Domain investing tips, strategies, and industry insights
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I've always been curious about number domains. Most of us in this business are trained to think in words. We like one-word .coms, the strong two-word combos, short brandables, the occasional category killer, names that pass the radio test. Then you look at China and you see 360.com , 58.com , 1688.com , 4399.com , 2345.com , 12306.cn , all sitting under real companies and platforms that millions of people use every day.
A popular key many domainers, including myself, use when sizing up a keyword is check how many extensions are already registered. Takes about ten seconds and it's become a reflex. You could call it a vanity metric. Who cares if the .net, .org, .io, .co, .ai and twenty other versions are gone? You only own the one you own. Fair enough. But after enough years doing this, I've found the registered count tells me something, just not the thing people assume. It's not a valuation tool.
The interesting thing about vibe coding isn't what people are building. It's what they're building on. We spend a lot of time in this business chasing the perfect name. The exact match. The clean .com. The short brandable that passes the radio test, the billboard test, and three other tests somebody invented on a forum twenty years ago. Vibe coders aren't playing that game. They're not asking what the best possible domain is for the next ten years.
Gerard Micheal of Westmore (formerly DNPost) talks about the shift from traditional brokerage to operating as a principal, why deal structure matters more than headline price, revisiting the Featured.com transaction, and what AI is doing to demand for premium domains.
Every domainer has a routine before he buys a name. Mine's probably not that different from yours. Comps, search volume, age, backlinks, extension, archive history, trademark search, the radio test. I run through most of it. But there's one check I think a lot of investors skip, and it's the one that quietly costs people the most: where has this domain actually been? That's what URLVoid is for.
I've been watching the .si conversation pick up, and I went in more skeptical than I am now. On paper, .si is the country code for Slovenia. That's what it is. That's how almost everyone outside our world reads it. But domainers have always been good at finding a second meaning in an extension, and once in a while that second meaning actually takes. The rest of the time it's just a story we tell each other while we're renewing names we should have let go.
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.