"If they had wanted $5 million, I would have done it in a blink of an eye."

http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2007/07/05/google-yahoo-pets-ent-manage-cx_ll_0705tabibi.html
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Entrepreneurs

Meet Noah Of The Internet
Lisa LaMotta, 07.05.07, 12:15 PM ET

Alex Tabibi’s business card features a dog, a horse, a bird, a ferret and a fish.

Call Tabibi, a former oncologist, the Noah of the Internet. His ark: a burgeoning online catalogue empire called UnRealEstate. Formed in 2002 with his brother Carlo, the company sells a slew of products through a collection of sites with generic yet specific URLs
--such as Bird.com and Ferret.com
--and splits the revenues with product suppliers.
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Snatch up the most-searched Web addresses in the right markets
--specifically, those with a younger, Web-savvy customer base and no clear leader serving their needs
--and you can't help but make money,
he says.
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A big key to this strategy is buying those Web addresses.
Staked with capital from a family real estate business in Los Angeles,
the Tabibi brothers bought their first URL
--Dog.com--for $500,000.
UnRealEstate now includes
Bird.com,
Fish.com,
Ferret.com,
Horse.com,
Bike.com,
Garden.com,
Wind.com and
Solar.com, among other names.
(Construction-equipment giant Caterpillar (nyse: CAT - news - people ) wouldn't part with Cat.com.)

Some of the URLs cost just a few thousand dollars;
others, such as Fish.com, set Tabibi back about $1 million.
Two weeks ago, at a URL auction in Manhattan, he paid $95,000 for Fountain.com
--a good fit, he thinks, to go with his Garden.com and Greenhouse.com sites.
(The synergies between things like ferrets and fish are less clear;
any operating scale comes from sharing information technology functions like data warehousing
and search algorithms.)
Related Links:
The Most Expensive Web Addresses
Master The Domain Name Game
Marching Up The Search Stack
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While Tabibi admits bidding on URLs is as much art as science,
he and other masters of their domains do have a few strategic guidelines.

First,
and most obvious,
he wants names that are easily found by
Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ),
Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) and other online search engines.

Next,
he looks for the singular form of a word--like Bike.com instead of Bikes.com.

Length is important too:
Even though a Web address can be 63 characters long,
people don't tend to remember or type in snake-length names.

Another variable is whether the name is a single word or a phrase.
Single words are worth more
-- Garden.com, for example,
will come up in searches for
garden,
garden tool,
garden hose,
garden tractors,
garden furniture and so forth,
making it more valuable than any one of those phrases.
"A simple name change can change conversion rates
dramatically,"
says Tabibi.
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"We got something for $150,000," says Tabibi, barely suppressing a chuckle.
"If they had wanted $5 million,
I would have done it in a blink of an eye."
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