Domain name monetization is a crazily huge business. In my home town here in Australia there is a company listed on our stock exchange called Dark Blue Sea that is on of THE major players. Last year they posted a $3 million profit on $22 million in revenue.

Thanks to them being listed you can get a really good insight into the entire business and various strategies you can use even just on a small scale.

The annual reports and investor presentations are a gold mine of information to basically create a how-to-guide for manageing a domain name portfolio.

I’ve recently bought 7 new domains. I konw it’s a huge business, but I’ll admit I don’t know a whole lot about it. I would think it would be hard to get a domain today and slap some adsense on it and make any money, really the only way that would work is if the domain is something like candy.com where it would probably get a ton of type in traffic. Otherwise you’d have to do some SEO stuff to even get the site ranked high enough where people would see it to click the ads. I think the domains I’ve recently bought are all profitable ones, but nothing that just some average joe would blindly type into his address bar. But I’m definitely not a pro with domains and such, so I could be wrong here.

Domains are like plots of land. If the land is in a desirable enough area (if the domain name is good enough), it alone will have huge value. However, if it’s even marginal land (if the domain name is not a lead-pipe lock), it must be DEVELOPED in order to be monetized in any reasonable time frame.

Although I think you could buy/sell domains for great money if you already had a lot of capital, I think you must land on the side of the developer if you wish to get into the game with minimal start-up costs.

[...] The US Gaming Exchange has been collecting domain names for some time now, trying to build the largest network of gambling sites online, but it’s time to move on. They’re selling their entire portfolio on eBay, 1,673 dot-com names, with a starting bid of $150,000. Not sure how many bids they’re going to get, but check out the auction here. Ben, one of my roommates and frequent poker opponent, has a post at his site College Startup about collecting and selling domain names for profit. Only a few months ago he sold our old site ThePokerBlog, which has a few new writers and seems to be doing really well. They just wrote a post on a college student who won the WPT event in the bahammas for over one million dollars! One of my classmates from Ohio State finished at the final table taking home over $300K as well! Shows that college-aged kids are starting to really be a force in the poker world abroad and online. Good luck on the felt! [...]

Very hard to do and takes a stroke of great luck to sell your portfolio!

And until that time you must pay the yearly renewal fees, which could be as much as millions!