Rick Schwartz (domainer)

Rick Schwartz is an American domain name entrepreneur.

Domain name industry

By 1999 Schwartz, owned more than 3,000 domains, buying both in auctions, directly from owners via email and through his website eRealEstate.com. His most valuable early property was Porno.com, for which he paid $42,000 in 1997 and sold in 2015 for $8,888,888 after earning in excess of $10 million in advertising revenue without ever having any adult content.^[1] The sale was the 4th largest ever recorded all cash domain name sale and Escrow.com's largest single cash transaction ever. Schwartz made an historical high-profile sale in 2003 when he sold the domain name Men.com for $1.3 million to a magazine company, a domain which he had purchased for $15,000 in 1997.^[2] Schwartz stated at the time that he sold the property at a lower value than it would fetch in the future in order to purchase a broader variety of other domain names before the market rebounded in the mid-2000s.^[3] After acquiring Candy.com in 2005 for a reported low 6 figures, Schwartz then sold Candy.com for more than $3 million while acquiring 12.55% of the newly formed company as a silent partner.^[4] He also bought Property.com for $750,000 and Properties.com for $61,000 and made a similar deal.^[5] He acquired the initial first few thousand names working with his first wife and expanded the business after divorced, by himself. By 2008 he had acquired over 6,000 different domains. He has sold domains very early on for as much as $750,000 that he purchased for $100 in the late-1990s,^[6] such as his sale of iReport.com to CNN.^[7] In late 2015 and early 2016 Schwartz sold 989.com, 899.com, 399.com, for $2.3 Million. Domains he hand registered in 1996 for $100 each.

Public life

Schwartz co-founded the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. Domain Name conference with Howard Neu in 2004, holding the first iteration of the event in Delray Beach, Florida. The conference has been held annually ever since, as a meeting place for professionals in the internet domain industry to meet and share ideas.^[8] The event also featured live domain auctions the properties for which Schwartz announces each year.^[9] Schwartz is the main organizer for the event.^[10][11] He also wrote a blog on the domain name industry throughout the 2000s called Ricksblog.com, retiring the blog in December 2011, opting instead to run it on an occasional basis.^[12] Schwartz was the president and CEO of the World Association of Domain Name Developers. The company that produced TRAFFIC but has since retired in 2014 with the last TRAFFIC show being held at the world Famous Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach. The 28 editions of the T.R.A.F.F.I.C. shows that were held In Major U.S cities such as New York, Las Vegas, Orlando, San Jose and 4 continents had such notable speakers as Steve Forbes, Don King, Barbara, Corcoran, Ben Stein and many others.^[13]

References