Update: I have read somewhere that CreditCards.com was sold twice in 2007 already; once for $1M, and the second time for $3M, after which the second purchaser brought in some VC capital, to the tune of $20M.  Well, I guess we know what *that* was for!

Domaining, or the purchasing of domain names with the intent to monetize it through sophisticated (or not) affiliate deals and pay-per-click marketing has gone huge over the past few years. This summer, Dr. Mark Han, a Canadian Family Physician, was named as the Man Who Owns The Internet due to the amount of virtual “real estate” he owns by many mainstream business magazines. I think it was really a watershed moment for the industry towards legitimacy and respectability. Its an industry, I’ll admit, I have little experience in, but its a fascinating one.

All the more surprising — or not, perhaps — that CreditCards.com is filing for an IPO in the upcoming weeks with a total valuation of up to $160 million dollars. How does CreditCards.com “work” in spite of its high powered CEOs and board of executives and million dollar evaluation? At its heart, it really looks like its no different than many premium domain names. It has brokered deals with credit card companies and uses a combination of type-in traffic (people just punching in the URL because its so obvious), organic and paid search to funnel traffic to those credit card companies.

In effect, its really no different than slapping up a few affiliate links and picking up the checks, but many orders of magnitude greater in terms of profits, and perceived complexity, I’m sure. I mean 930,000 visitors per month with $46M in profits for the first 9 months out of the year isn’t too bad, wouldn’t you say?

As reported by E-Commerce Times, CreditCard.com isn’t the only company that is going to go public; NameMedia, a company which purchases domain names (and sells them, and hosts a marketplace for them) also hopes to go IPO with another $170M filling.