2025 was a pretty good year for domain name sales. Namebio shows nearly $250 million in domain name sales closed last year, and that number will certainly jump when previously unreported domain name sales are publicized or discovered. NameBio took down the ability for me to search 2024 sales, but with just shy of $1 billion in sales over 5 years, it feels like it has been a pretty good year comparatively.

Going into the year, it seemed like we were primed for a sea change of AI-related advancements. I thought there would be improved tools related to domain name search and discovery that could help me find and evaluate domain names to buy. This did not come to fruition for the most part. Perhaps it’s my lack of prompting skills or maybe I just can’t see AI integrations in the tools I have always used, but I don’t think I am much better off with AI tools than I was a year ago.

I don’t earn much PPC revenue, and I am selective about what domain names I park with PPC advertising. When changing parking service providers, it is important to optimize domain names that need keywords manually input to display proper advertising links.

I park some domain names because they have earned significant parking revenue. I have also parked some domain names more for defensive purposes. For example, a domain name could be considered to be infringing by some people, but with the proper PPC links for the descriptive term rather than a particular brand name, it shows the domain name was acquired because it is descriptive.

One of the more annoying aspects of domain investing is negotiating a deal, coming to an agreement, and the buyer flaking when it is time to pay. It can be disappointing and frustrating, but I do my best to forget those broken deals and put them in the past.

I’ve always set minimum offer amounts on my platform-listed domain names. I don’t want to deal with $100 offers for 4 and 5 figure domain names. I have heard great tales of brokers closing six figure deals that started with 3 figure offers, but I’ve never seen that.

Squarespace acquired Google Domains in 2023. All domain names that were registered at Google Domains at that time were migrated to Squarespace.

Squarespace is primarily a website building platform with a focus on small to medium sized businesses. The domain name business was acquired in support of its primary services. To that end, the company has never put out a marketing campaign focused exclusively on its domain name registrar line of business.

We visited our friends in New York this weekend. I was chatting about my friend’s dad, who passed away after a battle with pancreatic cancer several years ago. I vaguely recall attending his funeral, but it was a bit of a hazy memory for whatever reason.

As I was thinking about this, trying hard to remember if I made the trip, a very specific domain name came to my mind. I don’t know why, but I distinctly remember sitting in the parking lot of the Long Island funeral home having a conversation with a representative from the company that owned this domain name I had been trying to buy for a while. As I recall, the conversation was productive and we reached a deal shortly after our phone call.