Domain investing tips, strategies, and industry insights
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Most of us assume that owning a domain means we can sell it to whoever shows up with money. Unlock it, grab the auth code, push it to the buyer's registrar, done. That's how it works with .com, .net, and .org. It's how I operated for years without thinking about it much. But not every extension plays by those rules. Some domains carry restrictions for their entire lives. Some can only change hands if the buyer meets requirements you have no control over.
I'll admit something up front. In almost twenty years of buying and selling domains, I've never seriously thought about owning the other side of the dot. Registries always felt like a different universe. Verisign and the big infrastructure players. Not something a guy flipping names out of Chicago needed to understand beyond renewal pricing. Joe Alagna and Andrey Insarov wrote a book that made me question that a little.
"What's your budget?" That one can burn you. It sounds harmless. Sometimes it even sounds reasonable. The other side just wants to know if you're both in the same universe before anyone wastes time, right? Except that's not really what's being asked. The budget question is a request for the most valuable piece of information in the entire negotiation, and people hand it over in the first email because refusing feels rude.
A few years back I had a four-letter .com on my watch list. Decent name, nothing spectacular, but exactly the kind of thing I'd flip for a few hundred bucks. Expiration date came and went. I checked Whois like clockwork for about three weeks, convinced I was about to snipe it the second it opened up. I wasn't. I just didn't understand yet that "expired" and "available" are two completely different states, separated by a process I hadn't bothered to learn.
Every year somebody tells me the market is changing. Half the time they're right. Half the time they just had a slow week and needed something to post about. This year I actually believe it. Not because domains became some new thing overnight. A good name is still a good name. Short, clear, easy to say out loud without spelling it, something you'd actually put on a business card. None of that changed.
I used to stare at certain short letter domains and feel like I was missing something. Cars.com makes sense. Hotels.com makes sense. Even a solid two-word .com is easy to picture, because you can see the buyer standing right there. Then a three-letter .com sells for six figures, sometimes seven, and it isn't a word at all. It looks like three letters somebody shook out of a Scrabble bag. So where's the value? Start with scarcity.
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.