Interesting to contrast with this (top of Hacker News at this moment):

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/26/communicate-acquires-y-...

In Japan, URLs are on the way out, while a U.S. company who's main asset is a bunch of domain names are buying a YCombinator start-up to further monetize them.

EDIT: I can't believe I just used "monetize" un-ironically in a sentence.