Elephant Traffic: Renting space on unused domains
David Spark here, reporting for ad:tech at ad:tech NY 2009.
Aren’t you annoyed when you do a search for some content and land on a web address that you think is relevant only to find it’s a domain just waiting to be bought? Wei-Hai Chu, Elephant Traffic’s CEO thought it was a waste too. So he puts his owned and brokered domains to good use to create what he calls a direct navigation advertising company. He currently has 80,000 domains in his network, many of them have rather impressive traffic, such as cellphones.com and laptops.com. Similar to the Google Adwords model, companies rent to have their ads appear on those pages for a certain period of time. Chu also mentioned that much of the traffic is people querying the addresses. People will type cellphones.com and laptops.com directly into search engines.

