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1st September 2006, 05:35 PM
An overseas Internet gold rush
Even with Google and Yahoo's best efforts, the Internet advertising revolution is still in its early stages, especially overseas. But if they're successful at bringing online ads to more countries, overseas domain owners are going to find themselves sitting on prime property.
"As people in many regions go online, these names will become great pieces of real estate," says Marc Ostrofsky, president of iReit, a private company that is accumulating domain names and is backed in part by Starbucks (Charts) founder Howard Schultz. In the past year and a half, iReit has amassed a domain portfolio of more than 400,000 names.
This spring it spent millions of dollars - Ostrofsky describes the amount as "mid-seven figures" - to buy up a collection of names ending in .de (Germany), .nl (the Netherlands) and .fr (France). The firm is now looking into deals in India and China.
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/29/technology/nextbigforeign.biz2/index.htm
Even with Google and Yahoo's best efforts, the Internet advertising revolution is still in its early stages, especially overseas. But if they're successful at bringing online ads to more countries, overseas domain owners are going to find themselves sitting on prime property.
"As people in many regions go online, these names will become great pieces of real estate," says Marc Ostrofsky, president of iReit, a private company that is accumulating domain names and is backed in part by Starbucks (Charts) founder Howard Schultz. In the past year and a half, iReit has amassed a domain portfolio of more than 400,000 names.
This spring it spent millions of dollars - Ostrofsky describes the amount as "mid-seven figures" - to buy up a collection of names ending in .de (Germany), .nl (the Netherlands) and .fr (France). The firm is now looking into deals in India and China.
Source: http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/29/technology/nextbigforeign.biz2/index.htm