Thanks for creating this MapleDots. I was going to post sooner, but haven't had much time and I knew I wanted to really put some thought into this, and now that my renewals are due, what better time?
This is something I've been contemplating for several years now... Why did I do this?
What it came down to for me was fear-of-missing-out and buying in areas where I had some interest or saw actual use by businesses (.solar). I paid $100+ for early registration on a few of these.
I previously had about 75-80 gTLDs, but now it is 51, which is 0.7% of my total domains.
After 5 years I've had a total of 1 offer of $1,000 on a .solar domain and the buyer backed out. For me, at this point it really makes no sense to hold onto them. They are all what I call "boat anchors" and if my boat was much smaller, it would be sinking.
It costs me $1,428 per year to renew these 51 domains that have been supported by my .com sales. If I decided to take that $1,428, I could buy 100 .com domains in 4-5 days for $1,300 and pretty much guarantee that I'll statistically sell around 1.5 of them for about $2,100 total within 12 months. That is $1,400 per year in renewals. I could even let them drop and be better off. Airplane tickets to Hawaii anyone?
I've had most of these for 5 years. If you compare this to when .com came out, it would be the equivalent to around the year 2002. By 2002, I think you would've easily received some offers on toydirectory//com, simplesolar//com, or reliablesolar//com, yet toy//directory, simple//solar, & reliable//solar and the other 75 names (including the ones I've dropped) had zero interest. But guess what, it isn't 2002! It is 2019, and we all have a personal computer in our pocket now and yet these still get ZERO interest. Can someone really say that the word hasn't gotten out yet about gTLD with twitter, facebook, youtube, and everything else that didn't exist in 2002?
For .com, I haven't lost money in any year since I started regularly in 2005. There hasn't even been a 4 month period that I've lost money. Just last year I bought another 1,200 domains in a 3 month period and that batch produced around $20,000 in sales in 12 months. So to me, it is really peculiar that for .com I can buy them in any year including TODAY, and make money. But I am so bad at picking gTLDs that I lost money every year, and couldn't sell 1, with 15 years of experience. I've even sold a hyphenated .com within 5 years for $2,875, and I wouldn't touch hyphenated names any longer.
When my last batch of .solar and other gTLDs were expiring, I offered them at around $100 to exact match companies with the long versions of the same name in .com. So they might have gensolarenergy//com and still they have no interest in gen//solar. I even sent them photos of Vivint Solar vehicles and how they used their .solar. Vivint Solar bought .solar early on and put vivint.solar on all their vehicles, which made me think it would be a viable gTLD since there were companies doing it, but it just hasn't caught on with other solar installers.
Here is an estimate of where things would be at if I had put $1,300 towards buying 100 .com domains 5 years ago instead of "investing" in boat anchors. This is based off of actual statistics of my 7,000+ .com domains.
So, while this post has been a downer for me in some ways. At least I know what I'll be doing over the next 12 months. Same goes for 90% of my .net domains. For me, it has been impossible to go wrong with .com and .org (org related .orgs!) and impossible for me to make $1 with a single gTLDs. My "boat anchors" will be "sleepin' with the fishes", as mobsters say.
