Domain investing tips, strategies, and industry insights
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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.
We spend a lot of time in this business talking about the perfect domain. Founders spend approximately none. They've got a product to build, customers to find, and payroll on Friday. If the exact match .com is going to run six figures before anybody has proven the thing works, that's a hard check to write. So they don't write it. They add a word, or they take an alternative extension, and they get back to work. That's how a lot of very good companies got started, and I don't think we give it enough credit.
For years I did this math wrong, and I did it wrong in the direction that felt good. You buy a name for $400. You sell it eight years later for $2,500. That's $2,100, right? Write it down, screenshot it, drop it in the year-end thread. No, it isn't. Start with what shows up on an invoice. You paid $400 for the name. Then you carried it for eight years. Call renewals $12 a year to keep the math simple. That's another $96. So you're at $496 before a buyer ever emails you.
Every investor ends up with a pile of names that don't fit anywhere. They're not bad domains. Some of them are pretty good. Real commercial meaning, a keyword people actually search for, enough quality that letting them go feels like a mistake. They've just got one problem. Nobody's bought them. These are the names that live in the uncomfortable middle of a portfolio. Too good to dump for $50 or $100, not good enough to keep renewing forever without asking a few questions.
For most of the twenty years I've been buying domains, I've picked registrars on price and convenience. What's the .com renewal? Is the interface tolerable? Can I bulk update nameservers without losing an afternoon? How fast do I get an auth code? Does it play nice with the marketplaces and tools I already use? Those are fine questions. I still ask them. But there's another one I didn't start asking until the portfolio got big enough to matter. Should all of it really be sitting in one account?
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.