Business 2.0 and Kevin Ham
I subscribe to Business 2.0 magazine and I usually receive the magazine about a week later than it hits newsstands. Sometimes I just can’t wait and go to the website early to see what they’re all about that month. This was the case again this month as I ran into the cover story online about Kevin Ham.
Kevin has found a way to exploit newbie internet users by using their typos and domain guesses to make truckloads of money. The article talks about if this is ethical and how many enemies he has collected over the years. I think the guy has a great idea and deserves every penny he gets for the practice. There should be (and probably is) a whole market for monetizing early internet users and their navigational mistakes. Kevin makes his money from Google/Yahoo whenever a link is clicked on a landing page that someone accidentally lands on by directly typing in their search or domain name into the address bar. The ads on his landing pages are relevant to the domain name or typo and we have all probably landed on one of his (or someone like him) pages.
Once you land on page, you have an option to leave in many different ways:
- re-type the domain name in the address bar
- hit the back button
- go to a search engine
or actually click a link and follow the advertisement. Doesn’t sound evil to me. You still get a choice and you aren’t tricked into doing something you didn’t want to do in the first place. Two things stuck out as me as I read the article, unrelated to Kevin Ham, was how Microsoft’s newest browser version IE7 will correct typos or sometimes send you to their own landing page. This is kind of like Microsoft gaming its own ad platform. Again though, I have no problem with it because you never have to click a link you don’t want to. The other thing that struck me would be how Google should give this guy a medal because landing on those pages enough as a new user would make anyone learn how to use a search engine.
More power Kevin.