Business 2.0 magazine has a great feature on Kevin Ham, the $300 million master of Web domains. Ham has parlayed users’ foul-ups and ignorance about how to use the Internet into a fortune. Try this: type “www.newyorktimes.cm” (not .com) into your browser. You’ll come to a website that has lots of come-ons for publications. That’s the work of Kevin Ham, who has not only snapped up thousands of erroneous URLs typed by fumble-fingered users but who has cut an ingenious deal with the poor African country of Cameroon – which owns the “.cm” domain – to intercept traffic intended for the big-brand websites.

I had lost track of the value of domains after “business.com” sold for $1 million in the late 90s. This article shows that the domain trade is alive and well and becoming very sophisticated. No one is more sophisticated about it than Kevin Ham. This is an excellent profile of someone who’s making money by working under the Internet covers. You can argue about whether his work is contributing in any meaningful way to the economy or furthering the advance of human knowledge, but what you can’t argue about is whether Kevin Ham is succeeding. He’s filthy rich.