 million.

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