Cyber bet makes for loads of dosh.com
Kevin Savage
http://www.bulk123.com
by SIMON DE BRUXELLES 11/3/00
A GAMBLE on an Internet address has made a handsome return for a computer
programmer who had never placed a bet in his life. Mark Dale, 26, bought the
name www.bettingservice.com for £70 last year. This week he traded in his
Metro for a Porsche 944 after selling the name for £25,000.
Mr Dale, from Glasgow, bought the name after reading an article about the
potential for online gambling. But he had no idea his investment would prove
such a good bet.
Mr Dale is one of a growing number of speculators buying up Web addresses in
the hope of cashing in as use of the Internet increases. He intends to use
part of his profit to buy more names.
Kevin Savage, spokesman for names123.com which auctioned the Web address on
Mr Dale's behalf, said: "It was extremely shrewd to buy a betting-related
name last year. He got in just before the whole online betting thing took
off.When we started five months ago we were taking about 100 calls and
e-mails a day, now we are getting literally thousands." The most popular
names, he said, were linked to betting, sport, banking and financial
services.
The race to secure the best Web addresses has dramatically hotted up after
the introduction this month of a "registration engine" capable of
registering up to 5,000 names an hour. Until now the number of Internet
names has been growing at the rate of 5,000 a day worldwide.
Companies, professionals such as architects and solicitors, and even
individual users who one day hope to have their own Internet address are
scrambling to stake their claim to a site fearing they could be left out in
the cold.
On its first day of operation the registration engine patented by a British
company secured the rights to 774 Web address on behalf of just one
individual. As each name was registered with four different extensions, such
as ".com" or ".co.uk", the total bill was around £50,000.
At the last count there were 14 million registered Internet sites, and
although there are more than 60 million words in the full edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary, dreaming up names for new websites is becoming a
task that would tax the ingenuity of a crossword compiler.
Every combination of three letters has already been registered with every
available extension. Most words in everyday use have also been registered,
from aardvark.com to zebra.com, along with snazzy variations such as
e-aardvark and zebras-r-us.com.
Speculators known as "warehousers" have been buying up catchy names for the
past couple of years. Most valuable are generic names such as banks.com
which reportedly sold last year for £1 million. But others called
"cybersquatters" have also been buying up company names, the names of
celebrities and even some popular family names. Elizabethhurley.co.uk,
victoriabeckham.co.uk and gregdyke.co.uk were among the names being offered
this week on one Internet auction site.
One Bristol businessman, who prefers to remain anonymous, has been investing
in Internet names as fast as he can think of them. Names with the extension
.com cost £69 for a two-year licence and the right to renew, while .co.uk is
£39. Among the names he has registered are totalelvis.com and
awopbopaloobop.com
He said: "It isn't a lot of money when you consider what you're getting.
It's like the gold rush. You've got to stake your claim now or you may get
there and find there's nothing left. Eventually I may set up an Elvis site
but even if I don't I reckon it's a good investment."