Rebirth 2003: Dominate the Tech World

The next morning, Ye Yunzhou and his father went to the tax bureau to deal with tax matters.

For Ye Yunzhou, paying taxes on time is his bottom line. Ye Yunzhou has seen various Internet celebrities being punished for tax evasion in the future, and he doesn’t want to lose the big picture for the small. After all, he is the man who will replace Jobs and Musk in the future.

Yesterday’s songs sold a total of 32.5 million. According to the tax law at that time, the tax amount to be paid is: 5.2 million. Since then, he has earned 73.3 million after tax from two song transactions, which is considered financial freedom in Lincheng. You know, this was in 2003, even if the average house price in Yanjing was less than 5,000 yuan, his money could buy more than 100 houses in Yanjing.

“Son, why don’t we start a business? Just write more songs in your daily life.” After paying the tax, Ye Yunzhou’s father said.

His father thinks it’s so cool to make money this way, and there is no risk.

“Dad, what are you thinking about? How can such a song be written casually? Besides, starting a business is to realize your ideals, and writing songs is just a hobby.” Ye Yunzhou rolled his eyes and said.

Ye Zhenting thought about it and it was the same.

“But starting a business is a complicated matter. We have nothing but some funds now. We have no team, no products, and we don’t know where to start.” Ye Zhenting frowned and said.

Although the couple quit their jobs at the instigation of their son, they knew nothing about starting a business. Now they feel a little regretful when they think about it.

“Dad, don’t we already have a team of three people? And we are not short of money now, which is much better than many start-up teams.” Ye Yunzhou said.

What Ye Yunzhou said is indeed the truth. In this era, there are indeed not many teams with tens of millions of startup funds.

It was already one o’clock in the afternoon when he returned home. Ye Yunzhou was preparing to continue reading professional books related to scanning software production. As of last night, he had read and scanned half of the more than 100 professional books he bought from Amazon.

Turning on the computer, a message suddenly attracted him.

“From March 17, 2003, the registration of second-level domain names under the top-level domain name .CN of Xiaguo was officially opened. Users can directly register second-level domain names under the top-level domain name CN.”

Seeing this news, his thoughts went back to before his rebirth, when he saw a blogger’s knowledge popularization on Douyin, and saw several big men who made money by registering domain names.

Cai Wensheng: He is called “the king of domain names”, “the king of webmasters”, “the king of grassroots bloggers” and “the king of angel investors”. When international domain names emerged, their registration costs were relatively low, and Cai Wensheng seized the opportunity to register 100,000 domain names. 80% of the domain names of 2,200 counties and cities in Xiaguo were purchased from him, such as Suzhou’s domain name “suzhou” sold for 1 million, and Ctrip’s domain name “xiecheng” sold for 3 million. When Google acquired the 265.com website founded by Cai Wensheng, it also bought the domain name “G.cn” that he registered for 50 yuan, which eventually made him 130 million.

Another big shot is Ye Yun, whose company owns more than 100,000 domain names, with an average of more than $100 in advertising revenue per domain name per year, and a net profit of $19 million in the year before the acquisition. In November 2004, Marchex, a Seattle-listed company, acquired Ye Yun’s domain name company for $155 million in cash and $9 million in stock.

He once registered company domain names that were forgotten to be renewed due to neglect of maintenance, such as the domain name “pwc.com” of the famous accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and the domain name “hardware-update.com” referenced in Microsoft’s hardware automatic update program, and earned profits when the other party redeemed them at a high price. He also registered some domain names that are easily misspelled by people, and used the traffic brought by misspellings to obtain advertising revenue.

There is also a foreign big shot, Eric Borgos, who once purchased the word domain name “Yachts.com” (meaning “yacht; sailboat”) for $350,000. After holding the domain name for just one year, he sold it for $600,000, making a profit of $250,000 (about RMB 1.68 million). He had previously spent $200,000 to acquire “Adventure.com” (meaning “adventure”), and tried to operate several different businesses on the domain name but all failed. In the end, he still sold the domain name at a higher price and made a considerable profit.

“……”

Thinking of this, Ye Yunzhou was completely moved. Ye Yunzhou no longer waited and took action quickly. He wanted to register some domain names that had not been registered in the future.

Ye Yunzhou in GuI searched the steps of domain name registration on Google. It seems that registering a domain name is easier now than 20 years later.

First, you need to choose a domain name registrar certified by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, such as Network Solutions, GoDaddy, Register.com, etc.

Ye Yunzhou browsed through the websites of these registrars and found that Network Solutions was relatively simple to operate.

At this time, people usually visit the websites of these registrars through web browsers to register.

Ye Yunzhou directly used Microsoft’s built-in browser to register. At this time, Ye Yunzhou began to miss the browser launched by Google in 2008. It’s hard to say whether the browsers on the current market are really hard to use. Whether it’s Microsoft’s built-in IE6 browser or Opera browser.

Ye Yunzhou opened the official website of Network Solutions and used their domain name query tool to enter the domain name he wanted to register. The system will check whether the domain name has been registered by someone else. At this time, this step is usually immediate, but the interface and experience may not be as intuitive and user-friendly as it will be 20 years later.

Once you confirm that the desired domain name is available, you need to fill out a domain name registration form and provide personal information or company information, including but not limited to name, address, email address, phone number, etc.

At this time, for individual registrants, the information requirements may not be as strict as 20 years later, and the real-name authentication policy may not have been fully implemented in some areas, which just gave Ye Yunzhou a loophole.

In order to pay for the domain name, Ye Yunzhou also registered a PayPal account. PayPal is equivalent to Alipay in later generations, and Alipay in later generations also borrowed a lot of PayPal’s design.

After the payment is successful, you will receive a confirmation email containing a notification of successful domain name registration and the control panel login information for managing the domain name. At this point, you can start setting up domain name resolution, email and other services.

Ye Yunzhou was full of energy at this time. When he thought that the domain names of these famous Internet companies in the future were in his hands, he was extremely excited.

Ye Yunzhou had been in an excited work, and he didn’t notice it until it got dark. It wasn’t until his mother came to call him for dinner that he looked up and looked out the window and found that the whole city was brightly lit.

“Son, what are you doing? You’re acting weird all day.” Li Wanrong pushed the door open and saw her son typing excitedly, laughing from time to time, and asked worriedly.

“Mom, we may make a fortune again, haha.” Ye Yunzhou was in a good mood after registering some of the top domain names in the future. For example, Ai.com, G.com… etc.

“Okay, don’t think about getting rich, come out to eat.”

Li Wanrong was still more concerned about her son’s eating problem.

“By the way, your class teacher, Mr. Wang, called me today and said that you haven’t been to school for so many days. I asked about your current study situation and asked you to go to school tomorrow.” Mom said.

Ye Yunzhou didn’t want to go to school. Isn’t this a waste of his time? In addition to reading books related to scanning software and game production, he also had to register domain names. Now he has less than 100 domain names registered?

“By the way, son, won’t it affect the college entrance examination if you take leave every day like this?” Ye Yunzhou’s father looked at him and said.

“No, don’t worry, don’t you know my strength yet?”

“……”

After dinner, Ye Yunzhou continued his domain name registration business. He first registered all the domain names of companies that were well-known in the future but have not yet been established, such as Taobao, Alipay, Facebook, WeChat, etc., all of which were registered by him.

At the same time, he also registered some nice special domain names such as short characters (such as two numbers, two letters, etc.), domain names with special meanings or widely recognized.

He was busy until two o’clock in the morning before going to bed, but he was still a long way from registering the domain names he wanted.