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So what happened with Eric Borgos and his 9,000 domain names?

In mid-November Eric Borgos wrote a story on his company’s blog entitled: What To Do With My 9000 Domain Names?

The story sparked a lot of interest from readers and people started commenting with their own thoughts on what Eric should do with his 9,000 domain names. Readers posted over 100 comments on the site that were all over the place – some offering to buy several of the names, to some suggesting Eric mass-sell or drop the worst of the domain names.

Eric laid out a number of ideas in the beginning of the article on what he wants to do.

Selling all his domain names at once to one buyer at wholesale prices was at the top of his list of considerations. Eric wrote: “for $8 million for example, I would make $15,000/month in interest from the money in the bank (after income taxes and the brokerage fee I would net around $4.5 million from the sale) plus I would gain another $2000/month from the savings on domain fees (the difference between my parking income and my registration fees) that I no longer have to pay.”

Unfortunately, there are very few buyers of portfolios right now Eric points out, but the wholesale option seems to be “Eric’s choice”.

Other considerations included selling more domain names than before by listing them with more brokers, setting up all his parked domains on minisites, and setting up real sites on his better domain names.

So, what did Eric do with his 9,000 domain names?

If you read through all the comments on the post, you’ll notice Eric is active and regularly responds to readers’ comments, even the not-so-nice ones.

You’ll also learn more about what he’s decided to do, that is, until selling all of his domain names to one buyer comes through.

Eric doesn’t believe parking is the answer, and has no plans to let any of his names expire or sell any of them at registration fee. “In terms of keeping vs selling my domains that make no money, the vast majority of my domains are worth at least a few hundred dollars each $500”, Eric writes.

Eric also states that he continues to get a high click through rate on Google Adsense ads, contrary to what many other domain investors are saying about their own domains.

As far as his adult domain names, Eric is working with xpays.com: “A month ago I changed all my adult domains to be parked at xpays.com. They are not a parking company though, they put up a splash page giving the visitor some free content and then it tries to get them to signup for a free trial. I get paid $35 for each signup. Xpays has many different types of sites, and directs each of my domain to the best matching site of theirs. I switched my domains to their dns, so I did not have to do anything to set things up.”

Eric claims to have doubled his revenue using xpays, making nearly $2000/month from xpays with his 4,000 adult domains, rather than the $1000/month he was pulling in using traditional parking.

For Eric’s 4,000 non-adult domain names, he’s creating minisites using his own automated mass-development system he spent several months setting up. Go to Inventing.com to take a look at an example of the mini site template that he is using across thousands of his domains.

After all is said and done, Eric is still developing bigger web sites like Dumb.com and WatchMovies.com, and he’s still selling his domain names – with 2010 being one of his best years in terms of volume.

Eric comments: ” Most years I think I have sold 30-50, but i am trying to accept more offers this year. I am not doing anything different to market them, and have never done any marketing other than listing them on Sedo.com and Afternic.com and on my own site at NameShopping.com.”

With pay-per-click revenue from 9,000+ domains like Orgasms.com and Inventing.com, 200+ websites like Dumb.com and Adoptme.com, and sales of names like Taboo.net and sales of websites like Bored.com – Eric Borgos has figured out how to make money and a living online.

How did Eric Borgos get rich online?

Even though Eric has made millions, he’s not sure about the answer. But one thing’s for sure, he didn’t want to keep working for other people, and decided he could do things on the internet on his own. According to Eric’s blog:

Because I run my own Internet company, I often get asked the best way to make money online. Oddly enough, I have no good answer for that question. I was able to be successful mostly because I got in on the ground floor (back in 1995). I started by creating web pages for small businesses for $50-$100 each, plus I offered hosting for them. so I decided it was not worth the time and effort to convince people to create websites, just for the small amount of money I would make from it…

After a few years of being a web designer and web host, I saw all the sales my clients were getting from the pages I made for them and I decided I would be better off creating sites for myself instead. By then I had built up a portfolio of several hundred domain names, all of which were sitting there unused, so I decided to develop them.”

Registering Domain Names, and getting them on the drop

How did Eric get Bored.com – the name he ultimately developed and turned into a multi-million dollar sale? He got it on the drop.

Network Solutions used to take the domains back around 4am-5am (Eastern Time) each morning, so I would make sure to get up by then and frantically keep typing in my list of domains one by one to try to buy them. That is how I bought Bored.com. I would also sometimes find good domains that nobody ever registered before…

Developing websites from his domain names, entire networks of them

Eric learned early on that web development was key. Listing links to relevant sites run by other people on Bored.com – Eric decided to build up his own network of sites and send traffic from his Bored.com hub, to his own sites – growing his own network and revenue. Eventually, Bored.com was pulling in revenue of $35,000 / month, and traffic was growing to other sites.

As the Internet grew in the early 2000’s, so did the number of visitors to Bored.com, and I was able to run ads from major ad networks such as DoubleClick. That increased income significantly, and I decided that instead of linking to other sites and giving them all the free traffic and ad income, I would be better off creating my own sites to link to instead.

Trying new ideas

Eric is completely honest about his success and his failures. But most importantly, he writes on his blog, to try new ideas.

…other than sites that were related to Bored.com, almost none of the sites I created or bought in the past few years made any significant money. This might be my fault, in that I didn’t promote them well, but I think it is much harder to get a good site noticed nowadays. That is not to say that there is not money to be made online though, because of course there are plenty of people who recently started sites that became successful. The good thing though that is is much easier, faster, and cheaper to start a website than it used to be. It is certainly worth trying any ideas you have, because you never know what will catch on.

List of sites

Alot of Eric’s sites receive thousands and thousands of visitors. If you take a look at them, you might be surprised how simple some of them appear to look, but the niche they fill and the interest they draw, is no surprise. Sites like CheapFlowers.com are businesses, not just content.

Here’s a look at some of Eric’s sites.