Hedge funds and private investors that invest serious amounts of money in publicly traded companies have many tactics to understand how a company is performing before financial reports are given. People are hired to count cars in parking lots, check inventory on retail sales floors, ask employees of suppliers for production details, and a variety of other means to ascertain non-public information. Domain investors should consider a similar strategy using different tactics.
I am not an investor in non .com domain names. That should be pretty obvious. Despite this, I am emailed regularly asking me for thoughts on buying new gTLD domain names. I believe investors would benefit from doing end user market analysis to check their investment viability. This is important for non-.com domain names, but it could also be done for the non-blue chip .coms (one word, 3/4 letter…etc), too. People should understand the market before investing thousands of dollars in speculative domain names.
Here’s what I would do if I was going to the legwork to evaluate investment viability for a type of domain name I was unsure about:
