.cm Registry Redirection Mystery Solved
A while back, I first commented on the fact that the entire .cm (Cameroon) TLD appears to be redirected to the Agoga.com parking page in my post ‘Typo Squatter loses Thousands of Dollars Due to Missed Details‘. This post generated tons of interest and comments, and a large amount of search traffic.
The move by the government of Cameroon has become an ongoing mystery for many domainers - few could fail to see the benefitsof owning the .cm registry. Think of the profits - any time you mistyped ‘.com’ as ‘.cm’, you went to an ad-driven parking page. It is estimated that millions of people make this sort of error every day, leading to hundreds of thousands of dollars of ad revenue daily. In essence, whoever redirected the .cm registry pulled off the perfect coup of the domaining world.
Well, the mystery is finally solved. According to a recent article on CNN, the mastermind behind the .cm switch is Kevin Ham, domainer extrordinaire with an estimated net worth of $300 million dollars. According to the CNN article, Ham sent a group of his employees flying to the nation of Cameroon to convince the government-run registry the value of landing-page redirection. Ham splits his profits off this scheme with the government of Cameroon.
According to sources, he is also eyeing Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) for the same type of agreement he has with Cameroon.
[…] Update: the mystery is finally solved […]