“So you’ve done this before?” I asked. “Tracked people down?”
“’Course I have.”
Now, as I pace and cajole, he wants to know how my “savior mission” went. I report that some people were grateful—though only moderately so, as it’s hard to grasp the emotional and financial consequences of letting your domain expire until it happens—and some never responded. Perhaps because “an urgent message regarding your domain” sounds about as unurgent as messages come. Or the timing was farcically bad. The heating and cooling company’s Web designer was on a cruise in the middle of the Atlantic. With the country singer, I wrote to his manager and his agent, to no avail. I tried to get to him through his Twitter profile, only to find a “Hey guys, taking a break from social media. Mental health!”
“You see?” Perkins asks, almost gleefully. “You get it now. Even if you’re trying to be a Good Samaritan, half the time it doesn’t work anyway.”
* * *
A pipe has burst in the pub Perkins selected, so we agree to meet outside. He is his profile picture come to life—forty-six, five nine, compact and quick-gestured. He grins when he spots me, an open smile that pokes into his cheeks. Yesterday’s trepidations seem to have melted away. He greets me warmly, kissing me on the cheek. He wants to make sure I accurately describe what he’s wearing: “I got on brand boots, slim-fit jeans, a muscle-fit T-shirt. Athletic build, would you say?” We proceed to speed-weave through the streets of Marylebone, a neighborhood with which he’s only marginally familiar, but Lesley wanted to do some shopping here (sexist but inevitable thought: her and whose money?). He’s concerned that another pub will be too loud. So we settle on a café, which is fine by Perkins because he doesn’t drink.
“If you hear my phone bleeping,” he warns me, “I’m bidding on domains.”
He winks. My face contorts like a baby’s, practicing amusement. I have never reminisced with someone about the time they took my money and my identity. He orders a soda and thanks me for earning him an unexpected $4,800 yesterday. What $4,800? I am as confused as he wants me to be. Apparently, while we spoke on the phone last night, Perkins was in the midst of negotiations. Panicked by the silence, the domain’s rightful owner increased his bid to meet Perkins’s asking price.
“So really I have to thank you, Sloane. You did that.”
My stomach turns. Perkins’s second-favorite activity after domain acquisition is needling me. (When I informed him that I’d be staying with a friend, I got a “You have friends?” in return.) He seems to be waiting for a “You’re welcome.” I change the subject. Perkins is self-taught, having stumbled into his current revenue stream by accident four years ago. He’s an “online trader” and was looking for an expired domain for himself, one that had some traffic already, when he came across unitedfinancial.org. He bought it, but it turned out the credit union wanted it back. So Perkins sold it to them for a cool $15,000.
“That’s still the highest domain sale I ever done. I tend to keep it just under 10K. It’s sort of like psychology. I’ve found that if you keep it under 10K, it gives people hope. So if you give ’em a carrot at 9.7K, yeah? They think they can get it at 5K. And if we do a deal at 5K, I’m happy because I’ve only paid a few hundred and they’re happy because they’ve gotten a good price.”
I search my memory for a time I’ve felt “happy” since this happened. Nope. Nothing.
Soon Perkins was trolling auction sites for nearly expired domains. He prefers fishing for preexisting domains over squatting on ones he suspects might be valuable, so he set the parameters for an algorithm to do just that. Perkins has a nemesis in the form of a domainer in LA called Scarface (“Me and him hammer away at it all the time”). He’s written Scarface in the hopes of teaming up since they’re costing each other thousands of dollars a year but Scarface is a lone wolf. No matter, Perkins knows his algorithm is better. It doesn’t just search for traffic, but for the status of a site, organic traffic, and, most crucially, the duration of ownership. Perkins claims not to target individuals, but his algorithm is a heat-seeking missile for personal domains. We look like what we are—people who have lost something and will want it back. By his own admission, celebrities and corporations “tend to have enough people looking that someone always warns ’em before I get there.”
“Your problem,” he concludes, “is that you’re not more famous.”
“Yes, that’s definitely my problem.”
“And what the hell were you using Hotmail for? You deserve to lose your site just for that.”
Perkins slaps the table and laughs. He may have the moral center of a Cadbury Creme Egg but he’s also starting to sound like every single one of my friends.
“You just gotta ask yourself,” he levels with me, “how do you value your brand? Some people think no, I’m not giving him the money, because they want to make a stance, but the stance can harm their business. And hey, I lose a lot. Sometimes I’m buying twenty domains at a time and spending two thousand dollars, yeah? It’s like being in a casino. You know when your number drops in and you’re like ‘Yes!’? That’s what it feels like.
