General Domain Information

As the year winds down, I have been thinking about what to expect for the upcoming year. I am hopeful that it will be a good year, but I would not be surprised if the business of domain investing is more challenging than the past several years.

It seems like economists and pundits believe we are either in a recession or going to be in a long one soon. I have been preparing my business for one as best as I can. I’ve been more apt to accept decent offers on inventory, and I have been spending less money on auctions and acquisitions. I would not be surprised to see domain auctions impacted by spending cuts at some point in 2023.

Less than a week remains in 2022. This is generally a quiet week in terms of domain name sales, so I tend to spend my working time on some end of year tasks. Here’s what I am working on this week…

Throughout the past year, I have won many domain names in auctions that ended up my accounts at different domain registrars. I have been unlocking these domain names and transferring them to my primary holding account. Having a primary account tends to make it easier to keep track of my domain names.

A couple of years ago, I moved many of my inventory-quality domain names off parked pages in favor of for sale landing pages. I would guess less than 10% of my domain names utilize pages with PPC links on them. I was looking at my revenue report and noticed several previously-sold domain names continue to earn revenue after being sold.

Almost one year ago to the day, I sold a domain name for $2,999 via Afternic. The buyer did not change the nameservers, and it is still parked with PPC links. In the last year, the domain name earned $33.96 in revenue.

I maintain a fairly small portfolio of domain names – fewer than 2,000 in total. Part of the reason for this is to keep my overhead costs low. Even with a relatively small domain name portfolio, it doesn’t make sense to carry domain names that I don’t think have a good chance of ever selling. Deciding what to let go is difficult.

For the most part, I don’t let many domain names expire. If something about a domain name caught my eye and I bought it, that luster usually continues to exist. I usually let a couple of handfuls of domain names expire each year because there’s almost no chance of them selling. For instance, earlier this year I let a domain name with the word “Famer” in it expire because I bought it thinking the word was Farmer – whoops.

I’ve always wondered what tools domain investors may have created to help them with their domain investing businesses. I think people who operate and manage large domain portfolios must use a variety of tools to effectively and efficiently manage their holdings. I wonder if any are already using artificial intelligence (AI) tools. I also wonder what role AI will play in domain investing in the future.

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company that recently opened its ChatGPT chatbot to the public. Michael Cyger shared that he was checking out the tool to ask domain name related questions:

Playing around with OpenAI and asking domain name questions. pic.twitter.com/inKAXVuTRr

— Michael Cyger (@MichaelCyger) December 3, 2022