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opinion Why I registered 20,000 .xyz domain names.

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Darryl Lopes

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I thought I was smart, it was like an aha moment, like when that guy bought 12,150 cups of chocolate pudding and earned 1.25 Million Air Miles. This was back in June 2016 and .xyz domain name extension was having a sale at Uniregistry and every .xyz domain name that was available to register would cost $0.01, one penny. I spent the next two nights scanning and compiling lists of domain names that I could add to my cart, at that time, the site could roughly only handle about roughly 500 registration per session, so on it went adding domain names 500 at a time to my account. Most of the domain names I registered, I would say 80% of them were just purely number combinations, during that time such as 0000011.xyz and 0000012.xyz, also I registered thousands of high-value keywords in the car, insurance, legal, addiction, mortgage and real estate industries. The Chinese domain market was hot for number domain names and 4-letter .com domain names at that time. I also thought it was pretty cool to see in the next couple days that I had over 20,000 domain names in my account. With great power comes great responsibility, I must have quoted those lines quite a few times to myself, I mean in general, when you have that many names, surely some sort of traffic would come along, via type-ins or bots, there was one way to test it out. I asked my friend Andre who had a blog and small online store selling art, pictures of guitars as clocks if I could test and send traffic to him as he had Google analytics. The next day he told me to stop redirecting my names because his service provider was going to charge him more for the influx of traffic. So it is true, it works. With great power comes great responsibility.

I set the names back to their default name servers and did a bulk edit where I priced every name for sale at $300 USD each. I was going to be rich! I got maybe two enquiries in the coming months and put it at the back of my mind and carried on the day to day work. The one enquiry was someone confused and the other one was a real person, they wanted a domain name I had registered for $0.01. The name was somnambulist.xyz, I don't even remember the name or registering it. Turns out the definition of somnambulant. 1 : walking or having the habit of walking while asleep. You learn something or about something every day when you are in the domain industry. Anyways an email went out to the potential buyer quoting them $2,000 USD minimum and the came back and laughed on email. I sent an email saying that was sent in error and the price was actually $300, they could not see the value and suggested the name might be worth $3 bucks if being generous. I held firm on my $300 USD asking price, I mean I did pay around $200 for all 20,000 domain names so I really just wanted to sell one and make a profit. That never happened, almost a year went by and I had to make sure all the .xyz were on auto renew off as the renewal price for around $12.88 USD each, I knew this going into this and a few clicks and sorting out bulk domain edits I was going to let them all lapse. If you really wanted to renew 20,000 .xyz names it would of the cost you in the region of $250,000 USD!

One thing I will strongly suggest is not to register domain names blindly or in bulk like I did, unless you curate every single name you register, you can get into trouble with the law in the form of a URS (Uniform Rapid Suspension System) and or UDRP (Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy) and they will be a headache, cost you money and damage your reputation forever online. I did not get into any trouble registering all the .xyz names, but I could of and that would have been a stupid mistake to make in hindsight. .xyz is still one of my favorite extensions, they have good marketing and brand awareness. I just won't be registering 20,000 names anytime soon.

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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and story Darryl!

Been in a similar situation 2 year ago when the .xyzs was gaining traction and
I've bought a few hundreds of CHIP 3C domains from the aftermarket, sold 2 on loss. :)

Everyday is a learning curve in all our journeys.
We need to make the best out every experience and use that to grow ourselves.
 
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Congrats, I think you can see a good investment opportunity
 
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Very true, he does appear to have an eye for a good opportunity, something not to be overlooked.
 
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1. Guy registered 20,000 domain names;
I'm sure some where good keywords domain names or even one-word domain names.
2. Didn't sell even one (1).

And people in this thread still don't think it's a crappy extension (at least for reselling)?!?
Hellooooo!

Funny somebody mentions .biz, .pro, .info....all extensions you can pronounce as a word
What about .xyz?
Lol, you need to spell each letter if you say the name of your website.
Didn't you think about it?
 
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1. Guy registered 20,000 domain names;
I'm sure some where good keywords domain names or even one-word domain names.
2. Didn't sell even one (1).
And people in this thread still don't think it's a crappy extension (at least for reselling)?!?
Hellooooo!
Funny somebody mentions .biz, .pro, .info....all extensions you can pronounce as a word
What about .xyz?
Lol, you need to spell each letter if you say the name of your website.
Didn't you think about it?
he wanted xxxx for each name, thats all.
i cant believe he could not sell at least 10% for 5$ each one
his problem was insist in xxxx and then he disapointed and was passively sitting and waiting offers..
he could make at least $1k
at least
 
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My only question is how much time did you spend on this activity. Seems to me that if time was spent researching and buying 1 or a few quality (aged/dropped/expired) domains for a total of $200, you might have had some type of a ROI verse registering 20k random domains.
 
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sure more than a few took a gamble, some win, some lose
Personally I didn't mess with them cause I'm an old school .com guy and the thought of 20,000 xyz in my account would drive me nuts, would need a separate account to keep those away from hiding my .coms :ROFL:

I did create a separate account with a primary email. That is also why I could tell how many .xyz domain names I had in the account as the total showed up in the manage domains section.
 
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My only question is how much time did you spend on this activity. Seems to me that if time was spent researching and buying 1 or a few quality (aged/dropped/expired) domains for a total of $200, you might have had some type of a ROI verse registering 20k random domains.

I spent 3 nights from 11am to 3am looking up and registering names. I never did any outbound, looking back now, I should have started from day 1. Not much time.

There were multiple lists of names available to register and download ranging from one word, two words and numbers on the gen.xyz website, so I registered most of those. Also was a fun exercise looking around the web for lists and lists of keywords in Excel .csv format that I could plug in.

I mean, imagine this was the year 1995 and I gave you 12 hours to register as many .com domain names as you wanted for $0.01 each. How would you do it? Where would you start? :spiderman::woot:
 
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he wanted xxxx for each name, thats all.
i cant believe he could not sell at least 10% for 5$ each one
his problem was insist in xxxx and then he disapointed and was passively sitting and waiting offers..
he could make at least $1k
at least

Yes, that was my mistake. I wanted to be in profit from the first sale of $300 for 1 name.
 
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Brilliant story - unbelievable with all those names you didn't get one sale and only 1 concrete enquiry.

Thanks for sharing and being honest about your experience - really good read
 
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People think a lot about listing their failures publicly, I appreciate your courage for your honesty, we learn something from failures it adds a lot to our experience.
All the best
 
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Most of the times, you just need to get the attention of a good buyer.
Look at bidding war on AmazonCars.xyz ($34,010 now) with 23 hours left, all while my very own Cars.xyz sits without even a single bid at Flippa. You can decide for yourself which is better.

The issue of zero sales was probably due to ZERO outreach, given that .XYZ is a ngtld extension.
 
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Most of the times, you just need to get the attention of a good buyer.
Look at bidding war on AmazonCars.xyz ($34,010 now) with 23 hours left, all while my very own Cars.xyz sits without even a single bid at Flippa. You can decide for yourself which is better.

The issue of zero sales was probably due to ZERO outreach, given that .XYZ is a ngtld extension.

In my opinion, Cars.xyz is much better than AmazonCars.xyz. I think there is a bidding war on AmazonCars.xyz because of "Amazon", but the domain name has a potential trademark issue.

I have rejected several offers on my .XYZ domain names.

My .XYZ list:
- Bid.xyz
- Cat.xyz
- Model.xyz
- Wow.xyz
 
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Most of the times, you just need to get the attention of a good buyer.
Look at bidding war on AmazonCars.xyz ($34,010 now) with 23 hours left, all while my very own Cars.xyz sits without even a single bid at Flippa. You can decide for yourself which is better.

The issue of zero sales was probably due to ZERO outreach, given that .XYZ is a ngtld extension.

If the buyer isn't Amazon, the new owner will probably be giving it to them for free.
 
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If the buyer isn't Amazon, the new owner will probably be giving it to them for free.

Agree but I doubt Amazon will want that, they are already using AmazonCars.com
 
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From the couple of descriptions you gave I doubt the names would of sold in dot com though you did mention you had some power words ,yes hindsight is always the greatest teacher but the poorest wage ....I would of personally scoured every xyz dropped at expired and been a bit pickier though 20000 would of been just to much ,even 2000 at a grand total of $20........even one sale at $20 is money back ....with the right names pricing and exposure I find it incredulous to not make anything at those prices.......live and learn they say ...thankfully a $200 loss is not so huge,,,,and the lessons learnt worth the price that was payed
 
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Great Strategy, bad timing!!! .xyz is absolutely Notorious, indeed. In 2016, .xyz was the 4th largest registered extension after .com, .org and .net. And the xyz bubble was about to brust.

Albeit, the sale of .xyz hasnt picked up yet, I wonder how many of those 2000 names are now unregistered .I m sure they are gradually being registered.

Its might take years for .xyz to go mainstream but the registrars are infamous, you never know. Who would have thought Google would adopt .xyz to rebrand thier parent company into alphabet. This has caused serious disruption in domainspace with .xyz making a silent but serious global presence in the minds of general people.
 
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Their corporate page at abc.xyz is just for some investors...
Almost all people don't need it. It has no any effect on the enduser behaviour and aftermarket.
 
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.com is the king because it could relate to commercial, computer, company and corporate, that’s really a wide range accommodation, unlike other extension has its own niche.
The .xyz has no actual meaning when you see it directly, and that’s a good reason for branding your logo on .xyz extension because it’s easy to focus on your business branding, plus, the xyz is very bold extension.
So the way I see .xyz has pretty wide range uses too, the wide range things need more time to mature, I guess time will tell how it goes.
Ps. The .xyz can mean new generation and 3 dimensional things.
 
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He would not have turned a profit even trying to sell them for $5. each. The lack of sales had to do with the extension more than the asking price. The one inquiry he received wasn’t even willing to pay $5. - was reluctant to offer even $3.
 
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The CEO of .xyz his strategy looks like now considered the interests more of registrants not investors, and advertising to school and youth, So substantially I would say it’s a good strategy for long term investment, it’s like old time Mcdonald’s strategy. I guess the potential will emerge couple years later. He has a bigger view I can see that.
 
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great story to hear and personable social history


-have a special day
 
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As a beginner in domain flipping, it's really important for me to learn as much as I can. So, thankyou for this story. Will keep this in mind :)
 
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