玉楼春

香米的话：此文原作为英文版http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/06/01/100050989/index.htm ，为我们揭示了利用typo域名从而拥有互联网的凯文•韩，堪称最有实力的.com域名巨头，其建立价值3亿美元的域名帝国故事，引人入胜。由于在网上我尚未找到中文版本，特此继编译《Masters of their Domains 域名大师》后，再度不遗余力编译出来，与大家分享。首发于“香米”网站www.xiangmi.cn，原创编译万字长篇很辛苦，转载请尊重劳动成果，注明出处，谢谢！

 The man who owns the Internet

Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here’s how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.

By Paul Sloan, Business 2.0 Magazine editor-at-large

May 22 2007: 2:17 PM EDT

拥有互联网的人

据《Business 2.0》杂志报道，他是你从未听说过的一个人：凯文·韩。他是最有实力的.com域名巨头，建立了一个价值3亿美元的域名帝国。

《Business 2.0》杂志主编保罗·斯隆写于2007 年5月 22 日: 东部夏令时间下午 2:17

(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Kevin Ham leans forward, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type — into the air. He’s seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas’s Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block.

（《Business 2.0》杂志）凯文•韩熬夜熬得很晚，他闭着眼睛，探身向前开始打字。 他背靠着墙坐在拉斯维加斯威尼斯酒店的包房里。在他面前，一个域名拍卖者正在快速浏览一份域名名单，挑选着韩可能感兴趣的域名，那些域名的出现就像看见老爷车行驶在街区里。

As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It’s the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it’s a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner?

当韩感兴趣的域名出现时, 他有时候会输入浏览器，进行最后的核查。人们可能直接输入他们的浏览器的这个域名，会不会就像韩所希望的，是完全通过搜索引擎进入? 作为单数形式好还是复数形式好? 如果这是个容易输错的“蓄意错拼”域名, 是许多人都会犯的错误吗? 或者拥有这个域名, 就像拥有海边的极品房产，让人感觉像一个赢家?

When Ham wants a domain, he leans over and quietly instructs an associate to bid on his behalf. He likes wedding names, so his guy lifts the white paddle and snags Weddingcatering.com for $10,000. Greeting.com is not nearly as good as the plural Greetings.com, but Ham grabs it anyway, for $350,000.

当韩想要一个域名时, 他安静地倾下身去，让合伙人代表他竞价。他喜欢婚礼名字，因此他的合伙人移动着白色的鼠标符，为Weddingcatering.com（婚庆供应）出价1万美元。还有个Greeting.com（问候），虽然和复数形式的 Greetings.com（问候）相比不够好，但是韩无论如何都想买到，他出价为35万美元。

Ham is a devout Christian, and he spends $31,000 to add Christianrock.com to his collection, which already includes God.com and Satan.com. When it’s all over, Ham strolls to the table near the exit and writes a check for $650,000. It’s a cheap afternoon.

韩是个虔诚的基督教徒，他已经有了God.com（神）和 Satan.com（魔鬼），仍然花了3.1万美元将Christianrock.com（基督教音乐）收入囊中。当竞价结束时，韩闲逛到靠近出口的桌子写了张面额65万美元的支票，对他而言，这个下午的出价很便宜。

Just a few years ago, most of the guys bidding in this room had never laid eyes on one another. Indeed, they rarely left their home computers. Now they find themselves in a Vegas ballroom surrounded by deep-pocketed bankers, venture-backed startups, and other investors trying to get a piece of the action.

就在几年前，在这个房间中出价的大部份人从未见过彼此。的确，他们很少离开过自己的家用电脑。如今在拉斯维加斯的包房里，他们发现自己身处于试图分一杯羹的富有的银行家、风险投资家和其他的投资者中间。

And why not? In the past three years alone, the number of dotcom names has soared more than 130 percent to 66 million. Every two seconds, another joins the list.

为什么不呢？在过去的三年里，.com域名的数量增长超过130%，达到6600万个，平均每两秒就有一个被注册。

But the big money is in the aftermarket, where the most valuable names — those that draw thousands of pageviews and throw off steady cash from Google’s and Yahoo’s pay-per-click ads — are driving prices to dizzying heights. People who had the guts and foresight to sweep up names shed during the dotcom bust are now landlords of some of the most valuable real estate on the Web.

但是最有价值的域名是出现在二级市场上，那些域名有着数以千计 页面浏览量，从谷歌和雅虎的按次点击付费广告中攫取着稳定的现金，将域名价格推上令人晕眩的高度。当.com域名不景气流出的时候，有勇气和远见的域名投资者扫光了这些域名，现在已经成为网上一些最有价值的域名的持有者。

How to make money without really trying

The man at the top of this little-known hierarchy is Kevin Ham — one of a handful of major-league "domainers" in the world and arguably the shrewdest and most ambitious of the lot. Even in a field filled with unusual career paths, Ham’s stands out.

如何不用真正尝试就能赚钱？

凯文•韩是这个很少人知道的圈子里中的顶尖人物，参加了全球数量极少的“域名投资人”联盟的人之一，是众人中最精明的和最野心勃勃的，甚至在一个充满着不同寻常的事业路径的领域中，韩也显得很突出。

Trained as a family doctor, he put off medicine after discovering the riches of the Web. Since 2000 he has quietly cobbled together a portfolio of some 300,000 domains that, combined with several other ventures, generate an estimated $70 million a year in revenue. (Like all his financial details, Ham would neither confirm nor deny this figure.)

韩以前是一名家庭医生。在发现网络财富之后，他离开了医学界。从 2000年开始，他和其他的风险投资合伙人悄悄地弄到了 30万个域名，每年预计产生7千万美元的收入。 （对于这些数字，像他所有的财务细节一样，韩既不表示肯定也不予以否认。)

Working mostly as a solo operator, Ham has looked for every opening and exploited every angle — even inventing a few of his own — to expand his enterprise. Early on, he wrote software to snag expiring names on the cheap. He was one of the first to take advantage of a loophole that allows people to register a name and return it without cost after a free trial, on occasion grabbing hundreds of thousands of names in one swoop.

大部分时候，韩独立工作，搜寻着每个开放和有待开发的领域来扩张他的企业，甚至发明了一些他自己的软件工具。早些时期，他编写软件去廉价地抢注域名。他是最先钻允许人们免费试用注册域名空子的人之一，每次抢注能弄到数十万计的域名。

And what few people know is that he’s also the man behind the domain world’s latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name.

而且很少人知道他也是域名体系中最近实施方案的幕后者：从数以百万计的人们在域名后缀中错误输入“. cm”而不是“. com”产生的流量中获利。

Try it with almost any name you can think of — Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm — and you’ll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500).

尝试输入你能想到的几乎任何名字，如Beer.cm（啤酒）、 Newyorktimes.cm（纽约时报），甚至Anyname.cm（任何名字），你将会登录到一个充满着雅虎广告的网站，叫做Agoga.com。

Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad — as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code — just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.

每当有人在一个西非国家喀麦隆的网站上点击广告时，韩和他风险投资的合伙人就赚到钱了。 为什么选择了喀麦隆？因为它拥有的.cm 作为国家域名后缀，是一笔无法估算的好财富，正如德国用.de作为国家域名后缀一样。

The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well.

不同之处在于几乎所有. cm域名都被注册了，与.com域名仅相差一个字母。韩联系上喀麦隆政府，派驻他的人员飞到当地去进行网络流量转向。如果他的方法见效的话，哥伦比亚 （.co）、阿曼（.om）、尼日尔（.ne）和埃塞俄比亚（.et）也将会成为他的囊中之物。

"It’s in the works," Ham says over lunch in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. "That’s why I can’t talk about it." He’s nearly as reluctant to share details about his newest company, called Reinvent Technology, into which he’s investing tens of millions of dollars to build a powerhouse of Internet businesses around his most valuable properties.

“这项工作正进行中，”韩在他位于英属哥伦比亚温哥华的家中用午餐时说道。“那就是我为什么不能谈论它的原因”， 他很不情愿提及有关他最新成立的“再创技术”公司细节。围绕他的最有价值的域名资产，他投资了数千万元，来建造一个互联网商务的发电所。

New ways to strike it rich on the Web

Given Ham’s reach on the Web — his sites receive 30 million unique visitors a month — it’s remarkable that so few people know about him. Even in the clubby world of domainers, he’s a mystery man. Until now Ham has never talked publicly about his business. You won’t find his name on any domain registration, nor will you see it on the patent application for the Cameroon trick.

获取网络财富的新方式

韩在网络上扩张所带来的是，虽然他的网站每月有3千万个独立访客，但是很少有人知道他。甚至在域名投资人的交际世界中，他也是一个神秘人。直到现在，韩从未公开讨论他的生意。 你在任何的域名注册资料上找不到他的名字, 你也将不会看见他的名字出现在喀麦隆计划的专利申请上。

There are practical reasons for the low profile: For one, Ham’s success has drawn enemies, many of them rivals. He once used a Vancouver post office box for domain-related mail — until the day he opened a package that contained a note reading "You are a piece of s**t," accompanied by an actual piece of it.

如此低调是有着现实原因的：韩的成功引来了很多对手，多数是他的竞争者。他曾经使用过一个温哥华的邮箱来收发域名联系邮件，直到一天他打开了一个收到的包裹，上面的便签写着“你是一块大便”，包裹里面放着一块真的大便。

Bitter domainers are one thing, lawyers another. And at the moment, Ham’s biggest concern is that corporate counsels will come after him claiming that the Cameroon typo scheme is an abuse of their trademarks. He may be right, since this is the first time he’s been identified as the orchestrator.

一方面，当域名投资人是辛苦的，另一方面，律师也给他带来不少麻烦。 此时此刻，韩最关心大型公司法律顾问是否会随后而至，宣称喀麦隆“蓄意错拼”域名是对他们商标的一种滥用。他可能是对的，这是第一次他被确认为域名方面的管弦乐编曲家。

When asked about the .cm play, John Berryhill, a top domain attorney who doesn’t work for Ham, practically screams into the phone, "You know who did that? Do you have any idea how many people want to know who’s behind that?"

当问及这个.cm域名游戏时，一名不是为韩工作的顶尖域名代理人约翰·贝里希尔在电话里发出尖叫声，“你知道是谁干的？ 你有多少人想知道到底是谁在幕后操作的？”

Spreading the word

Kevin Ham is a boyish-looking 37-year-old, trim from a passion for judo and a commitment to clean living. His drink of choice: grapefruit juice, no ice. His mild demeanor belies the aggressive, work-around-the-clock type that he is. Ham frequently steers conversations about business back to the Bible. Not in a preachy way; it’s just who he is.

文字传播

37 岁的凯文•韩看起来像个男孩，热爱柔道，生活洁净。 他对饮料的选择是：柚子汁，不加冰。 他的温和态度隐藏着攻击性，能够一天不间断地打字工作。韩经常把有关生意的谈论引回到谈论圣经方面，但不是以说教的方式，这就是他的方式。

The son of Korean-born immigrants, Ham grew up on the east side of Vancouver with his three brothers. His father ran dry-cleaning stores; his mother worked graveyard shifts as a nurse. A debilitating illness at the age of 14 led Ham to dream of becoming a doctor. He cruised through high school and then undergraduate work and medical school at the University of British Columbia.

作为韩裔移民的儿子，韩和他的三位兄弟在温哥华的东部一起长大。他的父亲经营干洗店，母亲是一名夜班护士。14 岁时，一种衰弱型疾病使韩梦想成为一名医生。他上了中学，然后进入英属哥伦比亚大学医学院学习，并毕业了。

Christianity had long been a mainstay with his family, but as an undergrad, he made the Bible a focal point of his life; he joined the Evangelical Layman’s Church and attended regular Bible meetings. Ham recalls that it was about this time — 1992 or 1993 — that he was introduced to the Web. A church friend told him about a powerful new medium that could be used to spread the gospel.

基督教长期以来是他家庭的信仰，但是作为一名大学生，他把圣经当作他生活中的焦点。他加入了福音派教堂，而且经常参加教堂聚会。韩回想起把网络介绍到他面前的时间，1992年或1993年。 一个教堂朋友告诉他一种强有力的新媒体可以用来传布福音。

"Those words really struck me," Ham says. "It’s the reason I’m still working."

“那些言语真的打动了我，”韩说道，“它是我继续从事工作的理由所在。”

After he graduated from med school in 1998, Ham and his new bride took off for London, Ontario, for a two-year residency. By the second year, Ham had become chief resident, and when he wasn’t rushing to the emergency room, he indulged his growing fascination with the Net, teaching himself to create websites and to code in Perl.

1998年，当韩从医药院毕业后，他和刚结婚的新娘到安大略省伦敦进行为期两年的实习。在第二年，韩已经成为主治医生。当他不必赶到急诊室的时候，他在网上恣意成长，自学了网站建设和脚本编码。

Information about Web hosting at the time was so scattered that Ham began creating an online directory of providers, complete with reviews and ratings of their services. He called it Hostglobal.com.

当时有关网络主机的资讯传播得相当快，以至于韩创建了一个提供商在线目录，叫做Hostglobal.com（环球主机），有着各种服务评论和等级。

From there it was a short step to the business of buying and selling domains. About six months after he launched Hostglobal, Ham was earning around $10,000 per month in ad sales. But when one of his advertisers — a service that sold domain registrations — told him that a single ad was generating business worth $1,500 a month, Ham figured he could get in on that too.

那时的域名交易的步骤很短。在他发布 Hostglobal.com（环球主机）大约六个月后，韩靠广告销售每月赚取了1万美元。当他的一个提供域名注册服务的广告商，告诉他一个能够产生交易的广告价值1500美元一个月时，韩计算出他也可以获得那么多。

From doctor to domainer

It made sense: People shopping for hosting services were often interested in buying a catchy URL, so Ham launched a second directory, called DNSindex.com. Like similar services operating at the time, it gave customers a way to register domain names.

从医生到域名投资人

这是有来由的：人们为采购主机服务时通常会对购买一个好记的网址感兴趣。因此韩发布了另外一个目录,叫做了 DNSindex.com（域名指数）。像当时其他类似的注册服务商一样，这个网站可以让客户注册到域名。

But Ham added the one feature that early domain hunters wanted most: weekly lists of available names, compiled using free sources he found on the Web. Some lists he gave away; others he charged as much as $50 for. In a couple of months, he had more than 5,000 customers.

但是韩增加了一个早期的域名猎人最想得到的特别之处：每周删注域名目录，用他在网络上发现的免费资源编译的。他赠送了一些目录，并向其他人收取50美元。在一些月份里，他拥有了超过 5000个客户。

By the time he finished his residency in June 2000, his two small Web ventures were pulling in more money in a month — sometimes $40,000 — than Ham made that year at the hospital. That was enough, he reasoned, to put off starting a medical practice for three more months, maybe six. "It just didn’t make sense not to do it," he says.

2000年6月，当他完成实习后，与韩在医院赚的钱相比，他的两个小的网站投资在一个月内能够创造更多的钱，有时 能够达到4万美元。“已经赚得够多了,”他说到，将医院实习额外延长了3至6个月。“没有理由不去那样做。”他认为。

With a new baby in tow, Ham and his wife moved back to Vancouver, settling into a one-bedroom apartment. Ham’s timing, it turned out, was spot-on. Tech stocks were tumbling, dotcoms were folding left and right, and investors were fleeing the Web. More important to him, hundreds of thousands of valuable domain names that were suddenly considered worthless began to expire, or "drop." Ham and a handful of other trailblazers were ready to snap them up.

带着一个新生的小宝宝，韩和他的妻子搬到温哥华一栋一居室的公寓去住。此时，恰到好处的时机在韩的面前出现了。 科技类股票大跌，网络公司股价忽上忽下，投资者正在逃离网络。对他更重要的是，数十万计的突然被认为无价值的，实际上相当有价值的域名已经期满或者被删除，韩和一些其他的开拓者准备把他们抢注到手。

Figuring out when names would drop was tedious work.

At the time, Network Solutions controlled the best names; it was for a long time the only retail company, or registrar, selling .coms. It didn’t say when expiring names would go back on the market, but twice a day it published the master list of all registered names — the so-called "root zone" file (now managed by VeriSign (Charts)). It was a fat list of well over 5 million names that took hours to download and often crashed the under-powered PCs of the day.

计算域名何时删除是份沉闷的工作。

当时，Network Solutions控制了最好的域名，在很长的一段时间内，它是唯一的零售.com域名的公司及注册商。 它不会告知期满时域名回到注册市场的时间, 但是每天两次它会推出所有的注册域名持有人的目录，被称之为“根区域”文件 （现在由 VeriSign 管理）。目录里面有着超过500万个域名，需要花数个小时下载，时常会让低配置的个人计算机罢工。

So Ham wrote software scripts that compared one day’s list with the next. Then he tracked names that vanished from the root file. Those names would be listed briefly as on hold, and Ham figured out that they would almost always drop five or six days later — at about 3:30 a.m. on the West Coast. In the dark of night, Ham launched his attacks, firing up five PCs and multiple browsers in each. Typing furiously, he would enter his buy requests and bounce from one keyboard to the next until he snagged the names he wanted.

因此韩编写了能够将当天的一份目录与另外一份目录作比较的软件脚本，然后他追踪从根文件消失的域名，将那些暂停的域名简洁地列出表格。韩计算出它们可能会被删注的时间，通常在5-6天后的西方海岸时间的早上3：30分左右。 在深夜时分，韩用五台个人电脑和里面的多种浏览器发出他的抢注指令。 通过强有力的输入, 他会从一个键盘到下一个键盘不断反复提交注册请求，直到他抢注到想要的域名。

He missed a lot of them, of course.

Ham had no clue that there were rivals out there who were way ahead him, deploying software that purchased names at a rate that Ham’s fingers couldn’t match. Through registration data, he eventually traced many of those purchases to one owner: "NoName." Behind the shadowy moniker was another reclusive domain pioneer, a Chinese-born programmer named Yun Ye, who, according to people who know him, operated out of his house in Fremont, Calif.

当然，他也错失过许多域名。

韩无法找到是哪个对手走在他前面，他配置软件的水平是以韩的手指不能达到的级别。通过查询注册数据，他最后追踪到那些被购买域名的所有者的名字：“无名氏”。在这个影子名字的背后隐藏着另外一个域名高手，他在位于加州弗里蒙特的家中进行的。据那些认识他的人称，是一名叫做“叶云”的华裔程序员。

By day Ye worked as a software developer. At night he unleashed the programs that automated domain purchases. (Ye achieved deity status among domainers in 2004 when he sold a portfolio of 100,000 names to Marchex (Charts), a Seattle-based, publicly traded search marketing firm, for $164 million. He then moved to Vancouver.)

白天，叶云的工作是一名软件开发员。晚上，他用程序自动抢注域名。（当叶云于2004年以1.64亿美元将他10万个域名组合卖掉给麦策克斯公司后，在域名投资人的心目中成为了神。麦策克斯公司位于西雅图，是家公众商业搜索营销公司。叶云后来搬到温哥华居住）。

Ham went back to the keyboard, writing scripts so that he, too, could pound at the registrars. Ham’s track record began to improve, but he still wasn’t satisfied. "Yun was just too good," he says.

韩回到键盘前面继续编写脚本，以便能够打击其他抢注者。韩的记录开始改善，但是他仍然不被满意。“叶云太强了，”他说到。

Then Ham did something brash: He bought his way to the front of the line. Since registrars had direct connections to Network Solutions’s servers, Ham’s play was to cut out the middleman. He struck deals with several discount registrars, even helping them write software to ensure that they captured the names Ham wanted to buy during the drops. In exchange for the exclusivity, Ham offered to pay as much as $100 for some names that might normally go for as little as $8.

然后韩做了件颇为显眼的事情：他购买了较好的注册通道。 每当抢注者发出连接Network Solutions服务器的指令时，韩的办法是从中转站切断连接。他击退了其他抢注者的交易，甚至帮助他们编写软件，以确定他们获得的是韩想要在删注时购买的域名。为了换取独家垄断，韩为一些域名支付了差不多100美元，而通常价格仅为8美元。

Within weeks Ham had struck so many deals that, according to rivals, he controlled most of the direct connections. "I kept telling them to hit them harder," Ham says in a rare boastful moment. "We brought down the servers many times." During one six-month period starting in late 2000, Ham registered more than 10,000 names.

在数个星期内，韩已经击退了许多竞争对手的抢注请求，他控制了大部份的连接。“我不断告诉他们，我将让他们更痛苦，”韩少见地夸耀了片刻。“我们多次让服务器垮掉。”在2000年晚期的6个月内，韩抢注超过 1万个域名。

Rival domainers, locked out of much of the action, didn’t appreciate Ham’s tactics. It was one of them, most likely, who sent him the turd. "Kevin came in and closed the door for everyone else," says Frank Schilling, a domainer who figured out what Ham had done and sealed similar deals. "There was a ton of professional jealousy."

由于多次抢注行动被封锁，与其竞争的域名投资人很不欣赏韩的手法。很有可能是他们的其中一员，把大便寄给了韩。“凯文进来后，就对其他人关上了门，”域名投资人弗兰克·席林说。席林计算出韩已经做过的类似封闭式抢注，他说到，“从专业角度讲，这让人相当妒忌。”