Imagine you run a startup company with a generic sounding name. Because you’re a startup with little funding, you’ve decided to save money and use a low value domain name. Perhaps you’ve hand registered a new gTLD domain name or you grabbed something like GetBrand.com or ItsBrand.com instead of Brand.com. You share some news and a major publication writes about your company but doesn’t include a link to your website. Good luck being found.

That’s sort of what happened to a company called WellSaid, which was written about today in TechCrunch. Technically, the company is called WellSaid Labs, but the title of the article mentions WellSaid, and the company is known as WellSaid. In fact, if you look at the company’s website, it refers to itself as WellSaid rather than WellSaid Labs. In the TechCrunch article, there was not a single link to the company’s website. This is not unusual. Many industry and mainstream publications write about a company without a link to its website.

Alan Dunn is a long-time domain investor and domain broker, and I trust his insights when it comes to the business of domain names. Take a look at Alan’s Twitter feed, and you will see he has become active in the NFT space. I have learned more about NFT projects from reading Alan’s Twitter feed than anywhere else.

Over the holiday weekend, Alan posted a Twitter thread explaining why his focus has shifted from domain names to NFTs for personal investments. Quite a few other domain investors I know have shifted some level of focus to NFTs, so I think seeing this perspective helps me understand what’s up:

Hiren Patel and Andrew Allemann inspired me to write this today. Some top reasons why I shifted some energy to the #NFT space. I still love domain names, still acquire/sell a bunch, but for personal investments, my focus has shifted tremendously to the digital art space. Why?

— Alan Dunn 🍌🛸 🇨🇦 (@alangdunn) July 3, 2021

Professional sports teams in the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL own some great domain names. I have tracked the domain names owned by teams in the major professional US sports leagues. The list doesn’t change very often, although there are quite a few domain names that are for sale (such as Bruins.com).

In looking at the domain names owned by professional sports teams, a handful stand out to me as exceptional domain names that could be used for more than just the sports teams. I thought I would post a poll to see what you guys think is the most valuable domain name owned by a professional sports team, not counting its value to the team.

For the poll below, I chose what I think are the top 5 most valuable domain names and included an “other” category for those who think something else is more valuable. If you choose other, feel free to share which name you think is most valuable.

A little while ago, I shared a bit of information about my domain portfolio sell through rate, and I want to add some commentary here. So far this year, I have sold a little more than 3.6% of the domain names in my portfolio. I have fewer than 2,000 domain names in my portfolio. One other fact is that I have acquired almost 3 times the number of domain names as I have sold.

So far this year, I have sold a little more than 3.6% of my portfolio (< 2,000 names). It’s a mix of inbound inquiries, DAN / Afternic offers and BIN purchases, and some highly targeted outbound email efforts.

I have bought nearly 3x the number of domain names as I have sold.

— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) June 16, 2021

Domain industry veteran Dan Cera posted his thoughts on the two biggest mistakes he believes a domain investor can make. One is related to buying domain names and the other is related to selling domain names. I like and respect Dan, but I think there is an even bigger mistake that investors can make.

Here’s what Dan wrote on Twitter yesterday:

Dan’s #domainname tip of the day:

Purchasing non dot com #domainnames is the single biggest mistake you can make as an investor (buyer) of Internet #domainnames

AND

Pricing your #domainnames is the single biggest mistake you can make as a vendor (seller) of yer #domain names

— DomainTrader (@DanCera) June 9, 2021

“We are pleased to inform you that the potential buyer for [redacted].com has accepted your offer of 24500 USD.”

“Congratulations, [redacted].com has sold for $1600!”

“Congratulations, you and [redacted] reached an agreement!”

I love receiving emails with the above messaging. They are from different domain name sales platforms notifying me that a buyer has agreed to purchase one of my domain names. The only issue is that these deals have either already fallen through or I expect that they are going to fall through.