One of the things over the years that has been a constant is the proclamation of opinion as fact. A lot of domain investors who either get something or they don’t, come out and call their opinion fact.
The truth is you are going to be hard pressed to find any industry that is more subjective, maybe music or Hollywood. It is a big world, what one person gets another person will not get. There certainly are naming conventions and extensions that are more popular than others, but the beauty of domaining is that you have so many options to find your way to a profitable transaction.
You can look at domain sales each week and there is no rhyme or reason behind certain names selling above others on the surface. One week you have VN99.com sell for $10,000 and the same week a domain like CRM2.com sell for $4,495, a couple of months earlier RQH.com sold for $2,600. So on the surface the people who for years told new domainers, “Don’t register names with letters and numbers unless it is a three character.com” That advice doesn’t look good to those two sellers, but there are always outliers, there are never any absolutes. Generally the advice of not mixing letters and numbers is sound advice.
RQH.com was thought to be a mistake, well I did the research on that name, the owner sadly passed away and a family member knowing nothing about domains placed it on Sedo for $2,600. They probably thought $2,600 for something they saw as worthless was great. That name was immediately flipped after being purchased on Sedo.
We rarely have the full story behind any transaction, so sometimes the speculation does not match what really happened. The same goes with alt extensions, when I started in .tv in 2004 the only commentary was it sucked. Well premium pricing sucked but Verisign slipping up and pricing LCD.tv for regular fee and me flipping for $4,200 didn’t suck.
Another absolute prognostication by some is, ” NO ONE WANTS THE NEW GTLDS” Well someone paid $90,000 for Transfer.Money as broken by Elliot Silver.
Someone purchased:
Pro.Flowers 50,000 USD
Commercial.Property USD
city.tips 8,500 EUR
power.financial 3,000 USD
naked.pizza 1,999 USD
sportwetten.club 2,999 EUR
simple.chat 2,999 EUR
app.life 1,310 USD
ads.pink 1,000 EUR
Does that mean the new gtld are a great investment ? No, are they super high risk from a domain investor perspective ? YES. But there is no truth to the statement “No one is buying these”
I get emails all the time as I am sure other bloggers do as well, that almost are begging me to guarantee that .com will always be king, or that 3l and 4l .com can go only go up.
The answer is no one can guarantee anything about this business. Things change and they can change quickly, look you could hand register 4N.com in 2003 and 2004, I did it, you could hand register 5n.com in 2010 – 2011 get cheap closeouts on Go Daddy in 2012, now those names are all sold out and are liquid investments. Everyone did not know or see that in 2002.
Look at 4L.com what was once ugly is now beautiful, names like XQJZ.com listed for sale or appraisal on Namepros or DNF would go nowhere in 2005, there was nowhere near the level of Chinese buying, so you were mostly dealing with Western domain investors who wondered what the hell am I going to do with XQJZ.com ? Today there is a market for that. I auctioned Xqqm.com on Namepros a few weeks back, transaction closed at $335, a decade ago maybe I get the opening bid of $10.
You have to decide if you are going to have laser like focus and stick to a few niches and extensions or if you want to be in every niche. If you choose the latter you need to be working day in and day out with a lot of time spent reading and researching. Deals pop up and certain niches fall in and out of favor.
You also have to pay attention to the bigger world of tech, and understand what is going on with mobile, with ICANN, with the economies of those buying your niche, with Google and search trends, online advertising trends, etc… This is a full-time gig and there are no absolutes.
Definitely a good read. Great perspective.
Ive invested in a few new gTld’s,only being .Video and .Fit
GuitarLesson.Video , and Calorie.Fit are two im having decent hopes for.
Just like in your article,At the time of hand registering,who knows 10 years from now what profit could be achieved.
Fantastic post and great “straight talk!” They’re definitely worth…….. Whatever and whenever someone will pay for them!
Very well explained Raymond 🙂
Sensible and clearly put. (Just catching up on my inbox and a few weeks late to the party here.)
The domain industry is messy & chaotic. Not only does it change over time, as all business sectors do. Worse! Nothing can ever precisely repeat.
If a store sells a computer or a shirt or a car, then it can order another exactly like it. Rinse and repeat; count the results. But each domain is unique, meaning that this industry is built entirely off of one-off events – none of which can be replicated.
Moreover, we’re talking about transactions. Nobody knows about those because they always involve at least 2 people: buyer and seller. Frequently they involve many more than that: bidders, brokers, competing sellers, etc. At best, we’re just 1 factor in the transaction. And if we’re speculating about whole categories of domains and transactions that may or may not happen in the future, then certainty is certainly impossible.