THE NEW WAVE OF ONLINE REAL ESTATE

"What we’ve wanted to do, quietly, is amass the largest real estate position on the Internet...." Such is the ambition of Kelly P. Conlin, the chief executive of NameMedia, "a privately held owner and developer of Web sites based in Waltham, Massachusetts."

NameMedia represents the largest and latest success in the area of what Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times calls "online property development." The company owns 725,000 websites and gets its business from the 5-10% of Internet users who use direct navigation (typing in the hypothetical name of a website based on what they're looking to find) rather than search engines.

NameMedia either develops the content of more profitable domain names to include information that users are looking for, or fills the sites with search engine ads and receives a commission from the engines when someone clicks on a link. Independent website owners also add their sites to NameMedia's network, producing even more revenue for the company based on carefully chosen ads placed on those sites.

NameMedia's business represents a new wave in Internet investment, and remains at the forefront of its field. After all, web publishers are always more than happy to expose their content to as many people as possible and make more money in the process.

To read Bob Tedeschi's article in its entirety, go to Millions of Addresses and Thousands of Sites