Today, seven years later, the company is 200 employees strong with $125 million in revenues and last fall was ranked by the Business Journal as the third fastest-growing private company in Los Angeles County.

The technology-driven Internet marketing company has done this primarily through the arcane world of “direct navigation.” That’s where users bypass such search engines as Google or Yahoo and type what they want directly into the browser address bar, such as “SoapOperas.com” instead of Googling “soap opera.”

Studies show that only about 10 to 20 percent of searches are done this way, yet Oversee, which has grown with no venture funding, is showing that there’s a lot of money to be made in the world of direct navigation.

So much so that Oversee is expanding. The company next month will move its headquarters down the street to a 44,000-square-foot space in the City National building.

The company’s 600,000 domain names and 2 million others it services can be likened to virtual real estate – something like empty lots at prime locations.

They are called “parked” Web sites that hold neither value nor content for users – except for the domain names – until Oversee’s technology takes over.

For example, Careerseeker.com sits on Oversee’s software. Careerseeker itself is not a destination; it features lists of links to Monster.com or more specific job sites like HealthjobsUSA.com or Hotelcareers.com. These, along with links to advertisements, get updated real-time based upon what key words are searched on the site and what links get the most clicks. As a result, the site becomes a category-specific search engine of sorts.

Oversee.net estimates advertisers make about $1 billion a year on direct navigation. Conversion rates – the rates at which Internet users become shoppers – for ads on parked such domains are double the conversion rates on search engines, according to a 2007 study by Efficient Frontier.

Capitalizing on context

Bill Mushkin, chief executive of Name.com, which owns about a million domain names, knows this. About 100,000 of his parked domains are powered by Oversee’s technology.

“People will say parked sites are meaningless, but they funnel people very quickly to where they want to go,” Mushkin said.

Name.com, which pays nothing to Oversee but shares advertising revenues that flow in on a cost-per-click basis, also gets free reports from Oversee that analyze traffic behavior for its parked sites.