The business model behind .cm websites

July 9, 2007 at 8:56 pm Leave a comment

Ever wondered what happens when we type a website name ending in .cm instead of .com. Well this is what happens. The .cm country code is owned by Cameroon. Not many websites are registered in the country. But the similarilty of .cm with .com makes it a big business opportunity. Kevin Ham, the domain king who has built a $300 million empire on domain names, sent some of his people to Cameroon to discuss the possibility of moving the .cm traffic to his website. This is what happens. When an internet user types a website with .cm extension, it gets transferred to a server in Cameroon. If the website is not registered with them it gets transferred to the website “agoga.com”. Agoga’s servers query Yahoo to find ads related to the typed name, which are then displayed on a parked page. Whenever a user clicks on an ad, Yahoo pays Ham, who shares an undisclosed slice of the revenue with Cameroon.