Domain investing tips, strategies, and industry insights
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A subscriber emailed me to say the NotRenewing daily was landing in his spam folder. That's a good email to get, by the way. Most people don't bother. They just stop seeing your newsletter and eventually forget it existed, and you never find out because your open rate drifts down a point a month and you tell yourself it's summer. My first reaction was defensive, and I want to be honest about that.
I've renewed names I knew were dead. Not by accident, either. The invoice showed up, I skimmed the list, and I clicked renew because clicking renew was easier than admitting I'd wasted the money two years earlier. That's most of the problem right there. Everybody already knows the theory. Cut the weak names, keep the good ones, stop paying rent on assets that will never produce. Nobody argues with that. Then renewal season hits and somehow the portfolio got bigger again.
Most domain portfolios don't fall apart overnight. It happens slow enough that you never notice the exact moment it started. You buy a name, point it to a lander, list it on a marketplace, set a price, and move on with your life. A few years later the domain's still sitting in your account, except almost everything around it has quietly changed. The price doesn't make sense anymore. The lander's broken. The domain's still listed on a marketplace you stopped using two years ago.
Every domain sale gets credit for happening in the one place we can actually see: wherever the money changed hands. Sells on Afternic, it's an Afternic sale. Sells on Sedo, it's a Sedo sale. The commission came out there, the transfer happened there, the dashboard says so. Case closed, right? Not exactly. The buyer probably didn't start there. They might've stumbled on the name through Google, seen it mentioned somewhere online, gotten an email from you, browsed your portfolio, or run into it on a completely different marketplace first.
When I put out the first edition of Beginner's Guide to Making Money With Domain Names , I had one goal. Give new investors the introduction I wish somebody had handed me when I started. Domain investing looks easy from the outside. Register a name, wait for the phone to ring, cash a check. That's the version people see. What they don't see is everything underneath it. The bad registrations. The names you let expire a month before someone would've paid real money for them.
UDRP decisions and disputed domain names both climbed more than 11 percent last quarter, right as AI starts drafting complaints on both sides of these filings. The rules haven't changed. What changed is how fast somebody can assemble something that looks like proof.
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.