Bob Hawkes is one of those people on NamePros who makes you realize how much more there is to learn. Not because he's showing off, he's not, but because he'll drop a 2,000-word analysis on some extension you dismissed, and halfway through, you realize you never actually thought about it at all. You just had an opinion. Bob has data. And patience. And this calm, methodical way of walking through probability that makes hype look exhausting.
I don't remember the first time I saw one of his posts, but I remember the feeling: "Oh. This guy is one of the few. This guy actually knows what he's talking about." Which is rarer than it should be.
What kept pulling me back to his writing was that he never sounded like he was selling anything. Not a course, not a service, not even his own portfolio. He was just genuinely interested in figuring out how domains actually work. Which patterns repeat. Which assumptions are wrong. How to think about risk when outcomes take years to show up. And not keeping it a secret.
He's helped thousands of investors think better about this space. I'm one of them. I wanted to talk to him about how he got here, what he's learned, and what he thinks most people get wrong.
Mike: Do you remember the first moment when domains clicked for you as more than just URLs?
Bob: First of all, let me thank you for reaching out for this interview. I admire your writing, both on your own blog and at NamePros. You have a rare ability to write with impact and clarity. I am also a fan of the one-liners that you share on X.
Now to answer your question. I am not sure there is a specific instance, but early on I was attracted to how powerful it could be to have a two-word phrase that worked across the dot. When Twitter, now X, and other social media began making those clickable to go directly to the site, just with the two words and the dot between, it became even more powerful. I don’t think the digital marketing professionals have fully taken advantage of these possibilities. It works with some of the country codes, things like .it, .us, .me, etc., and with many of the new extensions.
Mike: Which metrics do you see domainers rely on too heavily or incorrectly?
Bob: I understand that most of the best domain names are also aged, but I think we tend to respect age of the domain name too much. Age on its own is not a complete metric. The vast majority of aged domain names will not find a use. It is compelling to see a name at that someone has held for 20 years as more valuable. Don’t let domain name age alone impress you too much.
Mike: Can you share a moment where your thinking about domains changed significantly?
Bob: I think it was when I realized that sales data is only part of the picture. We should be thinking about sales relative to the number of domain names of that type or category that are listed for sale. For example, NameBio has 122 sales including the term ‘agentic.’ If that was from 500 names actively for sale, it would be highly significant for a newly trending term. Fortunately, DNX now gives us a way to check the number listed for sale on the main marketplaces, and this morning it showed about 16,500 active listings that contain the term ‘agentic.’
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Mike: Most of my learning in domaining has come from my mistakes. Have you made a bad decision that later turned out to be valuable because of what it taught you?
Bob: I specialize in mistakes! Seriously, I am a big believer that the best way to learn anything, including domains, is to truly struggle through it, and that will always come with mistakes.
My biggest early mistake, and one I think many new to domain investing make, is that I thought names would sell because I could see a specific use for that name that excited me. Names like this might sell, but it is also important to think about how likely they will be to sell. To know that, you need to, as part of the acquisition research, look at how often names that are similar have been adopted in businesses. Resources such as OpenCorporates and CrunchBase, or even a company search on LinkedIn, are ways to assess this, along with using NameBio to see what has sold in the past.
Mike: What is one of the most underrated skills a domain investor can develop?
Bob: I would say that it is thinking about decisions quantitatively and in terms of probability. Everything from ‘do the odds favour making this acquisition?’, to ‘should I renew this name years in advance?’, depend on thinking in terms of probability.
I wrote about this back in 2022 at NamePros with a number of specific examples: What Are The Odds? Applied Probability For Domain Investing.
No one can predict the future exactly, but thinking in terms of probability will help us make better decisions. For example, ask yourself what is the retail price this name would probably sell for, and what would you estimate the probability that it would sell in any one year. Let’s say I am looking at a specific .io name that I think would sell for $4000, maybe $3200 net after commission. But the term is specialized and I think the odds it will sell in any one year is 0.8 %, maybe slightly less. When I multiply $3200 x 0.008 = $25.60. But the renewal cost per year for .io is more than that. Therefore, based on these numbers at least, it’s not a smart hold. Now this is just part of the story, of course, and if you believe the term will trend upwards in future years, it could still be a wise acquisition. The longer we are in domain investing, and the more careful our record keeping and more detailed the analysis of comparable sales, the better we all get at estimating the values that go into the formula.
Mike: What has been your most rewarding piece to write and why?
Bob: It’s not the most important article, certainly not the most viewed or innovative, or one I put the most hours into, but my clear personal favourite is a 2020 article: Catching Trains and Avoiding Train Wrecks . It is essentially about the risks and possible rewards in trend investing. It starts with Gary Kremen, who was one of the very first domain name investors. He recognized that the Internet would replace newspaper classified ads, and that the prime terms would be valuable. This was of course long before search engines as we know them now.
I am terrible at writing clever title and section headings, but in that article they just seemed to fall into place. I think the article an enjoyable and worthwhile read with an important message.
I should add, I most enjoy writing analysis type articles, though. I look forward each year to my January article that places sales from the previous year in a multi-year context.
Mike: Has teaching, explaining, and analyzing domains changed the way you invest personally?
Bob: Yes. Completely. When I was a teacher, long before I got into domains, I came to realize that teaching or explaining something will help you truly understand it. That is why peer learning experiences, where students help each other master a topic, are so effective.
When I was writing a new article each week at NamePros, and trying to write on a variety of topics to better serve the NamePros community, I often wrote about things that, at the outset, I did not know at all. While those articles were the most work to write, they also influenced my own investing the most, and definitely the ones that I learned the most from researching.
I find that it is easiest to be truly balanced and open minded when I have not already invested in something. For example, when I wrote the two-part series on .io domain names back in 2020, Why is the .IO Extension So Popular? and Types of .IO Domain Names That Sell and Where, I had not invested in a single .io domain name. After researching the articles, I have now invested in a few dozen .io domain names, influenced by what I found in putting those articles together.
Mike: Is there a domain you passed on that still haunts you?
Bob: Actually, not really. Sure almost weekly I second-guess a name that someone registered while I researched the metrics for it, or someone outbid me, but I know there is an almost limitless number of domain name possibilities, so I am not fixated on any one domain name.
I am haunted by not getting into .ai at the right time, though. I knew how big a thing artificial intelligence was, even wrote numerous articles on the topic and AI domain names, but kept thinking we must be near the top of a demand curve for AI related domain names. But .ai demand and sales volume has kept increasing. I finally invested in a handful of .ai about a year ago, but almost entirely missed the .ai trend. My biggest regret by far.
Mike: Does your own data ever tell you one thing, but you buy on feeling anyway? What does that tension feel like?
Bob: Sure. Pretty well every week I do things that are counter to what the data says. Often, it turns out unwise, but it is also where true opportunity can lie. The numbers only take you so far. This is an art, as well as a science. There is a bit of tension, particularly since I write so often about using metrics and analyses to guide acquisitions, I feel guilty about not following them.
Now and then going against the metrics turns out well. A recent sale was for a term used in zero companies or organizations according to OpenCorporates. The .com I held was the only one extension registered according to dotDB. There is zero advertiser interest in the term, with the high CPC of $0.00. When I did a quotation mark search for the term, it appears in fewer than 10,000 web pages in all the globe, a ridiculously low number. Yet, when I saw the name drop a few years ago, I knew I had to acquire it. The name felt special to me, full of positive potential for some end user. The name? spiritfully.com
Mike: As more AI and automation enter the naming world, where do you see human creativity still holding the advantage?
Bob: This is the key question for the domain world. If we don’t have it already, we will soon, I am sure, have semi-autonomous, or fully autonomous, agentic domain name systems that evaluate, buy, present and sells domains, all with little or no human intervention. How well will it do?
Early in January, I plan to read the just-released book, written by Joseph Bradley and Don Tapscott, You to the Power of Two: Redefining Human Potential in the Age of Identic AI. As I understand it, the book is about the next step after agentic systems and agents. In identic systems the AI assistant comes to know your personal identity and becomes an extension of you. It isn’t that AI is doing things for you, it is doing things with you.
Over the last number of months, Rick Schwartz, The Domain King®, has been talking about a similar idea through his The Betty Project. I think he was the first in the domain community to see AI in this important way.
So my answer is the following.
While AI assistants will take over more and more tasks we do now, they will do it in concert with our own identity. That includes our knowledge, our creativity and in particular our ethical standards. I am very concerned with the increasing tendency of AI by itself to deceive and outright lie. Existing guardrails seem woefully inadequate.
But AI is also incredibly powerful in making the case for a name, helping me see the pros and cons of a potential acquisition, or presentation. I see the role of the person will always be a higher level of creativity, and an ethical and disciplined bedrock for decision making and actions.
Follow Bob on NamePros and X, and check out Rename.one