Throughout the last several years, the size of my portfolio has ballooned. For many years, I kept somewhere in the ballpark of 400 – 500 domain names in my portfolio. It has now grown to more than 2,000 domain names and counting.
With a larger portfolio, I pay more attention to domain name renewals. When I seek out domain names, there are many things I observe to try and buy commercially viable assets. I look at things like the number of businesses with that could upgrade to this domain name, the size and growth of the industry related to the domain name, the generic nature of the domain name, how the domain name sounds to me, and quite a few other factors that have become second nature to me.
All of these different factors are signals about the viability of a domain name.
When it comes time to renew domain names, I also look at these signals. I pay closer attention to the ‘what was I thinking’ domain names, but I try to pay attention to every domain name each year.
Sometimes these signals change from the time I bought a domain name until the next time I think about whether or not to renew it. Perhaps some of the companies that existed have folded – or perhaps were already dead when I bought the domain name. When looking at domain names in my portfolio, I will often ask myself if I would pay $11 to acquire that domain name today if it was available.
When the domain name is coming up for renewal, I will have had the benefit of time owning the domain name to understand if there is any traffic, possibly revenue, and importantly, inquiries.
All of these factors combined help me determine if I want to renew the domain name for another year or let it expire and write it off. These days, I am finding myself letting many more domain names expire than I ever did before. It’s a natural repercussion of growing my portfolio to the size it has become.
Elliot is the rare small portfolio Domainer with many years of experience.
A few years ago, Domain social media was over run with attention seeking portfolio size signalers.
If you didn’t have a 5K+ portfolio, were you really a Domainer?
I suspect many of those types lost the long game because they disappeared.
I find it harder than ever to build a quality dotcom portfolio over 300 with current wholesale prices.
There seems to be less end-user demand the last 2-3 years, so caution is needed.
But I hope to reach 500 by 2028.
Most of the product type domains will lose significant value in the coming years because of AI helping find best price and then even taking action to buy products you will need. Unless you always have the best/minimum price for products on your commercial website, you wont make much sales. I see prices anking for product oriented names.
Service names such as insurance, mortgage, plumbing, etc will be ok because you can still differentiate your site based on price and “service” you provide.
Media, News, Video, TV, etc domain will see significant rise in value because of AI making it easier to automate running those site fully or partially. Additionally, people are divided based on political, religious, geographical, community, etc affiliations therefore those domains will retain their value. As AI automates more media/news/TV/Video sites, then value will just keeps going up imo.
Casino/SocialCasinio/SocialBetting/betting names will also keep going up because of AI impact on development of such names.