Job title: Domain-name broker

Companies that hire them: Domain-name brokerage firms, such as Sedo, Moniker, Afternic, BuyDomains, and ImpressiveDomains.

How to find out about openings: Contact domain-name brokerage firms and attend industry conferences.

How much you can earn: Base salaries can range from $30,000 to $70,000, but brokers can double their income with commissions and bonuses.

Useful skills: Negotiating experience and an understanding of internet businesses, the domain-name market, name appraisal, research and data filtering, and marketing and sales.  

Number of jobs in the U.S.: Thousands of people are involved in domain-name transactions, but there is no official estimate of how many work as brokers who facilitate buying and selling of domain names.

If domain names are the real estate of the Web, then domain-name broker Ashley Saddul is a realtor who specializes in beachfront property. The founder, president, and C.E.O. of ImpressiveDomains, Saddul focuses on selling only premium names—generic words like asset.com and wallpapers.com that can’t be trademarked and can sell for at least $250,000. Saddul owns some of these names himself, but has built up his business by establishing relationships with the venture-capital-backed companies and other big buyers of domain names so that he can often get the best prices for them.

“Sellers would rather pay a 10 percent commission than do it on their own and possibly end up with less,” says the 37-year-old Saddul.

Since Saddul started his company in 2004, he and his team of 15 brokers have negotiated more than 60 six-figure deals, including wallpapers.com to a screensaver company for $300,000, and tanning.com and cairo.com to investors for $175,000 and $100,000, respectively.

At any given time, Saddul and his brokers list 2,500 domain names for sale—everything from downloadmusic.com to superfreak.com—but focus on selling the top 25 names each week. He guarantees a sale within 30 days in exchange for exclusive selling rights during that time.

Saddul appraises names for potential clients using a proprietary 12-point system that factors in likely traffic (not just through search engines and type-in traffic, but from typos as well) and branding power—how memorable the name is, the extension (dotcom is king), and whether there’s likely to be any trademark issues. But Saddul admits the process is more art than science, and that prices can sometimes surprise him.

Saddul grew up on Mauritius, an island off the coast of Africa, and went to college in Australia, majoring in mathematics and computer science. After coming to the U.S. in 1994, he worked in software development and internet technology for a startup. He got into the domain-name business in 2002 when he purchased a bunch of gambling domains such as onlinepokerbets.com and soccerbettingonline.com in the hopes of making a quick profit. Though he was never able to sell them, he realized in the process of trying that there was a valuable role—that of a middleman—that he could fill.

Recently, Saddul sold musicdownload.com for $290,000 to an investor and is currently negotiating the sale of several music and video-download domains. But he adds that trying to anticipate naming trends—and thus stockpiling ones likely to appreciate—can be difficult. “The type of names that keep getting sold are all over the map and are completely dictated by their availability,” Saddul says. “They are all islands.”