Vancouver is home to some of the richest entrepreneurs on the internet. $300 million “domain buying king” Kevin Ham, Markus Frind of famous dating site Plentyoffish.com, Flickr creators Stewart Butterfield & Caterina Fake, and one of the most famous technology website owners around, TheTechZone.com’s John Chow, all reside in vibrant Vancouver. Find out how these famous Vancouverites found their way to financial freedom.
Kevin Ham: The $300 million DOT.COM Guru
Mr. Ham keeps a low profile in Vancouver and already owns a massive piece of the internet. People would ask, ‘Who is Kevin Ham?’ all the time and still no one really knew the truth of his millions and strategic ways. He owns 100,000 domain names on the internet and he makes $70 million a year from placing ads on his domains. He has arranged it so he will get the traffic that comes through searches in the address bar, instead of searches made through MSN, Google, or Yahoo.
His biggest invention now is gaining all of the rights to domains that are mistyped such as Google.cm, or Hoteldeals.cm. You will find they always end up at Agoga.com. Because countries own certain domains, Ham decided to make a deal with Cameroon, Africa and offered them a percentage of revenue. He hopes to do the same type of deal with Columbia soon which has a prefix of .co.
Caterina Fake & Stewart Butterfield: Flickr
Host to millions of photos and members, Flickr was created by Stewart Butterfield and wife, Caterina Fake when Butterfield had a dream one night about a multiplayer game that was designed to share photos with players. The pair started creating Flickr in their Vancouver loft apartment and started basing it around instant messaging and adding photos to instant messages.
Tagging is what really got Flickr started because people were adding keywords, or tags to describe the photos and the meaning. This tagging idea was a big step towars the creation of all social media and Web 2.0.
Soon the couple were being contacted by loads of companies, and offered large amounts of money for the idea and website. Yahoo! Eventually bought Flickr for approximately $40 million dollars in 2005 and even offered Butterfield and Fake jobs at yahoo to keep it all running efficiently.
John Chow: Blogging King
John Chow knows how to speak his mind and will tell anyone he makes loads of money with his blogging. He has a great love for fast cars, fabulous Vancouver dining, and cuisine. He has a loyal following of technology and blogging lovers because he shows great enthusiasm and dedication in his work.
Chow started working on the internet in 1999 and began his first website on computer hardware, called The Tech Zone. In only a few years his website became a top successful technology website on the internet and had over 200,000 page visits in a single day. He then entered the blogging world and has one of the most famous blogs on the internet.
Markus Frind: Plenty of Fish Dating
Wouldn’t it be nice to work from a West End apartment in Vancouver, have no staff to maintain and pay, and make $10,000 a day? Markus Frind know’s exactly how it feels. This Vancouverite created Plentyoffish.com, which is one of the busiest dating websites in the world.
Ranking on Alexa.com as the 5th top dating site in the USA for hits, and 1st in Canada, he is sure to be rolling in the cash. He began the site with a program called ASP.NET which is a programming platform. He noticed that there was a place for a “FREE” dating website on the web, and went ahead with it. Once he added Google Adsense to his website, a millionaire was born in Vancouver. He has been raking in $10,000 every day since, in advertising income. Not bad for getting people to connect and fall in love huh?!
They are all Vancouverites, and all rich online entrepreneurs! Vancouver is a great city for entrepreneurs, online marketers, webmasters, and tech lovers. Yaletown, the City Center, and Gastown are all full of design, web, and affiliate marketing companies. This electric city keeps people on their toes, and going for the gold!
