[ktaylor]

A friend of mine runs a 1 person business. Well, technically, he does have an assistant who does his office admin and books.

My friend has steady gross revenues of $6M a year. When I first met him about 8 years ago he was 26 and living at home with his parents. He once remarked on how much he appreciated his mother still doing his laundry and cooking for him and his father.

I forgot to mention, he has extremely high gross margins and EBITDA. He does all the work himself other then that admin I mentioned already.

What is his business, you are probably wondering?

He owns internet domains. He flips them like real estate. He looks at Google trends, buys undervalued properties, develops their traffic via SEO, generates affiliate sales revenue, and if given the opportunity, then sells them at a much inflated value. He owns 1000s of domains and has built highly automated systems to efficiently manage them.

[stef25]

Money is money but this kind of business really feels dirty.

It's kind of like parking cars in every $1 spot you can find and then charging people $500 to take that spot.

Also, developing traffic via SEO for 1000s of (parked?) domains most likely involves even dirtier techniques.

Kudos to him, he's achieved more than I ever will but if that was me I couldn't look people in the eye when telling them how I made my millions.

[justaguyhere]

Most forms of landlording doesn't add value to the society. This is especially bad in the case of domain names. What is the point of one person owning 1000s of domain names, with the single goal of selling them at an inflated price? The internet would be a much better place without people like these.

[everybodyknows]

What sort of content is supplied by such web sites?

[ktaylor]

My understanding is he looks for phrases people are increasingly searching for such as "BHP Free Sippy Cup" and then buys a domain such as bhp-free-sippy-cups.com. On the site, he just displays affiliate links to various vendor product pages for that product, e.g. Amazon, etc.

The trick is understanding the trends and having the SEO skills to efficiently build the traffic. He can't put too much individual time into any one property because it will on average only generate a few hundred dollars a month in revenue.

If the trend becomes popular enough someone comes in and buys the domain for their real sippy cup business.