Domain investing tips, strategies, and industry insights
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Put the same domain in front of five experienced investors and you can get five very different prices. Youness Kasmi of DNRater talks about why he focuses on the Buy It Now price instead of a theoretical value, what AI valuation ranges get wrong, and what he has learned teaching domain investing in the MENA region.
Domain investors have no shortage of ways to decide whether a domain is good. Age. Backlinks. Keywords. Extension. Length. Search volume. AI appraisals. Comparable sales. Dynadot just published its Q2 2026 Domain Intelligence Report using more than 54,000 completed aftermarket sales from its marketplace between April and June. There is a lot of data in the report, but one finding stood out to me more than anything else. Some of the things we tend to talk about most weren't necessarily the things separating ordinary domains from the expensive ones.
There's a name I picked up at auction in 2019 that I paid far too much for. My walk-away number that afternoon was $1,200. I got stubborn around eleven at night against a bidder I'll never meet and closed at something like $3,400, and the next morning I told myself I'd been decisive. Two years later an offer came in at $2,600 and I didn't even counter it, because $2,600 was a loss and I wasn't in the mood to book a loss that week. None of the auction had anything to do with the domain. It was a fact about me on a Tuesday night.
Retailers have a word for merchandise that sits too long without selling. They call it dead stock. We should probably borrow it. In retail, dead stock is inventory that's been sitting unsold and isn't going to move at the price on the tag. The problem isn't the shelf space. It's the money tied up in products nobody's buying, plus whatever it costs to keep them sitting there. Domains don't take up warehouse space. Nothing to shelve, nothing to box up, nothing to haul to the back. But the carrying cost is real.
We all tell ourselves the same story about who buys domains. Some company is stuck with a clunky name, gets tired of spelling it out on every sales call, finds your name, pays up. It's a clean story. It's easy to picture. It's also about half the market. Some of the better buyers I've dealt with weren't struggling with anything. Their site worked. Their email worked. Customers found them fine. They were sitting on something short and clean that most people would call a perfectly good domain, and they bought anyway.
Every time I look at a domain, I end up back at the same question. Who would actually buy this? Not who could use it. Who'd write the check. There's a big difference between those two, and I've talked myself out of remembering it more times than I'd like to admit. It's easy to convince yourself a name has hundreds of buyers. Own something in accounting software and you can pull up a list of accounting firms that runs for pages. Own a construction name and there are more contractors within twenty minutes of my house than I could email in a month.
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 extension launched in 2001 as a .com alternative for businesses. It never earned the respect, and the aftermarket is thin.
The country code for the Cocos Islands, operated by Verisign and marketed as a .com alternative. Had a run of popularity in China.
A generic top-level domain for communities, organizations, and membership-based groups.
The commercial second-level extension under Britain's .uk, run by Nominet. Expired names are suspended for 90 days, then dropped without auction.