Domain investors talk about names like property. Location, scarcity, development, leasing, resale. It's so baked in now that we forget somebody had to think of it first, and in the early 90s it wasn't obvious at all. Most people didn't know what a domain name was. The commercial internet barely existed.
So who was the first domain investor?
I went looking for a name and a date. What I found instead is that it depends on what you mean by "domain investor." A few people saw the value early, and they went at it in completely different ways.
Start with Dennis Toeppen, an Illinois businessman who registered about 200 domains in 1995. He later wrote that it was clear to him at the time that domain names were "valuable, undeveloped virtual real estate." That's the entire thesis of domain investing, in one sentence, in 1995.
The problem was what he registered. Panavision.com. DeltaAirlines.com. Neiman-Marcus.com. EddieBauer.com. Intermatic.com. Some companies paid him. Others sued. Panavision wouldn't pay the $13,000 he asked for and took him to court instead, and the case that came out of it is still one of the early landmarks in trademark and domain law. Intermatic sued too, rather than pay the $5,000 he wanted. Toeppen saw the asset before almost anyone. He just built his portfolio out of other people's trademarks, and today we'd file that under cybersquatting, not investing.
Rick Schwartz went a different way. He paid $100 for his first domain, LipService.com, in December 1995, then kept buying generic and descriptive names and paying attention to type-in traffic. People typed a word plus .com into the browser, and those visitors were worth money. No trademarks required. Just memorable language, commercial meaning, and scarcity. That's the model the industry eventually grew up around. Schwartz became the Domain King, sold Men.com for $1.32 million in 2003, and sold Porno.com in 2015 for $8,888,888. He'd picked that one up in 1997 for $42,000.
Then there's Fred van Kempen, who wasn't trying to invest at all. He was a Linux developer who registered Linux.com in June 1994 as a home for people interested in the operating system. As Linux took off, the name became enormously valuable. But instead of auctioning it to the highest bidder, he handed it off through a business-plan competition, and VA Research won the right to run it in early 1999. He cared more about what the new owner would do with the site than about the check. He registered a category name before the category existed. He just never thought of it as real estate.
So who's first? The guy who registered hundreds of names to flip? The guy who bought generics and monetized the traffic? Or the guy who grabbed a category name early and mostly wanted it in good hands?
And those are just the stories that got written down. Somebody probably registered a pile of generic words in 1993, sold them quietly, and walked away before the industry had blogs, conferences, or a single sales database. We'll never know.
The better question isn't who was first. It's what they saw that everyone else missed. They understood the internet would need names, that the good ones would run out, and that businesses would eventually pay to be easy to find and easy to remember. That idea hasn't changed. The only difference is that in 1995, almost everything was still on the shelf.
It's tempting to look back and wonder why more people didn't load up. But buying digital real estate before most people understood the internet took a strange mix of imagination, risk, and patience. No comps, no appraisal tools, no auction platforms, no landing pages. Just a hunch.
Some crossed legal lines. Some built fortunes. Some got there almost by accident. All of them typed a name into a registration form while the rest of us were still asking what a domain was.