Last week there was a great post at Impulse Communications entitled, What To Do With My 9000 Domain Names? If you’re not familiar with the author and owner of the company, Eric Borgos, you’re missing out on a real domain professional. You can read an interesting interview I did with him at MO.com and read Eric’s blog for more details.
The question he posed was an interesting one. What should he do with his portfolio of 9,000 domain names? He revealed that he didn’t plan on developing them and that in the past, affiliate links and parking would more than pay for the renewal fees, but that’s no longer the case. In fact, he stated “Over 90% of my parked domains make less than the annual registration fee, and at least 50% make $0.” I have a couple of ideas around this and Eric is welcome to any an all of them.
Suggestion One
My first suggestion would be to gather the domains into categories by industry and contact major corporations that could profit from leveraging the domains. For example, Eric mentioned having over 350 geo florist domains pointing to his GetFlowers.com site. I would reach out to the major companies in the flower industry and strike a deal with one. Allow them to use the domains for a small fee and properly develop them to funnel in the keyword traffic. $10 a month / per domain would more than cover registration costs. If the hope is to some day sell the domains, why not put them in the hands of the end user and let them see the value that they have and why they should own them?
Suggestion Two
I posted another suggestion in the comments of the post that I feel has some validity. My comment was:
“You’ve got some great domains. Why not “lend them out” to other domainers willing to put the time in to develop them and generate revenue. Then you get x% of that revenue and as long as it’s producing income, there is no need to pull it from the domainer.”
While I don’t consider myself very religious by any means, I can’t help think of “The Parable of the Talents” that is often referenced when teaching the lessons of money. Replace “Talents” with “Domains” in the story and I think we have something. Identify some proven players in the domain development community and allow them to develop some of the domains for a share of the revenue. Those domainer/developers that produce well should be given more to develop. Those that are not producing should lose the opportunity.
Obviously I don’t know all the domain names and which are capable of producing income, but based on Eric’s track record, I’m sure he’s got some gems. I know there are some great domainers and developers out that that could make good with some solid domains. I’d love to see these suggestions put into action. I think it would be a win/win for all involved.
4 comments
Cool article Mike. I’m in the same situtation. However, I only own 800 domains.
I have domains in many different niches such as resume, education, jobs, NYC, taxi, hotels, products, services and a handful of hotel domains.
There are several domains that have made back the cost of registration in 2 months. More than 200 will expire, but I already made money with selling 10 out of the bunch.
Would you recommend selling them for cheap now to make some money than to let them drop in Feb? I may do a partnership on my resume and job domains to make some revenue.
Thanks for the cool article. Happy Thanksgiving.
@Jason, it depends on your financial situation and how valuable you think the names could be. It’ll cost quite a bit to renew that many domains, but if you’ve done well selling 10 and are making money off some of the others, it may be worth renewing.
I don’t own that many names but I have taken mine and tried every week to develop 1 or 2. I have done mostly related names about camping and backpacking and also high cpc names. Its not worth it to build out some bad names take the best put time and money in and you will cover the rest of the names.