Bad names are easy to spot. So are great ones.
The bad names are the ones that never should have been registered. You know them when renewal season arrives and your stomach does that thing. The great ones practically explain themselves. You know why you own them. You know who wants them. You know what to charge.
Most portfolios are not built on either of those.
They are built in the middle. And that is where things get complicated.
I call it the middle-class domain problem. These are not junk names. They are decent. Respectable. Usable. A two-word .com with a sensible meaning. A brandable that sounds polished enough. A keyword name in a real industry, but not the term anyone actually builds a company around. The reaction they get is usually something like, "that's solid." And it is. The problem is that solid is not what the market pays for.
The domain market does not reward names for being decent. It rewards names for being clearly desirable.
A truly weak name is almost a gift. It forces a decision. You look at it, feel embarrassed, and let it go. A truly strong name gives you clarity. You know the buyer, you know the price range, you know why it matters. Middle-class names do neither. They are just good enough to defend and just weak enough to disappoint. And because of that, they survive. Not because they are winning. Because they have not lost badly enough to force an honest conversation.
That honest conversation is the part most of us keep postponing.
I paid $5,000 for plasmatv.com early in my career. And I want to be clear, that was not a stupid buy at the time. Although I was not an electronics industry expert, Plasma TVs were a real industry. Real search volume. Real commercial logic behind it. Nobody was going to look at that purchase and call it reckless. It made sense on paper, which is exactly the problem.
It was not a bad domain. It was a good domain tied to a category that stopped mattering. That is what makes these names dangerous. The technology moved, the name went with it, and I was left holding something I could not sell but also could not bring myself to call a mistake. It was too defensible for that. Too respectable. Just completely stuck.
That is what middle-class domains do to you. They give you just enough logic to keep paying for them.
Early on, you think the game is about avoiding obvious mistakes. Later, you realize the bigger challenge is avoiding acceptable mediocrity. The names that quietly cost you the most over time are rarely the embarrassing ones. They are the respectable ones that never become important enough to matter to anyone but you.
And they pile up. Because it is much easier to build a large portfolio of almosts than a focused portfolio of convictions. I know which one I have been guilty of building, and it is not always the one I would brag about.
What makes this hard to untangle is that middle-class domains never feel like a problem while you are holding them. Each one has a story. Each one has some logic. Someone could want this. That is usually true. But could and will are doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, and most of these names fall apart somewhere in between.
A domain does not need to be bad to be a problem. It just needs to be stuck. Too defensible to drop, not desirable enough to move.
At least the truly bad names are honest about what they are.
The middle-class ones make you work for that honesty. And by the time you get there, you have usually already paid for it a few more times than you needed to.
The bad names are the ones that never should have been registered. You know them when renewal season arrives and your stomach does that thing. The great ones practically explain themselves. You know why you own them. You know who wants them. You know what to charge.
Most portfolios are not built on either of those.
They are built in the middle. And that is where things get complicated.
I call it the middle-class domain problem. These are not junk names. They are decent. Respectable. Usable. A two-word .com with a sensible meaning. A brandable that sounds polished enough. A keyword name in a real industry, but not the term anyone actually builds a company around. The reaction they get is usually something like, "that's solid." And it is. The problem is that solid is not what the market pays for.
The domain market does not reward names for being decent. It rewards names for being clearly desirable.
A truly weak name is almost a gift. It forces a decision. You look at it, feel embarrassed, and let it go. A truly strong name gives you clarity. You know the buyer, you know the price range, you know why it matters. Middle-class names do neither. They are just good enough to defend and just weak enough to disappoint. And because of that, they survive. Not because they are winning. Because they have not lost badly enough to force an honest conversation.
That honest conversation is the part most of us keep postponing.
I paid $5,000 for plasmatv.com early in my career. And I want to be clear, that was not a stupid buy at the time. Although I was not an electronics industry expert, Plasma TVs were a real industry. Real search volume. Real commercial logic behind it. Nobody was going to look at that purchase and call it reckless. It made sense on paper, which is exactly the problem.
It was not a bad domain. It was a good domain tied to a category that stopped mattering. That is what makes these names dangerous. The technology moved, the name went with it, and I was left holding something I could not sell but also could not bring myself to call a mistake. It was too defensible for that. Too respectable. Just completely stuck.
That is what middle-class domains do to you. They give you just enough logic to keep paying for them.
Early on, you think the game is about avoiding obvious mistakes. Later, you realize the bigger challenge is avoiding acceptable mediocrity. The names that quietly cost you the most over time are rarely the embarrassing ones. They are the respectable ones that never become important enough to matter to anyone but you.
And they pile up. Because it is much easier to build a large portfolio of almosts than a focused portfolio of convictions. I know which one I have been guilty of building, and it is not always the one I would brag about.
What makes this hard to untangle is that middle-class domains never feel like a problem while you are holding them. Each one has a story. Each one has some logic. Someone could want this. That is usually true. But could and will are doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, and most of these names fall apart somewhere in between.
A domain does not need to be bad to be a problem. It just needs to be stuck. Too defensible to drop, not desirable enough to move.
At least the truly bad names are honest about what they are.
The middle-class ones make you work for that honesty. And by the time you get there, you have usually already paid for it a few more times than you needed to.
they just don't have that large degree to push rush them through the door
