| Marc Ostrofsky | |
| Birth Date: | 28 October 1961 |
| Occupation: | Author, Entrepreneur, Investor |
| Genre: | Nonfiction |
| Notableworks: | Get Rich Click |
Marc Ostrofsky is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, New York Times Best Selling Author and public speaker.[1] He is the author of the books Get Rich Click!: The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Online,[2] and Word of Mouse: 101+ trends using technology on How we Buy, Sell, Live, Learn, Work and Play!.[3] Get Rich Click was in the top ten of the lists of bestselling books compiled by USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.[4]
His career began developing companies for voice mail and voice processing, private pay phones, operator services, telecom reseller and VOIP, and prepaid telephone cards in the United States.[5]
Before writing his first book, Ostrofsky was a domain name investor.[6] His venture capital firm has created a number of telecommunication, publishing and internet based companies, and he is the co-founder of hundreds of web properties.[7] He was a co-founder of Internet REIT (iREIT) (also known as www.iREIT.com), which acquires, develops and sells internet traffic wholesale to Google for them to resell to others on a pay per click basis with partners Ross Perot and Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks.[8] In 1999 he sold the DNS domain Business.com $7.5 million to eCompanies, which was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for what was, at the time, the most expensive domain name ever sold in the world,[9] Ostrofsky owned a stake in Business.com which was sold in 2008 for $345 million.[10] He coined the phrase "Domain names and web sites are the real estate of the Internet" when he bought Business.com for $150,000 in the mid 1990s, which had been the most money ever paid for a domain name at that time.[11]
Ostrofsky founded five high tech Internet and telecommunications magazines and a dozen technology trade shows, which were later sold to Advanstar Publishing for $8,000,000. He later created and sold Multimedia Publishing Corporation (another firm holding magazines, trade shows and web sites) to Primedia for $35,000,000.[12]
Ostrofsky was the first outside investor in Blinds.com and a member of its board of directors. In 2014, Blinds.com was sold for over $200 Million+ to Home Depot,[13] [14]
He currently owns the web sites Photographer.com, TechToys.com, APPortunity.com, MARCeting.com, LabGrownDiamonds.com, HeartDisease.com, BeautyProducts.com, Potshops.com and 200+ others.[15]
He also founded www.idNames.com, an international domain name registry service that was sold to Network Solutions, and is now a division of VeriSign.[16]
In 2001 Ostrofsky donated a sculpture to the City of Houston, Texas that now resides at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Terminal B, Houston, Texas.[17]
Ostrofsky is a professional public speaker domestically and internationally on business, how to make money and entrepreneurship in the age of the internet. He was a member of the National Speakers Association (NSA) and was the original founder of the Internet Commerce Association (ICA).[18]