It is said that in Major League Baseball, a player can fail 70% of the time at the plate and still make the Hall of Fame. Someone with a long career whose batting average is .300 or better has a decent shot of being inducted in the baseball Hall of Fame while being known as a solid hitter.

Domain investing is similar in a sense, but the bar to be considered successful is even lower than a hitter in baseball. A decent domain portfolio may have a 2-3% sell through rate (STR). A strong domain investor portfolio optimized for sales might sell only 5% of the portfolio in a year. 95% of a domain name portfolio may sit unsold each year, and a large percentage of these domain names may not get an offer or inquiry during the course of a year.

Atom.com recently announced “one of the biggest updates to search and discovery” on the platform. The platform is making its search results less literal and more intuitive. By way of example, if someone searches for the term “baby,” instead of being solely shown domain names with the baby keyword in them, the platform will show domain names that could make nice brand names for someone starting a baby-related business. The blog post has many more details about the change.

Last week, I wrote about my first domain name sale at Spaceship. The only hiccup was the $57 fee that was charged by PayPal when my payment was disbursed to me. This was partially my fault for not investigating further when Spaceship warned me about the potential for fees:

“Additionally, please note that you may incur fees when receiving funds. These fees are determined by the payout method and are beyond our control.”

I sold my first domain name via Spaceship today, and I thought I would share how it came about.

I recently listed nearly 2,000 domain names for sale on Spaceship with BIN prices and the make offer option enabled. The domain names were all priced below $5,000. None of the domain names were parked at Spaceship. I figured I would give Spaceship/Namecheap the opportunity to sell these domain names within their network, and if a domain name is purchased, I would pay the 5% commission.

Keeping my nameservers at Afternic allowed me to avoid paying a higher commission if one of these domain names was sold via GoDaddy. Since the time I listed domain names on Spaceship, I closed somewhere around 20 BIN + LTO deals at GoDaddy. Given how many domain names I have sold at GoDaddy in the time I’ve had many listed on Spaceship, I might have paid more in a commission penalty than I would saved, although it’s impossible to know if these buyers would have bought at Spaceship with their nameservers.