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

[Darryl Lopes]

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.

Affiliate link removed

 

[MapleDots]

So I have a little lesson for you.....

- Make a single landing page and add google analytics.
- Bulk change all name servers to your cPanel hosting account.
- This puts them in the main directory where you have your lander index file.

Now anyone going to xxx.xyz will see that in the address bar and you will see it on your google analytics.

Let all domains expire with no traffic and renew the ones where you get action.

I follow that and if I get even one type in I keep the domain.

Now you have a years gauge on which domains perform and which don't.

Renew the good ones, drop the rest.... wash, rinse, repeat.

Works great for me

 

[900Worldwide]

Well you could have made your money back if you had realistic pricing. $300 for a $0.1 is rather ridiculous imo. You could have sold them back at $5 each *20000 = $100,000 - $200 and profited $99,800 would have been a good flip and a great story.
Good idea poor execution is the learning part.

Stay blessed!

 

[Darryl Lopes]

Maybe was not a bad investment at the start - maybe turned in bad because not make enough advertising
Personal didn't know about this promo but for $ 200 worth to buy 20k domains & make advertising
Sorry didn't work for you & wish good luck for you in future

That is something that I learned from this. The day you register or buy a domain name and want to sell and or develop it, the best day to start marketing or reselling it, is today, not 6 or 9 months down the line, then you get desperate and renewals are creeping around the corner.

 

[Darryl Lopes]

Well you could have made your money back if you had realistic pricing. $300 for a $0.1 is rather ridiculous imo. You could have sold them back at $5 *20000 = $100,000 and profited $99,800 would have been a good flip and a great story.
Good idea poor execution is that the learning part.

Stay blessed!

Invent a time machine for me and also tell me to buy more Bitcoin, please.

 

[Darryl Lopes]

So, if I understand correctly - you didn't sell a single name?

Correct, I did not sell a single name.

 

[MapleDots]

I dont know what keywords you registred ! but not even a sale in 20.000 !
very hard to grasp ! either .xyz has very little interest from buyers or we're missing something wrong here!

The problem was that domainers knew what his cost price was and that is why the respondents laughed.

.xyz is to blame for EVER offering such stupid pricing, it brought zero value to the extension.

 

[Henry Y]

I registered a few .xyz domains.

bid.xyz
cat.xyz
spa.xyz
wow.xyz
model.xyz

 

[omarte]

Don't forget domain registrations and renewals were at the fixed price of $70 a pop. I think right up to 1998, He probably thought he had paid for life-time ownership, either that or knew the free-for-all market was about to start

I remember registring my ever first domain in the late 90's / early 2000's & that's only could happened because of a Networksolutions offer "free first year" it was a .net domain.
I've always struggled trying to make online payments "paypal, credit cards.." because i've found my self born in morocco (3rd world) & unfortunately missed a big opportunity!
To you all domainers who wasn't born in a country in the 3rd world you gotta be very thankful!

 

[1Darko]

So, if I understand correctly - you didn't sell a single name?

 

[Darryl Lopes]

Wow ! what a story, thanks for sharing ! many things can be learned from this so there is always something gained !!
quality over quantity

Glad you can learn something from my story. Quality over quantity for sure.

 

[1Darko]

Correct, I did not sell a single name.

Wow - what an experience! If I remember Josh from DSAD team regged about 12.000 xyz names and he sold something over 60 names. He has put them up for sale mainly at afternic I think - and made some nice profit.
At least you've got the feeling about regging a few thousand domains - hehe

 

[GoWebnames.com]

I once bought like 120/125 INFO domains here at NP, for $5 each.
Hardly 2-3 sold for $20-$30 each. Waste of $600.

 

[Acroplex]

Why is this even news?

Two years ago, XYZ did a penny promo that cost them $2-$3 million dollars. They ate the expenses as advertising, hyping their brand. To them, it was a business expense. Their renewal rate was way less than the 5% retention rate that most promotions dependent on huge discounts achieve. It was dismal. They also used those numbers of penny registrations to present the .XYZ string as hugely adopted. Well, numbers don't lie, and XYZ went down from its peak of 6.7 million domains to 2.3 million, with another 200-300k in the drop queue.

Domain value is built on rarity. The moment you devalue it by pricing it at $0.01 across the commodity's board, you have lost the game.

 

[Armageddon]

Maybe was not a bad investment at the start - maybe turned in bad because not make enough advertising
Personal didn't know about this promo but for $ 200 worth to buy 20k domains & make advertising
Sorry didn't work for you & wish good luck for you in future

 

[Darryl Lopes]

.com has much much more quality than .xyz so always quality comes first then you can play with quantity!

I have heard and read of nightmare type domain name stories of one guy that registered thousands of one word .com domain names and did not want to pay the invoice for renewals back in the late 90's. Bet he is kicking himself now!

 

[BaileyUK]

I have heard and read of nightmare type domain name stories of one guy that registered thousands of one word .com domain names and did not want to pay the invoice for renewals back in the late 90's. Bet he is kicking himself now!

Don't forget all domain registrations and renewals were at the fixed price of $70 a pop under Network solutions (No choice). I think right up to 1998, He probably thought he had paid for life-time ownership, either that or knew the free-for-all market was about to start.

Hell of a lot of money back then, even to own a dozen domains. That's why you can't be jealous of those that did get in early

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Thank so much for providing the details of your experience, @Darryl Lopes - your expertise, honesty, and transparency, in this and other posts, enrich our community. A valuable message about the importance of only registering a number of domains that we can manage, and just because a domain name is cheap does not mean that there are no associated possible liabilities (including legal and the time that it takes).

I think the main message from this is the horrendous impact of super cheap registration rates. Although some xyz domain names have sold (according to Namebio stats 475 all time, with 230 in 2016, 60 in 2017 and 11 so far in 2018), and although I don't invest in them, I do see a future for the extension to some degree.

Is there any way ICANN could be persuaded to get the industry to agree to some rule such as any domain renewal can not be more than 30% above the previous year registration? This would discourage crazy first year promotions, and ensure those buying a domain that the increases will be limited. I really think a rule like this would do more for ngTLD end use than any amount of promotion of the extensions (not that that is a bad idea as well).

Thanks again,

Bob

ps I really like the procedure that @MapleDots relays on using analytics to determine which domains have been watched as way to decide on renew. Of course, also need to take into consideration how that might change in future - those who saw blockchain long before it began to be talked about were wise, but might not have seen visits in early years.

 

[hookbox]

If you register 20,000 crap names in a crap extension then they are all crap but if you register 20,000 good names in a crap extension then you are bound to sell a few and create a profit. I can promise you if these were 20,000 single decent keywords a large handful would have easily sold for at least $300 each

 

[FolioTeam]

Well you could have made your money back if you had realistic pricing. $300 for a $0.1 is rather ridiculous imo. You could have sold them back at $5 each *20000 = $100,000 - $200 and profited $99,800 would have been a good flip and a great story.
Good idea poor execution is the learning part.

Stay blessed!

Then he would have needed to sell at least 40 names to cover the $200 starting capital. And there was no guarantee that he would have made 40 sales.

All things considered, $200 is not such a steep price to pay for the domaining learning curve. Some have paid higher one way or the other. We all have war wounds and that is domaining for you.

 

[Saeid Nejati]

It sounds interesting Darryl. Thank you for sharing your story honestly man. I really appreciate you for your works. It was so hard to register and manage all of them. I think honesty make reputation and it is one of important factors in making you successful.

 

[Darryl Lopes]

It sounds interesting Darryl. Thank you for sharing your story honestly man. I really appreciate you for your works. It was so hard to register and manage all of them. I think honesty make reputation and it is one of important factors in making you successful.

I 100% agree. Thank you for the message!

 

[maxtorz]

Glad you can learn something from my story. Quality over quantity for sure.

That's not true...you picked the wrong "vehicle" or in this case the wrong extension.
If you had 20,000 names in .COM you would have made a profit according to the "numbers game" investment method.

 

[Dan Beck]

Would love to see that list!

 

[Brands.International]

Well, as I see it, this has nothing much to do with extension or promotional pricing.

.xyz sells pretty well, IF you have good keywords. See namebio and results of few members here as well

If someone regs 20k of weak names, there is no chance this will ever work, which the OP already found out by this little experiment. Also it does not matter whether they paid 200 using promo, or 200k using regular pricing, buyers are not interested in that. They are purely interested in quality of the name, and its renewal.

Imo, it is better to invest 200 usd for 1-2 good 1 keyword xyz names here at Namepros (one can open WLTB thread), then to spend that for 20k names which you need to look up in dictionary to find their meaning. "Quality over quantity" is a rule which is even more important in case of new gTLDs, comparing to legacy extensions.

Thanks for creating this thread