Sunday, July 27, 2008

$300 Million from Typing Mistake

Your one typing mistake in browser's address bar can make millionaire to some one. This post is about a person who is making $300 million per year by doing almost nothing.
Kevin Ham, a domainer who was a doctor initially is making $300 million per year. The owner of 300,000 websites is behind the famous ".cm" scheme.

Try typing anything in browser's address bar, eg abc.cm, anything.cm, ranjeet.cm, yourname.cm or just ".cm" and press enter. You will land on a page Agoga.com, a site filled with ads provided by Yahoo. Agoga.com has ads on every page. Ham makes money every time someone clicks an ad also does his venture partner west African country Cameroon.
Let me guess "how does it work?".

  1. The Mistake - user enters a domain name directly into his browser's address bar but accidentally types ".cm" instead of ".com". The query goes to Cameroon, which owns the .cm country code.
  2. The wildcard- servers at camroon scan the address. if the name isn't registered, a line of software called a "wildcard" reroutes the query to agoga.com.
  3. The pay off - agoga's servers query yahoo to find ads related to the typed name, which are then displayed on parked page. Whenever a user clicks on an ad, yahoo pays agoga, who shares undisclosed slice of revenue with Cameroon.
Why Cameroon? Its country code ".cm" is very close to "com". Hardly any ".cm" names are registered and it is just one keyboard slip away from ".com". Similarly other countries are Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et).

Such type of pages are like spams. If you click any link of such type of page, owner will make money. Now it all depends on you whether you want to click or not. In my opinion, It is good to get a site filled with ads instead of "Server not found".

8 comments:

Anonymous,  July 27, 2008 at 2:35 PM  

Nice post man... :)
keep posting.

visit
http://mp3-az.blogspot.com

:))

Indomitable July 28, 2008 at 2:53 AM  

Good one..I have tried the link too..

Anonymous,  July 29, 2008 at 9:30 AM  

does it realy have to be perfect always.. Just having a little fun is fine. Thanks for sharing
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Anonymous,  July 29, 2008 at 10:06 PM  

Wow, really? But why in cameroon only? anyway, it was a good interesting post.

Karmasura August 5, 2008 at 10:43 AM  

hey,

on an otherwise fine post I have this objection..

"In my opinion, It is good to get a site filled with ads instead of "Server not found"."

I would rather land on a site with server not found than one with ads.. why make someone rich with our clicks.. ;)

btw, good work, keep blogging..

my blogs:

http://newbiepoetry.blogspot.com
http://krishnabhakt.blogspot.com

viagra online March 2, 2010 at 6:29 AM  

I like this text: "Ham makes money every time someone clicks an ad also does his venture partner west African country Cameroon.
Let me guess "how does it work?"..." is very interesting, thanks for sharing this information!

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