When I was 15, I borrowed my mom's credit card and bought my first domain: Glumbert.com.
I had no idea what to do with it, but since I enjoyed reading weird news articles, I posted links to those for awhile as I learned web development. I got my first taste of traffic after I saw people from the White House reading an article I had about Britney Spears and made a blog post about it.
Later when I was in college, I started posting videos and funny pictures for fun. Another post blew up when I found pictures of a news anchor who had done a strip tease at a local bar. By the time I graduated college, I was looking for a job and started posting videos I found were amusing. At this point, I had a cushy deal with a web host that gave me lots of bandwidth. This was right around when YouTube was blossoming and lots of people were watching tons of videos. And they were doing so in droves. Traffic to Glumbert started growing like crazy.
I think what people liked about Glumbert was that I found short and funny viral videos and added a little quip about them. It was dead simple. I took joy every morning waking up and making people happy by entertaining them. I posted videos every day, and as I posted more, I got a bigger and bigger audience — by the millions. After not too long and with a little advertising, I was able to pay my rent - I had found my job. It got to the point where I would meet random people who knew what it was and I even received a few death threats from people who were offended by the videos.
Maybe 6 months later, a company came knocking on my door wanting to acquire Glumbert. I was 22 and it seemed like a lot of money. I didn't understand business at all. So I went for it.
As it turned out, they were not interested in my rabid audience - all they wanted was for Glumbert to send traffic to their other video website and put really obnoxious ads on the videos. Traffic went down hill - the community I had created was gone. Even though I had grown the audience like they asked, they refused to pay out what they had promised me. It was all a fraud.
So I hung my head low and went onto other things. But that company with their shady business practices eventually went out of business themselves. And the domain was passed along to their creditors, languishing for years.