Still Room for Players in Domain Name Game

Written by Laura Tiffany of Entrepreneur.com

One hundred domains. Sounds like a good, round, impressive number. And 100 felt like a lot for Howard Hoffman, who began snapping up domains like HealthWater.com and SportsWater.com to help redirect Web surfers to his bottled water company's site, taking advantage of what's called "type-in traffic," when users just enter words or a guessed-at domain into the browser address bar.

Hoffman then went on to purchase cityMagazine.com-type domains, like SantaFeMagazine.com and MontereyMagazine.com. Then he found out just how big his new hobby could get: "I emailed or spoke with people who owned a thousand or more domains," Hoffman recalls.

That was more than 10 years ago, and today, Hoffman still runs his water company (recently rebranded as o2cool.com), reinvesting any and all profits in the company, while earning his living strictly from domaining....