In less than two decades, Kevin Ham has performed the ultimate makeover on himself, morphing from an overworked, underpaid medical resident into a domainer who is arguably the most powerful dotcom mogul in the world. Introduced to the web in the early 1990s, he approached it with a golden touch that has earned him a domain portfolio with an estimated total value of $300 million. At the same time, the man whose sites receive about 30 million unique visitors each month has managed to remain remarkably private while he continues, with apparently boundless energy, to explore and develop new domain opportunities.

One of four sons of Korean-born immigrants, Ham grew up in Vancouver and entered the University of British Columbia’s medical school. While pursuing his medical studies and continuing to practice the Christianity that was an integral part of his family life, he also discovered the Internet. Motivated initially by its potential to spread the gospel, he learned all he could about the web.

Newly married and in his second year of residency in an Ontario hospital, Ham still found time to start Hostglobal.com, an online directory of providers. In addition to offering ratings and reviews of the providers it listed, Hostglobal.com provided Ham with a natural stepping stone to the purchase and sale of Internet domains. Soon, he was earning about $10,000 a month from the sale of ads and had started another directory, DNSindex.com, that not only enabled people to register domain names, but also offered lists of available domain names. Thousands of customers flocked to the site, and by the time he completed his residency, Ham had decided to postpone his medical career.

The impressive charge towards the pinnacle of the dotcom world continued. In 2000, with a keen eye for a business opportunity, Ham signed up with GoTo.com, a new service that populated his domains with advertisements and made $1500 for Ham on his first day with GoTo.com. Using the direct navigation system, through which people type the name of what they are looking for into a browser address bar and add .com”, this system takes the searcher to a link-filled portal. Whenever someone clicks on one of the links to a site owned by Ham, he receives a proportion of the fee that the advertiser pays to Yahoo, the owner of GoTo.com. By 2002, Ham’s business was bringing in about $1 million a year.

Innovative and aggressive in his business approach, Ham experimented with domain tasting, taking advantage of the five-day free trial period designed to protect purchasers of domain names in case they buy the wrong name in error. This enabled him to register hundreds of thousands of new domain names for no charge and gave him time to monitor the amount of traffic they attracted. He then returned the unsuccessful names without having to pay a cent.

Ham eventually abandoned domain tasting, but has since become interested in another practice known as typo squatting. In this case, he profits from the simple typographical error made by millions who type in a domain name, but then put .cm instead of .com at the end. The odds are that this will lead the searcher to an advertisement-packed site known as Agoga.com. Whenever someone clicks on one of the ads, they make money for both Ham and Cameroon, the West African nation whose country code is .cm and has thus agreed to become Ham’s partner in this particular venture. Through software developed by Ham’s organization, traffic involving any unregistered .cm name is rerouted to Ham’s Agoga.com. A realist as well as an Internet visionary, Ham is well aware that the big names such as Yahoo and Google will probably find a way to prevent typo squatting. By the time this happens, however, he will no doubt have thought up even more original ways to strike it rich on the Internet he manages so masterfully.

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