A colleague reminded me that Marchex, the public company roll up of online advertising plays, recently purchased Name Development, a company that owns a couple hundred thousand URLs. (SEW thread here). The price was $165 million.

The business model for Name Development is drop dead simple: they own a bunch of URLs, and when internet users type a word into the address bar (expecting it to resolve to something useful) or misspell a legit URL, often times one of Name Development's URLs comes up as the resolved address. Name Development then sticks a sh*tload of AdSense or Overture links on the resulting page, and voila, free money!