Looking at whois records for other cctlds on the heels of the .mx purchase, it looks like ABC.cm changed hands on 8/7. The domain looked to have been owned by a Chinese registrant.
Of course .cm has been in the news before, Kevin Ham was once profiled in a Business 2.0 article that is published on CNN. Maybe Disney will care about this name if Google is indeed the buyer. The domain was dropped and registered in 2014 so a quick flip.
From the article:
And what few people know is that he’s also the man behind the domain world’s latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type “.cm” instead of “.com” at the end of a domain name.
Try it with almost any name you can think of — Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm — and you’ll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500).
Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad — as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code — just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.
The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well.
“It’s in the works,” Ham says over lunch in his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia. “That’s why I can’t talk about it.” He’s nearly as reluctant to share details about his newest company, called Reinvent Technology, into which he’s investing tens of millions of dollars to build a powerhouse of Internet businesses around his most valuable properties.
