New gTLD/vTLD Opportunity, Anyone Up For .CIM or .CPM?
Posted by This is going to be an interesting show to watch during the application process of gTLDs/vTLDs. After reading a current article posted on thedomains.com, I decided to make this post here on the blog. A while back, Kevin Ham was featured in Business 2.0, titiled, “The Man Who Owns The Internet”.
In that article, Paul Sloan discussed how Kevin had negotiated a deal with Cameroon for management of the countries .CM extension to earn PPC revenue. Here is a clip from the article:
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.
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).
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.
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.
So now a new opportunity exists for domainers or savvy business owners to apply for the .CIM or .CPM vTLDs. These domains will generate millions of typos for internet users searching for content online using a web address with a .com at the end. As we all know, if .CM gets millions of hits of typos monthly, it can be calculated that these two extensions .CIM or CPM, will generate millions of typos as well. This means big money for PPC payouts. It is going to be interesting what domainers/parking companies make the move on these two extensions. I am more than sure that domainers are working in stealth mode for this savvy investment.
You can bet that many of the companies that do apply for these, will be made up domainer business companies. There is alot of money on the table for these two extensions. I am making a prediction that there will be a bidding war to acquire management for the extensions .CIM and .CPM and people will be confused as to why, when other extensions are available as well. Anyone up to applying for these in a factional domaining group? 
This is going to be a fun one to watch and see who comes out on top of these. I can assure you, it will more than likely be one of our all star players in the domain industry. Unless we form a group!
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