Originally Posted by business2.com

Domainers have their heroes, and one of the most mysterious is a man named Yun Ye, a Chinese citizen living in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is credited with boosting the entire market when he sold his portfolio of more than 100,000 domains to Marchex. His names were bringing in more than $20 million a year in revenues -- and $19 million in profits -- when Marchex paid the equivalent of 8.6 times annual earnings, based on figures provided in SEC documents.

“He is our god,” says domainer Michael Bahlitzanakis the moment he hears Ye’s name uttered at a Delray Beach party. Every domainer knows of Ye, but few have ever met him. He’s the domainers’ Keyser Soze. “My attorney happens to be his attorney, but that’s as close to him as I can get,” says Bahlitzanakis, 29.

A onetime hotshot programmer, Ye used his software chops to build the bulk of his domain empire in the late ’90s and early 2000s. He became a master at what’s known as “catching,” or buying up domains that were dropping because people gave up on them or forgot to pay the annual registration fee. At the time, the system was secretive, and domainers were trying to figure out what names were expiring and when. In the dark of night, Ye would sit before a bank of computers and, like a conductor, launch programs he wrote to shoot rapid-fire requests to purchase names.