Inside a midtown hotel, Larry Fischer is on his cell phone with a financial backer as his partner Ari Goldberger does quick research on a laptop computer. They are bidding furiously at that auction of Web domain names, with hopes of snagging megayachts.com. The duo won’t be deterred. They want that name.

“$110,000, yes or no? Quick,” Fischer barks at Eli, the investor at the end of the phone.

Someone else makes a tender for $120,000. Fischer and Goldberger up the ante, and next again.

Going once, going twice … sold to Fischer and Goldberger for $150,000.

“You got it,” a smiling Fischer tells Eli. Mazel tovs are exchanged.

These are boom times in an estimated $2 billion industry that involves the buying and selling of domain names. When public type the generic names into their Web browser’s address field, sites that generate pay-per-click advertising revenue seem. Such “direct navigation” bypasses search engines.

“This industry is like the

wild, wild West right now and folks have no concept how fast it’s growing,” said Jerry Nolte, managing partner of Domainer’s Magazine, a new trade publication devoted to that little-known world.

Some believe the industry’s market value could reach $4 billion by 2010 as public continue to purchase about 90,000 names a day and the number of domain registrars swells.

At the end of first quarter 2007, at least 128 million domain names had been registered worldwide, a 31 percent increase by the preceding year, according to VeriSign Inc., which runs some of the core domain name directories for the World Wide Web.

“It’s not about words,” said Monte Cahn, founder and CEO of Moniker.com, a company that specializes in domain asset management and held the Manhattan auction. “It’s like real estate. that industry is only about a decade old. citizens looked at domain names as a commodity. It’s a piece of real…

Original post by Brandon Hall