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叶云是位程序员高手。在90 年代晚期和21世纪早期，他用自己开发的软件获得了大批域名，建立了他的域名帝国。他成为了一位域名大师，并因抢注和购买那些被人们放弃或忘记支付每年注册费的域名而出名。当时的域名注册系统是秘密运行的, 域名投资者得设法推测什么域名会在时候到期。在黑夜里，叶云会像指挥官一样，坐在一堆电脑前，火速下单，发送请求购买域名。 他的高超技术很快就显现出来。一位印第安纳波利斯州的域名投资者乍得·富尔克宁注册的域名，在那些年间因此被搅乱秩序，有时错过了续费的最后期限。他注意，叶云以闪电般速度抢注了他拥有的到期域名。在叶云抢购了他的100个到期域名后，富尔克宁决定需要与叶谈谈。“我要把叶云吃穷、睡晕、喝倒，”他说。发给叶云的电子邮件没有回复，打过去的电话也没有人接。到了2001 年底，富尔克宁去到圣约瑟市附近旅行，来到一个在叶云注册域名信息上面登记的地址。“我打算走到他的前门，敲敲门，并且说，‘叶云，我必须见到你，’”现在已经有了7000 个域名的富尔克宁说。然而，地址把他带到了一个信箱前。富尔克宁在叶云的信箱上贴了张便条，叫叶云回复他。过了两、三天后，叶云给富尔克宁发了封电子邮件，但两人还是没有见面。两年后，富尔克宁的一些相识熟人在洛杉矶市的酒巴搞了次聚会，叶云也参加了。“我谈了许多，然后他离开了，” 富尔克宁回忆道。直到第二天富尔克宁才知道和他喝酒的是另外一个叶云，真正的叶云在电子邮件中向他证实了这一点。（叶云的律师约翰·巴雷希尔说叶云不会与新闻媒体接触，并且他补充道，“我不回答任何关于叶云的问题。”） Forget condos and strip malls. Domain names, the real estate of the Web, have been delivering far greater returns. How some of the savviest speculators on the Net are making millions from their URL portfolios. On a balmy night in late October, hundreds of partiers, most sporting red or blue Hawaiian shirts, pack the Delux nightclub in Delray Beach, Fla. It's a swank place--outdoor decks, two bars, plush, bed-size sofas scattered throughout--and the crowd arrives in chartered buses and stretch Hummers. Many head straight for the guy rolling cigars and toss back shots as if it were 1999. Which, to them, it might as well be. They call themselves domainers. They make their living buying and selling domain names and turning their Web traffic into cash--lots of it. They have gathered in Delray Beach for a trade show called Traffic that this year boasts 300 paying attendees, more than twice the number that came for the first show, in '04. The man behind the conference, Rick Schwartz, couldn't be happier--and he isn't even around when midnight strikes and bikini-clad women take to the dance floor to raffle off prizes and peel off their tops. Schwartz, 52, began buying up domain names 10 years ago. Like many early players, he gravitated to where the money was: porn. He snapped up names like Ass.com, Makeout.com, and Porno.com, to name a few. It was a quick path to riches: Adult sites were paying handsomely for the traffic; mainstream sites were not--at least not yet. Today, Schwartz owns about 5,000 names, with less than a third falling into the "adult" category. He's the industry's biggest promoter, preaching the power of domains to anyone who will listen and bringing domainers together with moneymen and execs from the likes of Google and Yahoo. He sports a $65,000 Rolex on his left wrist, a $32,000 diamond bracelet on his right, and is astounded that he--a community college dropout--is living like a king in a waterfront house in Boca Raton. "I don't like to work," Schwartz says, almost yelling as if to convince everyone within earshot that they're fools if they do. "I figure any moron in the world can generate work for themselves and tie up their time. I have one laptop, no employees, and no product whatsoever--none! This is magic." Magic, he claims, that's earning him $2 million a year. And you thought the domain grabbers vanished with the dotcom bust. The boom in Internet advertising and the success of the pay-per-click ad model are making the go-go '90s look sluggish. Back then, buying a domain name was pure speculation: Snap up Whatever.com and sit back until some big company with a get-on-the-Internet-at-any-cost mentality offers you a set-for-life payday to buy it. Now it's all about the income stream. A single good domain name--Candy.com, Cellphones.com, Athletesfoot.com--can bring in hundreds of dollars a day, in some cases while the owner hardly lifts a finger. Schwartz, for instance, directs his traffic to one of the many small companies that serve as go-betweens with Google and Yahoo, the two giants that make this all possible. The middlemen, known as aggregators, do all the heavy lifting, designing the sites and tapping into one or the other of the search engines' advertising networks to add the best-paying links. Many other big domainers cut out the middlemen, creating their own webpages and working directly with Google or Yahoo. The secret? It has to do with what's known as type-in traffic, or, in Wall Street jargon, direct navigation. Though it may seem odd in the era of powerful search engines, it turns out that millions of Internet surfers don't use search at all. Instead, they type what they're looking for right into the top of their Web browser. Looking to buy candy? Type in Candy.com, a name Schwartz bought in May 2002 for $108,000. A page filled with links to candy-related products comes up. Click on one of the ads and the advertiser pays Google, which in turn sends a share to Schwartz and the company that runs Candy.com. Some days Candy.com makes Schwartz $300 in profits; the site paid for itself in a year and a half. 责任编辑：米尊 |