Dropping my One Premium Fee .XYZ

I currently own fewer than 30 .XYZ domain names. I acquired most of them via Afternic, Dan, or in auctions on Namecheap. With the exception of Embrace.xyz, I am pretty sure I paid less than $500/each for the domain names I bought.

One important aspect to my acquisition strategy was to acquire domain names that did not have a premium renewal fee. Not only do I not want to pay hundreds of dollars a year (or more) to renew a domain name, I did not want to have to explain the premium renewal fee to prospective buyers. I’ve always felt this was a deterrent.

Unfortunately, I screwed up and acquired one domain name with a premium renewal fee. I paid $255 to acquire the domain name via Dan.com but did not notice the premium renewal cost until I had already paid and received the auth code to transfer the domain name to GoDaddy. That inbound transfer cost me a little more than $200.

After receiving the domain name and putting it up for sale, I turned off auto-renew. The time for renewal has come, and the renewal cost is above $200. Instead of paying that fee, I am going to let the domain name expire and write it off.

I don’t mind paying $12+/- a year to renew most of these lottery ticket domain names. In fact, I am not planning on dropping any of the other .XYZ domain names I bought despite not selling any since my first and only sale.

I screwed up by not noticing the domain name I acquired was considered premium at the outset, but I am not going to continue to spend $200+/year to renew it.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

17 COMMENTS

  1. I emailed my developer to address the “Invalid security token.” issue when posting a comment. I am not sure what it means but comments were working fine yesterday evening but they are not working now. I confirmed this is an issue on an incognito browser. Unsure if I can even comment as an admin…

  2. Out of 1030 domains, I only own one with a renewal fee that has a premium renewal of $425. LA.City.
    While I was not aware at the time of acquisition, I totally understand the premium price, as it is a 2 letter domain that stands for Los Angeles in the .city registrar. While I could have backed out of the deal, I moved forward with it, and I am glad that I did, and if not sold by June 2024 renewal time, I will pay the renewal. While it was kind of an experiment for me to acquire a City name in the .city extension, I am pleased that out of my 1030 names at Dan, the monthly traffic is over 700 for this name, putting it into my top ten most visited names. I like the name and I believe it will find a good home.

  3. Have you considered letting Swetha sell it? She’s selling .xyz domains like kylin.xyz and taiko.xyz and bebop.xyz for $40k+ so I’m sure she can help you sell yours if its as good as those

    • @ Jeph
      Re: “Have you considered letting Swetha sell it?”
      You are joking, right? 🙂

      @BullS
      Re: “Is s/he …”
      “her/him”
      That’s funny! 🙂
      I coined the term “SwethGari”.
      It’s a mashup of Swetha and Negari 🙂 Feel free to use it.

  4. I dropped Myriad.xyz and Portable.xyz. I hand reg’d those for a few bucks, or less, each. Wish I would have kept them. Now someone has them listed at DAN.com for $179,998 and $49,888, respectively … not that it means anything. I had them listed at $8,888 each and never received a single inquiry/offer. I just think they are good .XYZ domain names.

  5. i had about 12 xyz domains
    good keywords in web3 and crypto
    zero inquiries on afternic, sedo, dan for 3 years
    i let them all drop
    my bad in not staying the course with mostly .com, 10% .AI, 5% .ORG and 5% .TV and .IO

  6. Long time domain investor here. My experience has been that only .com adds value, both to domain buyers and online visitors. Sure, maybe you can save a buck by going with some dumb-ass extension, but you’ll be sorry big time when you try to either sell or develop it. Not sure how to put this nicely, but I really think that they just simply suck.

  7. I dont see the point in xyz domains… I have proobably purchased upwards of 100 .ai domains. They are expensive, 279usd for a two year period from godaddy, but I dont see the ai hype going away anytime soon, so thats what Im betting on..

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