Domain investing tips, strategies, and industry insights
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There's nothing wrong with following a trend. Getting in early on one is how plenty of us have made real money. New industries invent new words, new companies need names, and for a while the demand runs ahead of the supply of anything decent. The trick is telling the difference between getting in early and getting carried away. I've watched this cycle enough times to recognize the shape of it.
I've watched a lot of domain fights over the years. After a while most of them start to look familiar. This one doesn't. Go to Radaris.com right now and you won't find the people-search site that's been running there for years. You'll find a notice saying the domain has been transferred by court order to Atlas Data Privacy Corporation. Transferred, as in someone else has it now. And it's the second time a court has taken this exact domain from its owner.
I own a lot of domains I like. Some of them sell themselves. Others need me to do the talking, and I've started to think that difference matters more than we give it credit for. A name can check every box we care about as investors. Short, aged, easy to say, registered in a few other extensions, maybe a keyword with real search volume sitting behind it. It looks great in a spreadsheet. Then somebody asks why their business should want it. If your answer runs three paragraphs, you've got a problem.
An inquiry does strange things to your head. You've got a name sitting at $4,995. It's been there three years. Nobody's bitten, nobody's emailed, and you've renewed it twice while quietly wondering if you should've just let it go. Then one morning an email lands and suddenly you're convinced you underpriced it. Maybe the buyer's a funded startup with the exact matching company name. You do twenty minutes of digging and find out they closed a $10 million round in March. Their logo already looks like your domain. That $4,995 doesn't feel so smart anymore.
I’ve always enjoyed interviews that give us a chance to step slightly outside the domain investor bubble. Christian Dawson, co-founder and Executive Director of i2Coalition, talks NamesCon and CloudFest Americas, AI agents, the next new gTLD round, regulation, and what the domain industry is underestimating.
Domain investors love an old registration date. Put "registered in 1998" or "25 years old" next to a name and it starts feeling valuable before anybody's said a word about the name itself. I get it. An old creation date hints at scarcity. Somebody thought enough of that string to pay for it back when most people didn't know what a domain was, and it survived while millions of others got dropped. But age isn't value. That's where I think we get carried away.
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.