Domain investing tips, strategies, and industry insights
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I used to stare at certain short letter domains and feel like I was missing something. Cars.com makes sense. Hotels.com makes sense. Even a solid two-word .com is easy to picture, because you can see the buyer standing right there. Then a three-letter .com sells for six figures, sometimes seven, and it isn't a word at all. It looks like three letters somebody shook out of a Scrabble bag. So where's the value? Start with scarcity.
Most of us are trained to look at the name before anything else. Is it short, is it a .com, can people spell it, does it describe something somebody actually sells, is there a pool of buyers who'd want it. Those are the right questions most of the time and I'm not knocking them. But expired domains with backlinks drag in a question the name alone can't answer, which is what already happened on this thing before it ever landed in your account. That one question can swing the whole number.
There's a name I renewed five years in a row before I admitted it was a bad buy. Actually more than one. That's the thing about renewal season. It tells the truth whether you're ready for it or not. A portfolio looks great when you're buying one name at a time. Ten bucks here, twelve there, a closeout you couldn't pass up, a hand reg you grabbed because a trend looked like it was heating up. Each decision is small. Then the renewal bill shows up and all those small decisions arrive as one big number, and you're sitting there doing math you'd rather not do.
I've got a soft spot for tools that solve an actual domain problem without dressing it up as something bigger than it is. So when I saw Michael Cyger's Notify.Domains , I signed up for the free week and pointed it at buildready.com just to see what it'd do. The pitch is simple enough. You hand it a domain, and it watches. Not just the expiration date, which is the thing most of us think about, but a whole spread of signals underneath that.
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 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.