Back in 1995, before the dotcom boom, James Coakes received some shrewd advice from a friend. “He told me the internet was going to be very big,” he recalls, “and that a lot of businesses would need good domain names for their websites. He said they’d be worth a lot of money to the right companies. So I bought a few likely-sounding names for about £30 each.”

It was a good move. Before long, a number of other people had switched on to this upcoming investment area, and by the end of 1996, he says, the best names had all gone.