What is a Domainer?

While at conference a few weeks ago I was introduced to the world of Domainers. A domainer is an individual or company that actively engages in the buying, selling, marketing, monetization and publishing of Internet domain names and other related web and or internet-based properties.

I spoke to quite a few individuals who own large portfolios of domain names from anywhere between 500 to 250,000 domain names. This is one of the world’s largest conferences of it’s kind in the world and had over 700 people in attendance representing over 100 different countries.

These are the guy’s that build those “Jump Pages” or “typosquatters” when you type in the wrong web site name and you get a web page with photo’s and links that are similar to what you were searching for, but not the web site you where intending to reach. Although we all have our own opinions about this type of business model, they are very good at times at monetizing value out of the invaluable.

The conference covered topics like PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and CPA (Cost-Per-Acquiring), web site marketing jargon that are beginning to dry up as long term revenues source for domainers in additional to affiliate and lead generation efforts. Strategies for buying and selling domain names, including some live auctions where included as well.

In the future domainers are going to have to begin competing with content, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) efforts has search engines begin to recognize them as visual spam over viable content.