Domain investing tips, strategies, and industry insights
Sponsored Partners
"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.
Most of us are trained to look at the name before anything else. Is it short, is it a .com, can people spell it, does it describe something somebody actually sells, is there a pool of buyers who'd want it. Those are the right questions most of the time and I'm not knocking them. But expired domains with backlinks drag in a question the name alone can't answer, which is what already happened on this thing before it ever landed in your account. That one question can swing the whole number.
There's a name I renewed five years in a row before I admitted it was a bad buy. Actually more than one. That's the thing about renewal season. It tells the truth whether you're ready for it or not. A portfolio looks great when you're buying one name at a time. Ten bucks here, twelve there, a closeout you couldn't pass up, a hand reg you grabbed because a trend looked like it was heating up. Each decision is small. Then the renewal bill shows up and all those small decisions arrive as one big number, and you're sitting there doing math you'd rather not do.
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.