I received an email from Clark Landry, a person who I had a nice conversation with at Ad:Tech. Clark is the CEO of Hecta Media, which just went public on the London AIM exchange. Hecta Media is a company whose purpose is to acquire and make investments in profitable niche content websites and domain portfolios.

According to Landry, the founders, (Clark Landry and Fred Krueger), are serial entrepreneurs who have founded or provided seed investment for a variety of internet content companies and advertising networks including TagWorld, Adconion, Traffic Marketplace, and iwin.com, among others. Said Landry, “Hecta Media is interested in acquiring premium domain portfolios and niche developed content websites.”

From the press release following their first day of trading provided via email:

“The directors of Hecta Media Inc (AIM: HCTA), a web consolidator, are pleased to announce that all of the Company’s 162,266,456 Ordinary Shares have today been admitted for trading on AIM valuing the Company at £6.5 million.

Hecta Media is a British Virgin Islands (‘‘BVI’’) registered company whose purpose is to make broadly distributed investments in niche content web sites and vertically targeted, branded domains. Using a combination of Ordinary Shares and cash to make targeted acquisitions, the Company intends to build a portfolio of high-traffic websites monetized through search and display advertising. Hecta Media will focus its efforts on active investment in websites and domains established in the UK, continental Europe, and the United States. The websites in which Hecta Media intends to invest will typically be simple, profitable businesses with few employees and positive cash flow. Hecta Media aims to consolidate a number of such websites across a few specific verticals, with the purpose of creating advantages of scale in each vertical market. The Directors intend that Hecta Media will acquire sites by offering a combination of cash and Ordinary Shares to the owners of the sites, providing fungible assets to owners looking for a suitable exit strategy by which to realize the value of the businesses they have created. The Directors consider that current market conditions provide good opportunities for investment in a wide variety of suitable websites which can meet Hecta Media’s strategic objectives – the Company having recently raised GBP4.67 mill ion.”

Congratulations to Clark and the rest of his management team. The domain industry is full of opportunity!

More information about Hecta Media can be found in an article in The Independent.

One of the smartest things a domain investor can do is read the newspaper, watch the news, follow popular culture blogs (like TMZ.com), and even observe kids at the mall in order to spot trends and capitalize.

There was a television commercial for Ameritrade a few months ago showing a father responding to his daughter’s request for money to buy jeans, and his reaction was to buy stock in the company that produces the jeans. Domain investors should do the exact same thing, but instead of buying stock, we should buy relevant domain names. For the domain investor with a good amount of cash, he should have been looking to acquire a name like Jeans.com or Denim.com, and for people without that type of income, names like JeansShop.com or JeansOutlet.com could have been good buys.

One of the keys to buying valuable domain names is to acquire names that are meaningful and would be desired by others. Owning a name that is either the generic category killer for a popular trend or a name that represents part of that category is usually a good buy. Stick to generic names, and you should come out on top.

Buying stock in a growing company is fun, but you really have no control over the performance of the stock. Owning a domain name in a growing industry is much more fun, and you completely control how you develop, monetize, or sell the name.