Every year somebody tells me the market is changing. Half the time they're right. Half the time they just had a slow week and needed something to post about.
This year I actually believe it.
Not because domains became some new thing overnight. A good name is still a good name. Short, clear, easy to say out loud without spelling it, something you'd actually put on a business card. None of that changed. What changed is how people are looking at names, and I've watched it shift in my own inbox.
Buyers got more practical. A few years back you could slap crypto or meta or NFT or AI into a mediocre name and somebody would at least open the email. Didn't mean the name was good. Just meant the word did the selling for it. I sold a few names like that myself and I'm not proud of it, but I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen either.
AI is still hot, don't get me wrong. But the market's gotten pickier about it. If the name makes sense for an actual product or platform or agency, there's real demand. If it's just two buzzwords duct taped together, people scroll past it now. Honestly that's probably good for all of us. Trends get people to show up. Usefulness is what keeps them from leaving in disgust six months later.
Alt extensions feel normal now too. I'm not saying .com lost the crown, because it didn't, and if you're sitting on the right .com you're still in the best seat at the table. But I've watched more builders launch on .ai or .co or .app or .io without blinking, as long as the name actually fits what they're building. Problem is, "accepted" and "valuable" aren't the same thing. The extension can help a strong name. It can't save a weak one. I wish it could. Would make my job a lot easier.
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Michael Cyger's Notify.domains is the example I come back to on this. I used it, I trust it, and the .domains extension isn't just a leftover string he settled for because the .com was taken. It's the pitch. You don't have to explain what the site does. That's the difference between an extension doing real work and an extension just being available.
Then there's renewal pressure, and I think about this one more than I used to. Building a portfolio is easy. Anybody can register two hundred names in a weekend. Paying for two hundred names every year when the inquiries have gone quiet, that's the part nobody warns you about. I've let names go that I probably shouldn't have, just because the renewal bill showed up before the buyer did.
So the question I keep coming back to isn't "what's this worth." It's "how likely is this to sell before I have to pay for it again." Less fun question. More useful one.
And the buyer pool is different too. Vibe coding, no-code tools, AI assistants that'll scaffold you a working app in an afternoon, all of it means more people building small stuff without a dime of funding behind them. They don't want a six-figure name. They want something decent and available today so they can stop procrastinating and actually launch. I think that middle of the market, the stuff that'll never touch DNJournal, is where a lot of the real activity is quietly happening.
Last thing, and it's not really a trend so much as background noise: there's more of everything now. More extensions, more marketplaces, more people calling themselves domain investors after one good flip. More activity doesn't mean more quality. If anything it means you have to trust your own judgment more, because there's a lot more junk to wade through to find the good stuff.
So yeah, it feels different. But I don't think the fundamentals disappeared, I think they just got less forgiving. Know who's actually going to buy the name. Know why it's useful to them. Be honest with yourself about the renewal math. Don't mistake a trend for real demand, and don't mistake an appraisal for a check that cleared.
The market didn't turn into something unrecognizable. It just stopped covering for lazy names.