Hand registering 7,500 domains - DNW Podcast

[Music] Welcome to the Domain Name Wire podcast. I'm your host Andrew Olamin, and this is episode number 579. There is a lot of appeal for domain investors to hand register domain names. After all, they're cheap and you don't have to participate in auctions. The challenge, of course, is that it's hard to find good domains that are available for registration. You've heard the saying, "All the good domains are taken." That's not exactly true, though. And on today's show, you're going to hear from an experienced domain investor who hand-registered 7,500 domains last year. Josh's reason will walk through the exact method he used to discover and analyze the domain names that he registered. It was a lot of work, but the process is repeatable. In fact, after recording this show, I used the exact process to hand register 100 domain names. I've got it throughout a warning here, though, while Josh has already turned a profit on his hand registrations, I don't recommend that new investors try this approach. I know it's tempting, after all, it's great to be able to go out there and register a domain for $10 rather than paying 50, 100 or more in auctions, but you really need to understand what types of domains sell before trying to hand register domains. Now, a word from our sponsor. Our sponsor this week is Spaceship, where you can build and manage your entire digital world. Transfer your domains to Spaceship to benefit from their always-low prices every year. Go to Spaceship.promo to see how much you could save compared to your current provider by using their comparison chart. Your domain renews for a year when you initiate a transfer, of course, and there are often further discounts when you switch. Once you're in, Spaceships, domain tools make it easy to manage renewals and connect to other products like their seller hub, domain security, and hosting. Transfer your domains to Spaceship today. Go to Spaceship.promo. Again, that's Spaceship.promo. Let's run through some news in the domain business from the past week. First up, IONOS, the company that owns Internet X and Ceto, reported 2025 earnings last week. The company showed an increase in revenue from the prior year. Now, its financials though don't include Ceto's performance. IONOS is in the process of selling that business unit, so it's been able to pull it out of its P&L. For its part, while Q4 was tough for Ceto after AdSense for domains ended, it wasn't as bad as I would have expected. IONOS hopes to complete the sale of Ceto by the end of Q3 this year. Team Internet Group also reported 2025 earnings last week, at least at a high level, gross revenue declined by 40%, net revenues slid 27%, and the company's adjusted EBITDA measure fell 54%. This is pretty much all thanks to Google ending its AdSense for domains program. Team Internet is trying to sell its domain registration and registry business, and it still thinks it will fetch more than the company's current market cap of 119 pounds sterling, even though the domain registration business is just part of the overall business. One other piece of news here, the Cosmetics giant L'Oreal, won a monster UDRP case last week, resulting in the transfer of 705 domain names. All of the domain names are related to jobs at L'Oreal, and they were likely registered for an employment scam. There's more news at domainnamewire.com, including a list of 29 domain registrars that send their domains to GoDaddyWinNakes. Buy her. Check all that out and more. Just head on over to dnw.com. Now, let's chat with Josh Reason. [Music] My guess this week is Domain Investor Josh Reason. Josh, welcome to the show. Hi, Andrew. Thanks for having me again. Josh at the Internet Commerce Association meeting back in January in Las Vegas. You had a guru table where you were talking about something that you shared on X, on social media before. You went on a hand registration binge last year. I want to dig more into this to understand your process, some of your early results, kind of your thinking around it. First things first, when did you do this? I started doing it last year. The full cycle hasn't come around yet. I probably started right at the end of March, beginning of April. I started hand registering, and I did it all the way throughout the year, probably up until November. Okay. You know, curious, you know, you have a lot of high quality names. You saw a lot of great names. Why did you decide to drastically expand your portfolio through hand registration? There's a few things I won't lie. I do love making sales. So the more frequently I can make sales, it just helps with that kind of like adrenaline rush that usdomainers love to get, especially those afternicky emails when they come through in the middle of the night and you didn't have to do any work. A lot of the time that happens more often with kind of like the lower value names and you need to have a lot of names to get frequent sales. So I've always liked the idea of that. The other thing is that last year in particular, I felt like there were a lot of.com promotions for hand registrations from Unstoppable, from DinerDot, and from I think name bright, I had a pretty long promotion as well. And all of these promotions were, you know, ranging from five to seven dollars per.com. Pretty low price. Historically low, I would say, for the last three or four years at least. And yeah, I mean, I'm a better investor today than I was. You typically hand registered domain names. I would say. You're first starting out. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So I felt like I'd learned quite a lot about like what makes a good name. So I just really wanted to kind of explore what was available from like in the hand registration market from someone that, you know, has now had experience knows what sells and it just wanted to see what I could come up with really. Sure. Okay. So you did this from about March to November of last year. And how many domains overall did you hand register? Yeah. So I typically hand register multiple different TLDs. But for this particular experiment, just.com, I hand registered about 7500 names. That was across a few thousand from DinerDot, a few thousand from Unstoppable. And I did a few thousand at name bright as well. So how much total then did you spend on those names? I spent about 45,000, 45,000. And you said you started in March. So that means we're recording this in early March. You're coming up to renewal time, which of course, renewal prices are higher than those first year promos. You're probably looking at close to $11 per renewal. So to renew all these would be more like what, 70, 80,000 plus. So what are you thinking here? Do you think you'll renew them and how are you deciding? Yeah. So I mean, when I was registering them, I registered them with the notion that I would plan to renew them all. Because I have a theory that I think is a fairly reasonable theory that the longer that you hold the name, like, especially in a hand registration, the better chance you have it selling it. Just because the name matures, it's been off the market. And I think that it's somewhat difficult to get a complete tell on the quality of your portfolio in just one year. Having said that, I will do some due diligence and go through each name. I may drop a few that maybe I just figured are not as good as the rest, but in general, I'm going to renew them all. Yeah. So let's go back and go through kind of the process you went through when you were choosing which domains to hand register. I assume you started with some keywords, right? To start your analysis. So walk me through that. Yeah. So I mean, I use expired domains to look at drop lists. And there are multiple ways to do it, but in terms of keywords. So like a long time ago, Mike Syger actually sent me a list of all the top SLDs, if you like, all the top brands based on like. Which ones are most registered as a second level domain? Yeah, most registered plus also with the most amount of trademarks. Well, so you can use a list like that and cross check with and kind of like use that to nail down what kind of keywords you want to use. But in my particular case, I actually took drop lists over like the last five years or so, but I tried to mainly focus on names that dropped in the last 365 days. And I took those lists and basically narrowed them down through keywords. So I would essentially filter them based on the suffix rather than the prefix. So I'm generally looking for two words, two word dot coms. And if I choose to do a suffix like, let's say partners. So it's keyword partners dot com. I would download a list with all of the keyword partners dot com domains that dropped in the last 365 days or so. And then remove the word partners from the list so that then I've only got the first word that was in the list. And then I would run analysis on the on that first word and sort those words from best to worse. And then from there we did a do a few words. few more checks to determine which ones are the best. But I can go into a little bit more detail on what kind of checks I'm doing as well. Yeah, yeah, I want to ask you about that, but just to back up, so for those that are familiar with the expired domains.net, most people use it to find domains that are dropping now, but you can also look at ones that have dropped in the past whatever timeframe you want. I guess the neat thing about that is you know it's been registered before, so it's kind of a signal that there's potentially some value there. So then you said, and this is really clever. So you got rid of the suffix when you're analyzing the words, and you talked about running some, I guess, individual analysis on each of them, but how did you kind of rank? I mean, that had to have been a lot of key words to the left of the suffix, right? How did you, did you use automated methods for that? Yeah. Yeah. So the first thing that I do in order to narrow that down, because like you said, it's in thousands of words is dot DB. So I have the top tier account on dot DB, and I take those list of 10,000 words, put them into dot DB, and then dot DB will rank them based on number of TLDs taken for that keyword. So then I can, I can straight away say, you know, okay, you know, the top keyword and the list is taken in 300 plus TLDs or whatever that's go from there and see which ones kind of like look to be the best. And we're talking about domains that we think are available, because expired domains kind of checks, not instantaneously, but so you weren't wasting your time looking at something partners dot com where the something is really popular, but it was already taken as a register. Yeah, but it's already taken. Exactly. I already know that every single one of these is available, because I pulled it from a list that shows that it's available. Yeah. And so when you're on expired domains and you do that is so so basically you're putting in your time frame and then it pulled up and then you searched by that suffix and then you just downloaded that entire list and then struck the suffix out of it. And then struck the suffix out of it. Exactly. Got it. That's exactly right. Yeah. And then what I would do and this is kind of like the next layer of things to really try to kind of like narrow things down is what I would then do is I would add other popular suffixes onto those keywords. So like ventures, for example, because we can say ventures and partners somewhat similar. So if I have galaxy partners dot com, I would expect galaxy ventures dot com to also be registered. So what I would then do is I would add ventures onto that list of available, let's call them prefixes. Those available prefixes that are accompanying partners and then adventures and then run them through to check if they're taken in ventures. And the ones that are taken in ventures, right? Again, that's a good signal because it means that if galaxy ventures dot com is taken, then galaxy partners dot com is probably a good name. Okay. Clever. So you're looking for them to be taken in other extensions. And so let's say you see that one. Let's use galaxy as an example. You're like, oh, great. It's taken in ventures. Did you just go ahead and register it? Or are you doing more beyond that? I'm doing most of it from there is manual checks. So from there, because like stuff like galaxy is never going to be sure. Yeah. Just using that as an example here. Yeah. Right. So then normally like more obscure keywords that you and I maybe aren't using in everyday terms, but are actually really popular in branding. So I don't know the Latin words and Greek words that we're not really thinking about. Or just sometimes words that you don't expect to be like great brands, but actually have a lot of usage. So from there, I'm looking because, you know, TLD data is saying one thing and then the fact that maybe, and I'm doing multiple checks. So instead of I mean, you're probably doing ventures and finance and a bunch of other things. And those data points are saying, okay, this is a good keyword. So then I'll go and check like LinkedIn crunch base and just looking to see how much usage there is for that keyword. And if there's decent usage, I'll then add it to the list of the names that I'm going to register. Are you saying for all 7,500, you were checking LinkedIn, you were checking or making sure someone was using it? Not all some of them are obvious. Some of them are like, okay, yeah, this is a good one. But for a lot of them, for a lot of them, I am checking yet. I mean, quick checks like I've gone LinkedIn, going crunch base, it's like a 30 seconds, just a quick spot check. Like, okay, there are 150 results here or 250 results here. But you're searching, what do you, sir? If you go to LinkedIn, let's just use Galaxy Ventures. Are you just typing that in without quotes and seeing how much stuff comes back? Just Galaxy, yeah, just typing in Galaxy. Got it. Got it. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, this, so first of all, this sounds like a lot of work. I mean, obviously, you structured it, you know, so there'd be less. You had a smart approach that you were starting with. You kind of laid out a plan went through it. But even at that point, you know, I know when I hand register domains, I'm not doing nearly as many checks. And, you know, you think about it long term, the more analysis you do, even if you're paying just five bucks the first year, the next year, you know, you're thinking about holding these for multiple years. This becomes a 30, 40, 50, $60 expense. It's a smart approach to take. But, you know, help me understand, obviously, we know you did this over about six, seven months. How much time are you spending on this? Were you breaking it up each day? Were you starting with one keyword moving on to the next? Yeah, that's a good point. I definitely went in in spurts. So, you know, one week I might register a couple thousand and then not do anything for three weeks. And yeah, it each day that I would do like a large quantity of registrations, it would take quite a long time. I will say that when one day unstoppable did like a four dollar promotion. Yeah. And on that particular day, I did less checks. It was just more like, okay, at four dollars a pop, I'm like not do as many cross checks on the data and just take more of a flyer on them. So, there was some, and I can tell you right now that I've looked back on some of those names and I'll probably drop a few of them. Yeah, I think, you know, that's the idea that then the next year when you have to pay 11 bucks, then you're going to pay more attention there. It is kind of funny how the difference between 10 bucks and five bucks. Like, I even want to go down stubble. So, I'm sort of like, yeah, okay, I'll just try it. Why not? Yeah. And by the time it's a huge difference, right? It makes a huge difference because at the end of the day, it's double. And the margins and the margins on these on these hand registrations are not that good. I mean, I've done pretty well, but if my cost was double what it was, I wouldn't be in like the profit at this moment in time. I'd probably be close to break even. By the time people listen to this episode, unstoppable domains has increased its prices. You know, they went from 5 to 5.99. Now, it's 7.99 by the time people listen to this. So, it makes it harder. Of course, there will be some registrars offering discounts throughout the year that might be a little bit cheaper. But I think we were kind of in an unique moment in time with unstoppable and that they're venture backed. They're trying to grow the registrar and they were willing to take a loss on domains to get new customers. But that said, even if there weren't super discounts, there's clearly some opportunity to do this. Why don't we obviously, there are fewer names available in these suffixes than before you did this. What were some of the specific ones that you went after? Yeah, yeah, we can absolutely talk about that. Intelligence.com was a really big one. For me, I was one of the first ones to really start mining that. I was fairly early on like AI.com as well. But when those kind of just got scooped up really quickly and started to sell, I was looking for ways to stay in that AI theme and intelligence, although long felt like we were in such a big hype cycle when it comes to AI that it didn't feel like a big stretch. I also did Intel, I and TEL, which some people may say, "Oh, that's when they think of Intel, they think of the big corporation." For me, I think that when used as a suffix, it's okay, but I wouldn't want to have Intel as a prefix personally. But trademark perspective. From a trademark standpoint. Yeah, correct. But other ones, finance and financial were two big ones that I did. Trade.com, exchange.com, medical.com, healthcare.com, labs.com, lab.com. Yeah, there were a lot I can keep it protocol. I tested a little bit. There are some that I tested with lower amounts that I've had some success with security.com was another one. I also did the same thing but with prefix. So like, you get try. You get try. I mean, use and try were actually pretty good ones. I had some sales from those this year. Yeah, you want to get the gist. You talk about having some sales and you talk about how you're profitable here. You spend about 45,000 buying these domains, registering them for one year. How many of you sold and how much is that generated? So I've sold, I think when I messaged you the other day, it was 16 at 63,500 net, which is, I think that's around maybe around 75 gross, 75K gross. I have sold another one since then. So 17 and close to 70K in net revenue. So you're taking these hand registrations and you're selling them for about 5K a pop, is that kind of word in general where they are? Yeah, and what people have kind of commented in a discord that I mean that they're surprised at the price that I'm selling. I think a lot of people would price their hand registrations maybe a little lower than the kind of 3K range. Most of my hand registrations in the fields that I kind of told you about are priced in that $5,000 range mainly because I feel like I'm targeting industries that finance, maybe technology, shouldn't be as price sensitive in that 5K range. And so let's talk about some of the, some of these prefixes and suffixes that you've actually sold here since doing hand registrations. Yeah, absolutely. Intelligence.com, I've had a couple of sales. One of them was, one of them was for 15,000. So you took a hand registration and listed it for, well you sold it for 15K. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Can you share that one? Yes, I can. It was, it was clutch intelligence.com. Interesting. Okay. clutch intelligence.com. So that one for 15,000, I just sold an intel.com name the other day actually, Abacus, ABA, C-U-S, abacus, intel.com. That one was sold for just under 5,000. See if I can, I registered quite a few three letter labs.com names. Again, one of the reasons why I registered labs.com names was because I saw that AI companies were often using labs. So just the other day I sold ABX. Oh, no, that, that was a tech. I did tech as well. I sold flslabs.com for $4,000. Tech is another thing. I did a little of three letter tech.com names. So the other day I sold ABX tech.com for just under $5,000. And yeah, I mean like ABX, I went and it probably made the cut because, you know, it's taken in 150 TLDs, which is quite a lot. ABXs, yeah. Three for a three letter. If like a three letter prefix that is maybe taken in like less than 100, I probably wouldn't touch. Yeah, that's tricky because there are a lot of combinations there and a lot of people would see X and they'd scratch that because it's not, although now with exchange and that's sort of thing. So, so for those, did you spin up all versions of the three letters and then run those through to see which ones were? I can't. Everything I did is from DropLists. Okay. Everything had been dropped within the previous year. Not all from within the previous year, but most. Yeah. But all of them had been dropped at some point. It's just another, I talked to a few guys about this before. It's like, it's just another metric that I want to stick with because I selected on itself. It probably doesn't make a huge difference. But when you start stacking up all these various metrics together, I think it then substantially increases your chances of selling more names. It's one thing if it's a brand new kind of topic like AI was five years ago, if it hasn't been registered before. But I do the same thing. I go to domain tools and say, okay, when was this previously registered? I want to see a history there. So I'm not the first guy who's thought this domain might be or something. This also goes to show though that a lot of decent domains at least make it through the expiration cycle without someone snapping them up at DropCatch or something like that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think that there are an awful lot of names that slip through the cracks. Yeah, I really do. I think that a lot of names that people will catch with a discount back order. You could get just as good quality by hand registry. So having done this again, we're coming up for an in all time. So you think you'll analyze certain prefixes, suffixes more, what you're thinking on the approach to take care? So the suffix thing is definitely an important part of the experiment, no doubt. And I think I talked a little bit about this in the ICA. The suffix thing is important, is an important piece because I would choose suffixes to test based on usage out there already. And one of the things that I did was I used raising.fi. Right. Yeah, you mentioned it. To check what kind of name, what kind of domain trends and conventions have been popular. And some of them that I tried are kind of tests that I feel like might have been in their infancy a little bit, like exchange.com, trade.com, they're not massively used. So if I don't get sales in those, I'll definitely take another look and just decide if they're not really strong prefixes that go along with the suffix I made drops up. I mean, ballparking, you think you might drop like 20% of your names or I probably drop no more than 100. No, well, okay. So you're going to keep most of these here. So yeah. And then thinking, you know, so other than maybe some of those who are a little bit too much in their infancy, if you could go back in time, what else would you do different? Yeah, you know, good question. I think one thing that I would have done is bet more on the what I was more certain of being the winners. And this kind of goes for everything that I've done ever when it comes to investing. I will say, you know, I have to keep telling myself this is like when you have conviction on something, it's better to go hard on that as opposed to, you know, spread your chips around on and other areas that you're less certain of. So intelligence and prior to that, even AI.com, which I was registering, like I should have gone, I should have bought more of those because I knew it was a winner. And yeah, although I did buy a lot, I could have bought more. And how many, how many AI.coms did you buy? I think I bought about over time. I've only bought about 100 AI.coms, but I bought a thousand intelligence.coms. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. I go back. There's this one go daddy invoice I have for AI.com domains. And it was like a $200 invoice. I'm like, I've made $50,000 off this order. Now, that's the only time in my domain investing career that I've had something that, you know, actually worked like that. And had I been really smart. I would have been registering the dot AI domains instead of the AI.com. That's out. Take it still. Yeah. I mean, I bought two AI.com names last year in the aftermarket for a few thousand dollars each. I think $2,500 each. And they both sold within the year for $60,000 each. That's how crazy the AI, that's how crazy the AI boom is. It's just like instead of focusing on, you know, what's coming up next and what's this? It's like right the way right the way. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, I know Logan Fletz sold humanity AI.com last year for 70 came. Like, I wouldn't have even thought to price it for that. You know, so it's crazy. All these hand registrations that you bought, did you just point them to afternick landers? What did you do? Yeah, almost exclusively afternick landers. Did test out some spaceship landers for a little while and I've decided to move everything back to afternick exclusively. Not because spaceship was doing badly, I've actually had quite a lot of sales on spaceship even without their landers. But yeah, I've got afternick on autopilot. I don't want to mess with something that's working well. Right. Well, you have your own platform. Of course, dnx.com. I assume you use that for your kind of higher value names because you have to directly correspond with people there. I have about 100 names using dnx landers where I just want to interact with them directly. Well, I don't want to, but I know that I should. Yeah. Well, for those listening, tell them why they would want to sign up at dnx. Yeah. No, so dnx, we've got a number of things going on, to be honest. But our main tool that most people are using is our kind of aftermarket search. We have an ExploreDemains feature that brings in the inventory of GoDaddyCedo and Atom primarily and populates it all into one spot where you can filter and go and look for all those kind of names. But we have numerous other tools, bulk search tools, monitoring tools so that you can see when a domain is changing price or changing aim servers or that kind of thing, which I think has been pretty popular. We did just get our eye-countercreditation, so we're working on. Yeah. Thank you. I'm becoming a registrar pretty soon, which will integrate into our management platform side of things, which is what you are referencing in regards to the landing pages. You can manage your portfolio on there and create landers for free. So that's pretty cool. And you can manage your inquiries through there. Kind of a little bit similar to how a uniregistry used to do it. So message back and forth within the platform, the buyer can just respond to emails when they get them in it. Conic goes into your dashboard. So, it's cool. Awesome. Well, you've motivated me to do some more hand registrations. So you're from now either say, "Man, you sent me down a rabbit hole and I lost money." Or, "Thanks. Let me buy you a drink." So, but it is inspirational. But what I love about this is the process. You had a methodical process you went through. And it's a smart process. And I think there are several things here that people are probably missing out on when they go through this. Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show and talk about it, say. Yeah, no, absolutely. I hope I explained it. It's not always the easiest thing to explain over audio, but hopefully it was good. Yeah, no, it was great. I took lots of notes. and again, we're recording this a few days before unstoppable increases its prices, so I'm going to spend the next few days going down this rabbit hole. So, right. Nice. All right, my guess this week has been Josh Reeson. That's a wrap on this week's domain name wire podcast. You can find all previous episodes at dnw.com/podcast or on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening. [Music]