Should I Buy 50,000 .XYZ Domain Names?

As you have probably heard by now, Uniregistry is selling .XYZ registrations for $.01/each for the first year. I saw this tweet from Frank Schilling and it got me thinking:

I could buy 50,000 .XYZ domain names for just $500. I could make sure that auto-renew is off so I don’t accidentally pay full price next year to renew them. I could then list them on Uniregistry Market with $500 BIN prices and see if any of them sell. Even if just one of these domain names sells in the next year, I would break even. If more than one name sells, it would be a profitable endeavor.

Essentially, doing this would be a gamble. Although $500 isn’t much risk for me considering my enjoyment of blackjack, there are other risks and costs to consider:

If I were to try and register 50,000 domain names, it would take a considerable amount of time to put together a list of domain names to buy. It would also take time to do perform bulk searches, as I am not sure if Frank would allocate time from one of his team members to do the search for me.

Registering 50,000 domain names is bound to create legal risk. With a portfolio of 50,000 domain names, it is likely there will be some trademark issues. Even if all of the names are generic in nature, it is likely that some trademark owner will take umbrage with my ownership of a keyword brand name that their company owns. I highly doubt someone would file a cybersquatting lawsuit over a parked .XYZ domain name, but I could see someone filing a UDRP (even though the $500 BIN price is lower than the UDRP cost) just to prove a point and show others that they will protect their brand. Even if they don’t file a lawsuit or UDRP, there is the potential that someone could label my company a “cybersquatter” on social media or on their website.

I am still not sure whether or not I am going to register a whole swath of names. I don’t think the odds of selling are great if I only buy a handful. I imagine it would take a large purchase to make it worthwhile. I am still not sure if it’s worth the time and/or risk to do this, so I will likely be on the sidelines.

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
  1. It’s a good trade if all of it can be automated including searching against registered trademarks.
    As for being labeled a cybersquatter, getting a udrp or a lawsuit filed, that can happen for any name one owns, especially for higher priced names.
    The higher the purchase price for the name the greater the chance a company just pays for a udrp or lawsuit to get it.
    They only lose the cost of the udrp or suit.
    No penalties imposed against them for losing or negotiating in bad faith.
    Even worse, more than one can do it for a name and neither has to buy it if they lose.

    • That is true, but when I buy names in the aftermarket, I am doing a risk/reward calculation in my head. I look at a variety of factors on an individual domain name basis.

      If I were to register 50k .XYZ names, I could not do that on a domain-level basis.

      Also, a UDRP loss can be cited by future UDRP complainants as being a serial cybersquatter. It doesn’t necessarily mean you will lose, but it could give pause to the panelist.

    • You drop the name or give it to them
      If you scan for them all properly i don’t think it’s your intent to buy any with registered marks.
      For $500 it probably never gets to any of that, but I’m not an attorney and I’m not advocating doing it.
      For the sake on conversation since the post was created.
      The real questions are:
      What has sold in the .xyz space since inception?
      How many current .xyz names have all the other extensions taken vs none at all?
      Can it all of it be automated from the scanning for names based on one’s criteria, buying them & the listing of the names (both for sale pages and at auction)?
      At $500 it’s probably going to be someone or some entity experimenting with the extension before committing to anything larger.
      Way too many extensions have been created.
      Reminds me of the baseball card marketplace of the 90s.

  2. Instead of throwing $500 in the trash, just give it to charity. Your odds of a profit are way worse than a lottery ticket.

  3. I just used GoDaddy’s bulk search and llooked up the 2,000 most popular baby names in 2015 (according to the Social Security Administration) and only 11 names were available to hand register.

  4. Professional domainers like yourself would have the discipline to refrain from renewing any .xyz (except under rare circumstances). I would caution new domainers from trying it, however, because its human nature to “give it one more year” . . . etc . . . before you know it, you could dig yourself into a commitment to recoup reg fees by continuing to renew. . . vicious cycle. Cutting the cord is difficult particularly when you see some .xyz domains selling for $x,xxx.

    This promo is a Smart move on behalf of .xyz registry because they understand human nature. Other new TLD registries will track registrations, read blogs, review statistics, and then do the same basic thing. (.info did it in 2004 . . with free domains (I believe with a 25 domain name limit)

    IMHO, there are better investments to make with your $500.

    • @ Stephen Wilson
      You said there are better investments to make with $500, Please help. I have $700 and I want to make a better investment with it, give an idea if you don’t mind.
      Thanks

      • ” I would not trust Internet commenters (or bloggers!) for investment advice. ”
        Good advice Elliot, and we might add never trust Reg. owners advice, especially when your registering long shots that have a 1% chance of ever being resold in the secondary domain channel.

        Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Former Rockefeller IBEC Marketing Analyst/Strategist) (Licensed CBOE Commodity Hedge Strategist) (Domain Master ) https://www.UseBiz.com

  5. Long story short: While many cheer this promotion, in my view it’s a very bad decision that makes .XYZ an untrustworthy extension linked with spam, scam, fraud and other illegal activities. Maybe in long-term it is a good direction for registry to make a future profit, but there is nothing positive for online community.

  6. If nothing else this is a great promotion to get folks to try out Uniregistry, which is an excellent platform to purchase and manage domain names.

  7. There is a reason the names are for .01. .xyz domains are worthless. Save for Googles abc.xyz. The rest are bogus.

  8. You can buy a bunch of junk for a penny a piece but try to register a good word and it will cost you $2,750 plus a $2,750 renewal. Over the course of a 20 year business it will cost you $55,000. For that you just go out and buy a good dotcom for 20 grand and invest the other $35,000 into the business. No brainer.

    • Well said todd,

      Buy a good .COM and you also can use them and employ a superior marketing strategy using a subdomain that incorporates the new GTLDs characteristics.This strategy puts you in complete control and steers you away from the many inherent risks of non-Legacy extensions. This is what a really smart Marketing Strategist would choose.
      Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Former Rockefeller IBEC Marketing Analyst/Strategist) (Licensed CBOE Commodity Hedge Strategist) http://www.UseBiz.com

  9. The time it’d have taken you to find 50,000 good and available .xyz to register alone would make this unfeasible.

    On a different note, can we conclude that that 6-figure investment Braden Pollock made in .ws is underwater yet?

    • We live in a .com world. Anyone who strays into .CRAPOLLAS thinking he will make money, will quickly get clobbered with reality and come crying home to mama. In my opinion, this includes Pollock and anyone else who foolishly ventured into non-.com territory.

    • I haven’t tried to sell my .ws portfolio yet. Way too soon. Perhaps next year. I have made some pretty decent .com sales, however 🙂

  10. Think the chance of selling one for $500 in a year would be worse than 1 in 50,000. According to namebio there is about a dozen .xyz sales above $500 that weren’t registry reserved sales.

    For example stocks.xyz sold for $1000 last year. 50,000 of “whatever is left” isn’t likely to cover the $500 in a year in my view.

    In some ways this is reducing reg fees down to “real values” though it is probably still too high even at 1 cent.

    • I don’t know the odds.

      My thoughts were that there might be at least one company / person that wants a name badly enough to pay $500 for it.

      Despite the lack of sales to back this up, I would imagine there have to be a small # of people who hand reg’d names but would have paid $500 if necessary. To some mid to large size companies $10 and $500 are no different.

      It would have been a $500 gamble, as discussed here: https://www.domaininvesting.com/gambling-gtlds/

      Ultimately, after doing a test search in which I only found 11 out of 2,000 names available to register, the sheer effort to find 50,000 names I would buy would be too time consuming and I didn’t buy any.

  11. Remember all those 1st-year .XYZ registrations that occurred below $1? Suppose you’re the registry. How would you cover up all the inevitable drops? How would you maintain the mirage of continuous growth?

    Unlimited penny registrations are the perfect way to hide the failure of earlier registrations.

    When your primary selling point is being #1 by volume, you don’t want to lose the illusion. From the very beginning, with all the registrar stuffing at Network Solutions, the .XYZ registry has sold .XYZ domains mainly by pointing at all the registrations they’d already racked up.

    What else can they do but pad the numbers some more?

    • Hello Joseph.

      The new TLDs in our opinion lose all credibility as an effective Online Marketing Strategy. Why? SIMPLE = ( .COM Subdomain creation completely nullifies the whole new TLD reason for existence.)

      Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Former Rockefeller IBEC Marketing Analyst/Strategist) (Licensed CBOE Commodity Hedge Strategist) (Domain Master ) https://www.UseBiz.com

  12. Unlimited penny registrations are the perfect way to hide the failure of earlier registrations.

    /////////////////

    Don’t know if this is the perfect way Joseph, because it is expensive for the registry to sell for less than the Icann fee, then again it may well be cheaper than the Netsol giveaway.

    I wonder also what Centralnic are charging them for these registrations.

    • Good point. Wondering who will pay 50,000 x $0.18 = $9,000.00 in ICANN fees? .XYZ registry? Frank?

      As to legal issues, one can use proxies and hedge the risk. But coming up with 50,000 good [.xyz] names to register, this is quite of a time burden indeed.

    • Yes, that was the biggest setback. If I couldn’t even find a dozen names out of 2,000 first mames, I would have been too tedious to find any large enough quantity. I threw in the towel and didn’t buy any.

    • I think for this to even be considered by someone it would all have to be automated. The broker or registrar needs to have a package of names and say we can put up all the for sale & auction pages up for you.

  13. As a domain and Bitcoin investor, I’ll suggest: invest in Bitcoin. Buy one full Bitcoin for $530 and keep it for a few years: no renewal fees and it will be worth much more by then. Until last September/October people had been buying it for $230-$240 but price has been slowly increasing up to today’s rate and it’s expected to grow even more in light of the upcoming halving in July.

    • Hello Joe,

      Bitcoin is an even worse investment than new TLDs. Bitcoin is a classic dark pool of trader mentality investors. This phenomenon called Bitcoin has all the characteristics of a pump and dump Stock Story Scam in sheeps clothing. Our advice steer clear of any computer generated Fiat money.

      Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Former Rockefeller IBEC Marketing Analyst/Strategist) (Licensed CBOE Commodity Hedge Strategist) (Domain Master ) https://www.UseBiz.com

    • Yes digital Fiat money will eventually be adopted by banks but NOT Bitcoin. Anyone buying useless tokens that are backed by a Digital pool of money with varying values will wish they had their heads examined before they committed to such a Bad Investment. Good luck

      Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Former Rockefeller IBEC Marketing Analyst/Strategist) (Licensed CBOE Commodity Hedge Strategist) (Domain Master ) https://www.UseBiz.com

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