Domain name squatting

I was looking around for a domain name for this site and also for another project that I want to start and invariably the best domain names have been taken.

I can understand legitimate businesses having a domain name I have in mind, but 99% of the pages I tried were either parked or dead with the domain name unavailable.

The best of the lot would have to be this page: iwant.com. In case it changes by the time this gets around, the asking price was $15 million. It also listed the following domain names that have been sold recently for lots of dough:

1) Invest.com: $1.00 million 2) Topix.com: $1.00 million 3) Guy.com: $1.00 million 4) Fish.com: $1.02 million 5) Cruises.co.uk: $1.10 million 6) Chinese.com: $1.12 million 7) Kredit.de: $1.17 million 8 ) Scores.com: $1.18 million 9) Vista.com: $1.25 million 10) Cameras.com: $1.50 million 11) Tandberg.com: $1.50 million 12) Datarecovery.com: $1.65 million 13) Auction.com: $1.70 million 14) Fly.com: $1.76 million 15) Seniors.com: $1.80 million 16) Computer.com: $2.10 million 17) Creditcards.com: $2.75 million 18) Vodka.com: $3.00 million 19) Candy.com: $3.00 million 20) Wine.com: $3.30 million 21) Altavista.com: $3.30 million 22) Korea.com: $5.00 million 23) Asseenontv.com: $5.00 million 24) Toys.com: $5.10 million 25) Casino.com: $5.50 million 26) Business.com: $7.50 million 27) Diamond.com: $7.50 million 28) Porn.com: $9.50 million 29) Fund.com: $10.0 million 30) Sex.com: $12.0 million 31) Moneyusa.com: $15.0 million (Not verified)

Out of the 16 of the above sites that I tried 4 were Type-in traffic ad farms.

Am I missing something or is the whole internet advertising bubble full of hot air? Surely investing into a generic domain name for that much will not pay off in the matter of decades. I would imagine that in order to get $1 advertising dollar the site would have to make at least double that in revenue for the advertiser. When will cameras.com generate (at least) 2 million dollars of sales for people advertising on cameras.com? In about a thousand years, if the internet still exists then.

Going with the example of cameras.com urlappraisal values the site at $31K - link here. Seems like whoever forked off cool $1.5M paid too much. Can’t say I feel sorry for them.

Then again, the front page made by a cyber-squatter is hardly a reliable source of information, in which case this whole article becomes moot. The question still remains though - Does the internet advertising generate THAT MUCH revenue for the advertiser or is this some sort of inverse pyramid still powered by Google IPO?