discuss Baffled by people against hand reg

[Laguna]

As many of you know, I hand reg all my domains. Most posts I have read are all against it. I am baffled by this as ALL domains were originally hand reg . Your comments and opinions are welcome but NO personal comments about my way of doing things please.

 

[Laguna]

Experienced people in this threat are trying to help you. You should reevaluate your strategy. Maybe spend your next 2 hundred $$ at DNAcademy.

That is why I started this discussion. There will never be a debate where everyone has the same opinion. If we all take a little piece of information from different views , then everyone learns a little. Even experienced people never stop learning

 

[Fancy.domains]

Exactly. The first year is a learning process

I can agree on that. If you lose some money the first year it’s not the end of the world. To become a profitable domainer will take a lot of effort. I’ve regged a lot of “crazy names” over the years.

 

[DomainRecap]

Panning for gold, drilling for oil, buying stock, bitcoin and tons more had their infancy as well, but good luck gong back to basics on those. I think this is the message people are trying to relay..

If there is one trend you are going to notice going forward, it's smart businesses snapping up short and expensive domains before they are gone for good. We saw a lot of that towards the end of 2018 and I almost couldn't load Twitter each morning without another big announcement, and those are only the public sales.

As any market matures, the more the smart money goes towards the very top-end of the scale, such as businesses upgrading to smaller and tighter domain names to match their name in 2019 (i.e. XYZTechnology.com to XZY.com or JonesConsulting.com to Jones.com) before prices really get out of hand.

Not only does this serve a true business need, there is also a lot of prestige associated with upgrading to a higher-end domain - then you can send out a press release and have your competitors and business partners nodding their heads and scratching their chins.

"Hey, it looks like XYZ has finally arrived."

 

[Kate]

How about this for a hand reg.
Yes it's 3 words but....

GlobalSpaceInternet .com

Elon musk space internet

globalinternetspace.com is available for regfee and it rolls off the tongue better.
internetglobalspace.com is free too.
And then you can surely find other names with keyword substitution.

hosterstats.com does not have any history, probably this name has never been registered in the past, which usually is a bad sign.

It's easy to make up good domain names by combining two keywords together. This is the sweet spot.
With 3 words it is quite more difficult. Not only does it make the name longer and less desirable/memorable, the number of possible alternatives also increases exponentially.

One rule of thumb is that people are not going to buy your domains, if they can find alternatives of similar or better quality available for regfee. Nobody likes to pay a premium for a domain name, so they really need a compelling reason for buying from a domainer. This kind of handreg is not stuff that is in demand.

 

[bmugford]

The thing about hand regging future tech is the psychological effect of owning a part of the future. Whether it takes off or not, most likely there hasn't been a lot lost. It's generally done in good fun, with some possibility at the end. It's under ten bucks at most registrars. You can hand reg 100 names for well under a $1000 bucks. Not too many people are going to be drastically effected by some hand regging. If it's going to change your lifestyle, stay away. Otherwise enjoy it.

On the other hand, there are many stories of veterans paying $10,000, $100,000 and upwards on a domain only to be holding on to it for years with no significant inquiries.

Pick and choose your battles, and most importantly enjoy the journey.

The problem with that is the ongoing cost. If you buy 100 handregs that is $1000 + $1000 a year in renewals.
If you buy (10) decent $100 domains the ongoing cost is far lower.

Over 2 years the cost is $1100 vs $2000.
Over 3 years the cost is $1200 vs $3000.

A hand reg portfolio can quickly turn into a liability.

Also, I would argue that 10 well selected low $XXX domains have far higher odds to make sales.
Then again you need the experience to know what is good and for what price.

Brad

 

[bmugford]

Totally hear you Brad, but if you look at yesterday's sales on namebio, how many could you honestly say we're probable sale material ?

Probably not too many, but if you buy crappy domains because a handful of 130M .COM regs sell a day that is still not a good business model. You need to factor in the likelihood of a sale, and you need to account for all the domains that don't sell in a given year as well.

Brad

 

[imadoer]

Nope I'm just telling you what your lacking listen to my advice learn what sells start watching auctions pay attention to sales reports learn wholesale numbers and retail numbers and try and reg names that you can sell for profit get knowledgeable get money

 

[toughdomains]

i only go shopping on expired domain lists. it gives me a way to purchase names I like that i would never have thought of and its nice to know someone else bought the name also. Got lucky a few times with owners coming back to buy the name which never happens with hand reg...not saying hand reg is bad its great for new industry like crypto or VR but that doesnt happen often enough to feed my shopping need.

 

[handpicked]

I believe most bitcoin, blockchain, crypto domains were han-regs in the recent past and probably sold like gold and so do drones and clouds... people with futuristic vision about a new technology can excel in hand reg i guess. the next is ambient computing (ie iot) google ceo has spoken about it in many of his interviews. eco friendly domains can also have value so is geo. thanks.

 

[McDuke]

.

Hand reg is cheap and lucrative if you research research research.
Especially in future tech

You're believing your own hype.

In a year or two you're going to be like every new domain investor and reevaluate your process. Either you learn and adapt or lose money like 95% of domainers. We have all been where you are in the learning phase.

Few get it, many don't.

You better be willing to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours learning multiple fields.

Domaining is not for everyone.

just my 0.02$

 

[HotKey]

I think hand-registrations should be left to experienced domainers, unless you are some sort of prodigy. Why? Well, give it a year and see how keen you are to renew those domains.

Panning for gold, drilling for oil, buying stock, bitcoin and tons more had their infancy as well, but good luck gong back to basics on those. I think this is the message people are trying to relay..

 

[JB Lions]

I guess you didn't read his opening.

I read it, but it's relevant obviously.

 

[DomainVP]

Justification for laziness ? Don't talk rubbish. Talk to me in a year s**t head !!

Oh i'm talking to you right now hobby-boy. The truth hurts, I know, but what I am telling you is the hard truth to help you, not to hurt your feelings. You can't be sensitive in this game.

So wake up!!! If You're Going to Do Something, Do It Right or Don't Do It.

Otherwise I will try to talk to you in a year, but you will have an "Account-auto closed" tag under your name and I won't be able to find out how many names you've dropped.

Either way, good luck and god bless.

 

[bmugford]

Do you actually know that all my domains are worthless ? To most people yes they probably are but it only takes one person to decide they want that particular domain. I look a namebio every day and most of the sales mean absolutely nothing but still sell . One man's junk is another man's treasure

No, but I know you posted a thread saying you have not received any offers.
That is usually a pretty good indicator of quality.

Sales aside, if you are not even getting inquiries that tells a story about the domain quality.
Sales are streaky, but a good portfolio tends to get steady inquiries and offers.

Brad

 

[maksimfa]

Just to add...

With handregs in particular... you better be sure you already have either a customer identified.. OR a customer profile in your mind for whom would buy that domain, why they would buy it and how much they would pay.

Just because you could, does not mean you should.

There a few domainers here in particular that I respect... but for instance they buy domains that sound good, but to anyone in that actual field... make ZERO sense to own. One example is gun domains. As part of my profession I am work with gun stores and gun manufacturers... people hand reg gun related domains that mean ZERO difference for an existing company.

So instead of just regging what you think is "cool", focus on an industry you know with actual people who would be interested in those domains.

Then, when you do outbound for those domains... people will take you seriously when you know WTF you are talking about.

 

[maya-zir]

Handreg also bring ROI, you just must to have a tactics.
I dont have money for buy domains, I handreg and sell for mid xx, low or mid xxx.
Just need to mark all domains (yes for renewal - no for renewal) and try to sell all domains before renewal, keeping just good ones...

 

[vravis9]

One thing I can say is @Lagunaboy you have to trust on your own work...

And you should already known that here they won't stop commenting on person and his belief...rather than providing their views in a professional way to support their theory...

See you already got so many replies...and it goes on..

Coming to main topic...

All good names are registered long ago... partially true..."partially" because all the names registered long ago are related to generic and main trending fields of those times...

So you will see a lot of names registered and sold for recent trending topics like VR/crypto/weed/and many more...

Of course some names are registered long ago in these fields also...by visionaries

So now if you are hand registering some names they should reflect the present trends and upcoming possibilities...do lot of research and proceed.

And one thing is sure if a buyer wants buy your name...it doesn't matter what a famous broker/some domainers/ I / you think.

End user is the only you have to keep in mind.

 

[mr-x]

Thanks to all that contributed to this debate. Was very informative as usual.

Advice from Mike Mann; if your not registering a .com, choose a popular single word.

 

[NickB]

It might be worth setting up a thread similar to what @lolwarrior did with gTLDs (which is a good thread) with the same rules....

Post your non gTLDs hand reg and let people vote "like" to keep or "thank" to drop

That way people can get some constructive feedback from the community

Just an idea.......

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Problem is that almost everything owned by NP members is hand reges names so it like taking a group of people wearing blue jumpers and then from those people calculating statistics showing everyone wears blue jumpers.

The vast majority also sold for peanuts so it rules out high quality dropped names.

You raise some very valid points @johnnie018 - thanks for pointing them out.

If it is true that almost everything owned by NPs members are hand-regs, then you are completely correct that an analysis of how many sales are hand-regs is meaningless. I presume, from the huge number of comments posted against hand-regs especially by those who have been in the business for some time, that NPs members hold a lot of non-reg, but maybe that is not true.

With 1 million members NPs does represent I think the overall community pretty well (although for various reasons some big names choose not to actively participate) and I would expect sales by our members represents overall the sales by individual domainers. However the subset that reports to Completed Sales is a far smaller group - does it have biases? Probably. Also outbound is biased to the geo names.

Re sold for peanuts, I am not sure I agree entirely. It is true that 69% sold for $399 or less, but if you look at NameBio data from the past year the breakdown is not much different (median price most days is in $225 to $325 range). I realize NameBio being a mix of wholesale and retail venues is problematic, but I still think we let the big sales blind us to the fact that most domain sales are somewhere in the sweet spot of $250 to $499. 9.9% of the sample are $1000 and above, not much different from NameBio overall (most days about 20 out of 200 sales are at $1000 level - I tweet this data daily and summarize it weekly so feel confident in this statement).

Thank you for reminding us to always be careful of biases in analysis of any sampled data, however. Have a nice day.

Bob

 

[Jv1999]

Does aftermarket mean the junk that someone else dropped ?(just curious)

I think that, if that's your perspective on domaining and aftermarket domains, then you should quit now. I feel like you have too much anger, frustration, and non-patience to be a good domainer. And then, you will certainly lose money if you keep up that attitude.

Domaining is about effort and patience. Very zen. Very qiaowei. You must reach into Eastern philosophy and martial arts and... jk. But it's also not jk because it's true. Domaining isn't like those 10x and 2 days schemes with crazy ad men with smiles and gel hair.

Domaining is carefully researching a domain, resisting FOMO, checking all angles to see if it's really worth... then afterward, reggae. Then, you find other good ones until you have a decent-sized portfolio. Then, you won't even make a sail yet. You'll have to forget your portfolio exists, (unless it's GEO for outbound or other outbound-type domains), and then wait 1 or 2 years for an inquiry...

 

[Laguna]

Hand reg is cheap and lucrative if you research research research.
Especially in future tech

 

[aditya agrawal]

As many of you know, I hand reg all my domains. Most posts I have read are all against it. I am baffled by this as ALL domains were originally hand reg . Your comments and opinions are welcome but NO personal comments about my way of doing things please.

Age is just a number. I sold a handreg about 8 months old to Microsoft.


Quality will always supersede all other parameters especially age.

 

[aditya agrawal]

Was it outbound to Microsoft?

No stealth approach by them to me. But I knew it was Microsoft. I had sold a few more domains to them and after a month all were transfered to Microsoft.

 

[NickB]

After reading through this whole thread I had to add the quote to my signature