Hasta La Creative!

LA Times sent a reporter to DomainFest, the annual get together of domain name speculators, brokers and developers.

Two of the biggest practitioners, Oversee.net and Demand Media Inc., are based in the Los Angeles area and have collectively received more than $450 million in venture capital investment to fuel domain name buying sprees.

The bidding paddles flew Tuesday and Wednesday in the hotel ballroom at DomainFest. Individual speculators and deep-pocketed companies snapped up domains such as Porn.net for $400,000, Bookmarks.com for $300,000, Alimony.com for $75,000, Butcher.com for $50,000 and Satinpanties for $10,000.

The more than 600 people who paid as much as $995 to attend the conference also got to hear from one of the “domainer” idols: college dropout Frank Schilling of the Cayman Islands, who started buying Internet addresses with credit cards and eventually amassed 300,000 addresses valued by some would-be buyers at more than $100 million.

Schilling works out of his beach house, where he watches what was until recently the largest TV in the world, and clears about $20 million a year from sites as varied as Homeforeclosure.com and Crosswordpuzzles.com.