General Domain Information

Over the last two weeks, the value of cryptocurrency, NFTs, and associated investment values have taken a hit for a plethora of reasons. Bitcoin seems to have bounced back off of its lows, but it is still considerably lower than it has been trading of late. I have not participated in these markets, but I believe a falling crypto market is bad for domain investors and the domain name industry as a whole.

If you have a look at some of the top domain name sales from the last five years, you will see quite a few domain names were sold to cryptocurrency related companies or were bought for crypto/Web3 related projects. Even more high value domain names were acquired by these types of companies in private. Public.com, Crypto.com, Circle.com, Republic.com, Gemini.com, Candy.com, Galaxy.com, and countless other domain names were sold in private for substantial amounts of money.

I would guess nine figures worth of domain names have been sold to crypto-related businesses in the last several years. I would not be surprised to learn the number is actually higher. It is an impossible to know given the amount of sales transacted privately on platforms like GoDaddy, Dan.com, Sedo, BrandBucket, and others, in addition to privately transacted off-platform sales.

Companies flush with cash are willing and able to spend money on great domain names. High growth industries, like cryptocurrency and associated businesses, have received substantial funding to grow exponentially. They also earn considerable revenue from sales and services. Some of this money trickles down to domain industry companies and domain investors. As the crypto market goes, so goes the domain name aftermarket.

With a softening crypto market, less money will be spent on domain name registrations, acquisitions, and upgrades. Companies would be reluctant to lay off staff while spending a substantial amount of money on a domain name upgrade. People may be less inclined to start a business, particularly as interest rates increase and the amount of funding available dries up. In my view, this means there will be less money spent on domain names.

In addition to the falling crypto markets, many companies on the NYSE and NASDAQ have also taken some hits. Stocks have fallen off of their recent highs. I have also been reading about startup layoffs and difficulty with fundraising. These factors will also impact the domain name aftermarket.

It’s not all doom and gloom on the horizon. There will also be plenty of opportunities for domain investors that pop-up. Companies that don’t survive may have valuable domain names that could be sold. Projects may get abandoned and associated domain names may be put up for sale to raise capital. There may be less money spent on domain auctions, giving investors a better opportunity to acquire investment-grade domain names at a lower cost.

I am sure there are some people who are happy about crypto investors losing some of their investment. As a domain investor though, if the crypto markets continue to fall, I think the ripple effects on the domain name ecosysyem will be pretty strong.

Over the years, it feels like I have been spending less time working. I think I can attribute this to a maturing business requiring less time to operate on a daily basis. I have built a daily routine with only slight deviations. I feel fortunate to have a super flexible schedule, and while I may always seem to be working, I wanted to make a guesstimate about how much time I actually spend working. For the sake of understanding a bit more about my business, I have somewhere in the ballpark of 1,500 domain names, and I have been buying a higher quantity than I am selling – growing from about 600 domain names several years ago.

Every day, I spend some time reviewing auction lists, doing acquisition research, and placing bids on domain names. Depending on where I am and what I have planned for the day, this can be as quick as a half hour or possibly a couple of hours. I would say on average, I spend about an hour a day doing this – every single day. 7 hours total

I use ExpiredDomains.net on a daily basis to find domain names to bid on and purchase. There is no cost to use ExpiredDomains.net, so I make a conscious effort to click on their affiliate links. In fact, I noticed and reported a bug at GoDaddy Auctions because I do not receive bid confirmation emails when I bid after clicking their links, unlike when I directly bid on GoDaddy Auctions.

TonyNames on Twitter shared some tips to maximize your usage of ExpiredDomains.net. He started a thread in August of 2021 and continued it with some additional tips this morning. I think his tips are worth highlighting. You can see his original tweet below and click the “Read the full conversation on Twitter” link to see the entire thread:

A couple of years ago, my longtime accountant retired and my wife and I hired a new accountant. One of the things she asked me was to get a full list of my domain name inventory with acquisition costs and date of acquisition. I had never tracked my inventory on a master inventory list before, and I have found it to be helpful.

The first thing I did was go into the control panels of the various registrars I use – GoDaddy, NameBright, Network Solutions, and Enom (at the time). I used their tools to get text lists of my domain names. I then pasted them in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and spent quite a bit of time searching my email for the acquisition costs and date of acquisition. I now keep this Excel list updated as I buy, sell, and expire domain names in my portfolio.

Automattic, the company that operates the WordPress platform, also operates the .Blog domain name extension. According to nTLDStats.com, there are just over 200,000 .Blog domain names registered. I want to share a domain name-related job listed posted by Automattic that I saw on LinkedIn this morning. Automattic is looking to hire a Premium Portfolio Manager for its .Blog extension.

Here’s a brief description of the job opportunity extracted from the help wanted post: