Woodstock, Maryland record producer Nik Tyler "just had a feeling," he said, when over a year ago he reserved, “for $6 apiece, three Web addresses: ipaddownload.com, ipaddownloads.com and ipaddownloads.net.”

As longtime Apple (News - Alert) observer Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes, “last week, shortly after Apple began taking pre-orders for the iPad, he put all three domains up for sale on eBay (News - Alert) for the Buy-It-Now price of $1 million each.”

As Elmer DeWitt says, a search on eBay last Sunday for domain names with "iPad" in them turned up more than 300 listings, some with asking prices as high as $21 million, but now “top prices had fallen to less than $4.5 million,” with Tyler’s listings “the 5th, 6th and 7th most expensive iPad domain names on eBay.”

Britain’s Claudine Beaumont of The Telegraph noted that, “some Web addresses can be snapped up for around $100, while others are listed for considerably more.”

Tyler told Elmer-DeWitt he's had "a lot of interest, but nothing in the price range I would like to get.”

Several companies and developers have offered to help him develop the sites to generate traffic for ad sales, but as he told Elmer-DeWitt, "I produce records. I don't really know anything about e-commerce."

“Entrepreneurial Web users are increasingly turning to domain name speculation as a way of making money, snapping up Web addresses that may be sought after further down the line, and selling them to other businesses and individuals at a big profit,” Beaumont writes.

“Some Web hosts, such as GoDaddy, enable people to make money by parking these domain names and receiving a share of pay-per-click advertising revenue.”

As Elmer-DeWitt wrote a couple weeks ago, “The big money, it would seem, is in iPad domain names — Web addresses that will presumably generate a lot of traffic if the device takes off. We counted 312 offerings, many for multiple sites. At least five have a Buy It Now sticker price of $21 million, including ipadsurfs.com and ipadinternetstore.com. “