Domain Count is an Important Metric

I have been using DomainLeads.com on a regular basis since it was introduced last year. I use the tool to see how many domain names are registered and developed for specific keywords. I find it to be helpful when buying and pricing my domain names.

I think the primary focus of the tool is on the TLDs developed figure. If I am looking to buy a domain name and see there are a dozen or more websites developed in different extensions with that keyword, it is probably a desireable domain name. Not only is there a good chance one of those other websites will benefit from upgrading to the matching .com, but there is probably a good chance a startup or other business would benefit from buying the .com for a startup or rebrand. This is probably obvious.

The Domain Count is also an important number to look at. There is a bit of nuance to this metric, which is essential for an investor to understand.

Yesterday, I sold a BIN domain name for $997. In looking at the Domain Count retrospectively, I realized I probably underpriced this 2020 acquisition even though it hadn’t received much interest since I acquired it (and an outbound marketing effort in 2021 failed to net any results).

At first glance, the metrics don’t look all that special. There were no other TLDs registered for this two word phrase. Obviously, that means there were no other TLDs developed either. However, the Domain Count for this domain name was 23, meaning there were additional derivations of this phrase registered. For instance, there were domain names registered with “The” and “My” appended before the keyword. There were also local terms appended as well. Several of these derivations were developed.

In essence, people and businesses weren’t buying the matching term in other extensions. They were buying longer tail domain names with the keyword.

My year is off to a pretty strong start from an inventory turnover perspective. A week ago, I began raising some of the prices for my $988-$999 domain names, the lowest priced names in my portfolio. I used the bulk tool at DomainLeads.com to quickly identify the names that had the most TLDs developed and the most TLDs registered. The bulk search functionality doesn’t show the total Domain Count for each domain name, and I failed to recognize this at the time. My oversight may have cost me a bit of money, but I am going to go back and broaden my searching to individual names in the hopes of avoiding this again.