Domain investing tips, strategies, and industry insights
Sponsored Partners
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.
A while back I had a name I was ready to drop. Average name, niche I half understood, and I couldn't talk myself into the renewal. So I did the lazy thing. I asked AI to make the case for keeping it. It made a great case. Buyer types I hadn't thought of, a couple of adjacent markets, a clean little story about where the niche was heading. I read it, nodded, renewed the name. It's still sitting there.
The fastest way I know to lose money in this business is to fall in love with a niche before I understand it. It usually goes like this. You read one article. You see one sale screenshot. Something starts bubbling on X. A week later you've hand-regged 25 names in a space you couldn't explain to a stranger at a party. The niche isn't always the problem. Sometimes the niche is fine. What got skipped is the boring part. Research.
Viken Mikaelian started the business in the late 1990s, back when putting planned giving online struck a lot of people in the nonprofit world as either pointless or vaguely improper. He says it wasn't exactly welcomed. The company began as VirtualGiving, built on a stubborn little premise: the gifts themselves are complicated, but the marketing doesn't have to be.
I've heard the argument: The name doesn't matter, the business does. Build a great product, make something useful, rank in Google, and the domain is just the label you stick on the front. It's not wrong. A good name won't save a bad product, and it won't fix a founder who loses interest in month three. Plenty of great names sit on dead projects. That part hasn't changed. What changed is that the building got easy.
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.