To those of you who the name doesn’t ring a bell; Yun Ye, aka. “Ult Search” had one of the largest and best domain collections and mass developed minisites from the late 90’s which were sold for 9 figures in 2005 to Marchex. Many domainers don’t even know how or why the man collected so many domains, but we’ve got all of the insights and answers at last!

Yun Ye’s domain portfolio at it’s peak had hundreds of thousands of valuable keyword domains which were primarily managed under an offshore company called Name Development Ltd as well as at least 8 – 10 other international companies based in the Middle East and Africa.

Many people have wondered how a Chinese man’s company who lives in California ends up in the Caribbean and that is a very good question. Originally, Ye purchased a California incorporation kit off of eBay in the early 90’s for $17.95 which came with a free expert consultation.

After all said and done, the business somehow managed to be officially set up in the Caribbean instead of California thanks to the assistance of a 15/16 year old Internet Guru from Mumbai who went by the nickname “RaJuXv2pAC4LyFe”.

Raju’s specialties on his Geocities.com hosted resume page included translation services in 13 languages, copywriting, e-mail cracking, AOL phishing, netscape browser programming, music composition, accounting, legal incorporation in 183 countries, graphic design, search engine spamming and traffic deoptimisation.

Yun Ye was very impressed with the young man’s skills and the low price of $17.95 for a complete incorporation service was a great deal to be had so he pulled the trigger. It later turned out that being based offshore had a lot of advantages and was great for business. All thanks to Raju! Other clients of Raju included many Wall Street financiers, most notably B-Mad, aka Bernie Madoff who is now known as MadOffx69Bi.

Yun Ye together with his wife Jin Lu whom he met on an internet dating IRC channel #bored, worked on an advanced web page publishing system for almost 5 month’s non-stop which had the capabilities of mass developing approximately 100 – 130 minisites per day filled with banners or contextual advertisements and custom graphic headers.

Veteran Chinese domainers such as King Kung, Tic Tak To and Pu Poo who intermingled with Yun Ye aka the Godfather of minisites on a daily basis during the late 90’s described him as a very passionate man when it came to mass developing and collecting domain names but unfortunately he had many demons to battle with along the way.

In an exclusive interview, one of Yun Ye’s best friends and former ping pong partner, Fak Yu, told us “What most people don’t know about Mr. Ye is that he had a very bad case of adult ADHD… So he would start developing a domain and then as soon as the web page was fully uploaded to the FTP server he would have already changed his mind and start working on the next minisite, and the next batch of domain registrations and so on.”

From an unnamed source, we learned that on one Saturday morning in early 2000, Yun Ye launched at least 200 minisites, which was a personal goal of his and a life long dream. It was a remarkable achievement and a world record at that time apparently. Yun Ye was featured in multiple online publications such as the Id Circle, DomainZ Wire, H4x Digital, TechRaunch, and Geeks-R-us [UK version] just to name a few.

Unfortunately all of this minisite development and domain registrations from over the years took it’s toll on him. The man’s development efforts had developed him a bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis. Within days, both of his arms were numb and almost paralyzed. Yun Ye couldn’t register or develop domains anymore! The man was depressed and heartbroken.

Yun Ye’s wife immediately threw together some code and setup a bot to auto-post every 2 minutes “SPECIALIST HAND’ DOCTOR WANTED” in the Yahoo.com and AOL regional California chatrooms.

Within 15 minutes of doing so, she was IM’d by a Kevin Ham, who convinced her to buy a listing in his website’s classifieds section of HostGlobal.com which cost approximately $5,000 per day. The normal pricing was only $30 per month, but this month Kevin Ham was running a special promotion for new clients and in his own words “IT’S WORTH EVERY CENTâ€� as 12% of the proceeds were donated to an unnamed Christian charity.

This not so popular web hosting directory and forum was run by the man who we all know as “the man who owns the internet” but back then he was only a medical student by night and webmaster up-and-comer by day. Yun Ye’s wife quickly became good friends with the Ham, after spending hundreds of hours chatting about domains, explaining how you can make money with them via PPC. Kevin found the entire concept fascinating and was drawn to her more and more.

Fast forward a few month’s later and millions of dollars paid for the classifieds listing which didn’t seem to be working, Yun Ye’s wife stopped paying. She had lost her hope. Kevin Ham was furious when he didn’t see his daily wire transfer come in from the Name Development company. He chartered a private jet that same day and went looking for them in the Caribbean but he didn’t find anything.

Kevin returned home and went right back to work. He logged into the yahoo chatrooms only to find the same messages being scrolled once again “SPECIALIST HAND’ DOCTOR WANTED”. He wanted to win over their business desperately, so he spent the whole night reading medical e-books about the various conditions which were effecting Yun Ye’s hands.

For the next few month’s Kevin Ham lived with Yun Ye and Jin Lu in a studio apartment. He quit medical school and instead worked on his masters degree in domaining directly from Yun Ye during the day and Jin Lu during the night, two of the most successful domain collectors and minisite developers at that time.

Right now we are still trying to translate the rest of the archived communications and interviews that were sent to us by a man who calls himself X.

As you can imagine, translating text from Chinese to English is a lot of work. It took us almost 25 minutes to translate what we have shared with you above. If you speak Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, or really any other Asian language… We could really use your help right about now.

We want to make sure we get everything right. It’s critical!! So please get in touch with us ASAP… Oh and 快樂愚人節 to our friends in China and mates in Australia too… Cheers!!