Domain investing tips, strategies, and industry insights
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The fastest way I know to lose money in this business is to fall in love with a niche before I understand it. It usually goes like this. You read one article. You see one sale screenshot. Something starts bubbling on X. A week later you've hand-regged 25 names in a space you couldn't explain to a stranger at a party. The niche isn't always the problem. Sometimes the niche is fine. What got skipped is the boring part. Research.
Viken Mikaelian started the business in the late 1990s, back when putting planned giving online struck a lot of people in the nonprofit world as either pointless or vaguely improper. He says it wasn't exactly welcomed. The company began as VirtualGiving, built on a stubborn little premise: the gifts themselves are complicated, but the marketing doesn't have to be.
I've heard the argument: The name doesn't matter, the business does. Build a great product, make something useful, rank in Google, and the domain is just the label you stick on the front. It's not wrong. A good name won't save a bad product, and it won't fix a founder who loses interest in month three. Plenty of great names sit on dead projects. That part hasn't changed. What changed is that the building got easy.
I still think .com is the best extension. That's not a brave position to take in this world. Given the choice between the exact match .com and the same name somewhere else, I'd take the .com almost every time. Where I think we get rigid is the next step. We're right that .com is king, and then we go ahead and seat every other extension at the kids' table, and buyers don't always carve it up that way.
One of the biggest blind spots in domaining is how passive most marketplaces still are. For years, the basic model has been simple. Put the domain on a platform, set the price, maybe add a logo, and wait. If the right buyer shows up, great. If not, the name just sits there with thousands of others. Atom's latest move matters because it points at a different direction.
AI is one of those domain trends that makes sense right away, which is probably why it is so easy to overdo. The category is real. Companies are being built around AI, products are launching every day, and money is flowing into the space. Buyers are looking for names that fit tools, agents, automation, and a long list of verticals. So this is not an argument against AI domains. Some AI names are clearly valuable.
The country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Anguilla that has become extremely popular for artificial intelligence companies and projects.
A generic top-level domain (gTLD) operated by Google, designed for mobile applications and app developers.
A generic top-level domain for communities, organizations, and membership-based groups.
A generic top-level domain suitable for any internet-based business or presence.
A generic top-level domain designed for e-commerce and retail businesses.
A generic top-level domain targeting the technology sector.