Andrew Rosener was the guest on the most recent Tim Ferriss Show podcast. The podcast is more than two and a half hours, and it is worth a listen in its entirety.
NEW podcast episode is up!
Andrew Rosener — The Path from Scallop Kingpin to Selling 8-Figure Domains, Achieving Financial Freedom, and How to Live a Contrarian Life
cc: @andrewrosener
Please enjoy! 🙌https://t.co/fENjA5gqrC
— Tim Ferriss (@tferriss) December 20, 2023
I think one of Lonnie Borck’s proudest domain investing moments was acquiring the Jewish.com domain name. Lonnie was proud to be the owner of such an important and meaningful domain name. Lonnie subsequently closed a deal with attorney Ari Goldberger, who is now the owner of this domain name.
Jewish.com is now being used in an effort to raise money to purchase ambulances for United Hatzalah, a Jewish volunteer emergency medical service organization. Lonnie was an EMT and leader in the Baltimore, Maryland chapter of Hatzalah. According to Jewish.com, the first ambulance purchased with donated funds will be donated in memory of Lonnie.
At least a couple of times a year, I am either emailed by someone who thinks GoDaddy is front running their attempted domain name registrations or I am sent a link to this type of accusation on social media. While front running was an issue many years ago, I am pretty confident it doesn’t happen any longer at any sort of scale, particularly at large domain registrars like GoDaddy. There are too many reasons why registrar front running doesn’t make sense.
I want to highlight something I just experienced that could easily look like front running to someone without domain name industry knowledge. It is definitely not front running, but it could appear that way to someone who just wants to buy a single domain name at GoDaddy.
Over the weekend, I noticed the Micro.CO domain name was forwarding to Micro.Company. In the normal course of web browsing, this wouldn’t be surprising, but given the context, it surprised me. GoDaddy Auctions had announced that Micro.CO was included in its NameFind private auctions closing on December 15th:
Looks like https://t.co/ePiQKJvhDN was acquired by @microdotcompany. Interesting that the auction at @godaddyauctions ended yesterday and they're already forwarding the domain name. The name I won (https://t.co/4emG3LaPTX) hasn't been provisioned to me yet. https://t.co/FV8TYTi0iZ
— Elliot Silver (@DInvesting) December 16, 2023
How the heck did the winning bidder manage to secure the domain name in such a short period of time? It generally takes many days for GoDaddy to provision domain names won via GoDaddy Auctions. In addition, I had won a domain name on December 15th, and it was not delivered to my GoDaddy account.
Most people who buy and sell domain names as investments do so to supplement their main source of income. Domain investing can be a lucrative side hustle. With its steep learning curve, domain investing can also become a costly hobby. Earning a full-time living as a domain investor is a challenge with a high rate of failure.
Domain investing has been my full-time profession since 2008. I think this business has gotten more difficult since I started out, but I have forward momentum – with a domain portfolio, knowledge, and capital. This has enabled my business to continue to grow despite the challenges.
For those of you who are interested in pursuing a full time profession in domain investing, I want to lay out some of the math involved in making that happen.
If you have .XYZ or .IO domain names listed for sale on Afternic, you probably received emails with the subject: “Opt-in to the Afternic Premium Network.” Last night, I received 31 of these emails from Afternic because I own 31 .XYZ domain names that are listed for sale on Afternic. In addition, I received several corresponding “Action required: Authorize your domain listings.” emails from GoDaddy. Michael Cyger mentioned this last night on Twitter.
The reason for these emails is that .XYZ and .IO domain names joined the Afternic Fast Transfer network. This was announced last week by Afternic:
