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 and directly from owners via email. His most valuable early property was Porno.com, for which he paid $42,000 in 1997. Schwartz made a 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. 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. He then sold Candy.com for more than $3 million. He also owned Property.com and Properties.com. Schwartz purchases the domains on his own without any employees. By 2008 he had acquired over 6,000 different domains. He has sold domains for as much as $750,000 that he purchased for $100 in the late-1990s, such as his sale of iReport.com to CNN.

Public life

Schwartz co-founded the TRAFFIC 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. The event also features live domain auctions, the properties for which Schwartz announces each year. Schwartz is the main organizer for the event. 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. Schwartz is the president and CEO of the World Association of Domain Name Developers.