What did the owners of Yahoo actually do? They created a short list of other Web sites, publicized it, and then sat back while the owners of numerous other web sites registered their URLs. In effect, Yahoo leveraged the desire of webmasters to get their sites in front of people. These owners were perfectly willing to perform work for Yahoo, entering the URL, suggesting categories for the URL, and so forth.
Yahoo and many other sites take advantage of the self-organizing capacity of the virtual economy. In many cases, all that is needed is for a public space to be created and standardized.