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.

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[omarte]

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

 

[omarte]

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.

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

 

[creataweb]

Someone on this forum was selling .xyz left and right for good money. Not sure what their strategy was.

I think if I wasn't sure I would have put them all on Afternic with decent BINs and 1 or 2 sales would have repaid the investment back surely.

 

[Furquan]

Could someone please ask .us & .co registry to start promo at $0.01, I might register more then @Darryl Lopes .

You did correct thing but unfortunately you have chosen wrong extension. I had some .xyz & developed them, but as a domainer I had only 247Btc.xyz which I got for free at west.xyz

 

[WatchDogue]

IMO it took a bit of guts and courage to carry out a plan to register and manage 20000 domains.

It was much more of an investment of time than money IMO, and hey, it might have paid off for you.

You saw a potential opportunity to " go for it " and you did, at the very least you gave it your best shot.

And it also takes a bit of guts and courage to post your plan and the ultimate unfortunate results of your plan herein for open comments.

Many excellent comments and insights ensued from your post.

Thanks for the interesting post.

 

[Vinod R]

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

 

[BaileyUK]

Well that was an interesting read Darryl. I blame the .xyz reg owners for allowing the one penny registrations. must have hit their figures quite badly as they all started to expire

 

[omarte]

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!

 

[garptrader]

The registries have issued a number of press releases of five and six-figure NTLD sales but with several years of experience in this industry i am skeptical that all those sales are legit third-party sales without some sort of backdoor agreement. A few very selective and diligent domain investors doing outbound marketing have made some sales. However I do not believe there are any Rick Schwartz or Michael Berkens or Frank Schilling type new GTLD investors who are making serious money with the new extensions. Keyword availability is easier in New and alternative extensions than .Com because .Com has well over 100 million registrations and that is where billion dollar corporations spend their money on branding. I believe most investors in new extensions will see similar results to the op even though the more common scenario among newbie investors is the following: acquire hundreds of domains in alternative extensions via either handreg or backorder in a relatively short timeframe. After the first year some paring of the portfolio occurs but 80% of the domains are renewed. In the second year the investor may continue acquiring names but is more selective in acquisitions due to inadequate sales. By the third year the portfolio starts to get pruned a bit as sales are not covering renewals but the investor is still optimistic that eventually sales will come through. By the fifth year the investor is more aggressive in pricing and has a considerably smaller portfolio than they had in year two. At some point the investor realizes that investing in alternative extensions was not a good investment.

 

[frank-germany]

thank you @Darryl Lopes for taking the time to tell us about your journey


here is what you could have done after 6 month
redirect the traffic to something that could earn you money
( freebitcoin , adult whatever )
and track which domain actually made money

and of course keep those
and take them out of uniregistry
to some cheaper registar before renewals

 

[Darryl Lopes]

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

Great advice! I should have also had a Namepros account back then.

 

[BrandMart]

The .xyz registry actually provided lists of names available to register at that time, I also did searches online for keyword lists in Excel format on the net. Like I said, the majority of the domains registered were number combinations.

PS: I was not the only one doing this at the time, I could tell because the lists would update in % saying how many were left in % too, even in one-word domain names and they would get lower and lower.

hehehe.. I can feel it bro. I once thought about registering 500 .infos when they were on huge discounted prices. Glad my cheque didn't clear on time and I saved some good money..

 

[JagG]

Great story @Darryl Lopes and thank you for sharing.

Sorry to hear things didn't work out, but we need to fail sometimes and learn own personal mistakes to come back stronger.

Live and learn buddy and make the remaining 2018 you're year.

Possible to see the list you had, I am sure I am not the only one.

 

[johname]

This is the domain version of buying 20,000 shares of an about to go bankrupt penny stock

The using the registry to tell you what to buy is the "What did I do?" moment to me.

 

[AbdulBasit.com]

@Darryl Lopes
Thanks for sharing your experience and that too very openly. Not many people does that which you did with big heart. Good lesson to learn for everyone in some way or the other.

Best wishes!

 

[hemirate]

Correct, I did not sell a single name.

Moral of the story: .xyz is a crappy extension. Noted.

 

[Michael Ehrhardt]

Domain Name Price Date Venue
galaxy.xyz 2800 2018-03-08 Sedo
host.xyz 3999 2018-01-28 Sedo
Jungle.xyz 7000 2017-11-26 Afternic
Paper.xyz 1000 2017-11-12 Private
Civic.xyz 1000 2017-11-12 Private
ripple.xyz 2500 2017-11-05 Private
Pistala.xyz 100 2017-11-04 GoDaddy
rudy.xyz 350 2017-11-02 Undeveloped
orlando.xyz 995 2017-11-02 Afternic
treehouse.xyz 599 2017-11-02 Afternic
circumcision.xyz 499 2017-11-02 Afternic
keto.xyz 499 2017-11-02 Afternic
preorders.xyz 700 2017-11-02 Undeveloped
Web.xyz 1550 2017-10-22 Flippa
stanley.xyz 1500 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
spectre.xyz 1008 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.xyz 995 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
kraken.xyz 995 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
reyes.xyz 700 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
pictet.xyz 299 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
treva.xyz 299 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
icarus.xyz 199 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
crownconstruction.xyz 100 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
ethereum.xyz 4000 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
Delaware.xyz 999 2017-09-16 Private



918 search results (only the first 25 results are displayed)

 

[jmcc]

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.

The whole discounting as a business model is built on a certain percentage renewing and covering the costs of the promotion. I think that the Network Solutions promo where all those free XYZ domain names were stuffed in accounts may have given XYZ registry a more rosy view of the discounting game than is the general case. Many of the Netsol customers are bluechips and may have considered it a brand protection registration and that's why the renewals for the Netsol discounting were a bit higher than they should have been. The 1c promotion was just taking the whole discounting thing to insane levels. The Chinese registries and the Famous Four gTLDs seem to follow with the usual boom and bust.

Regards...jmcc

 

[jmcc]

Moral of the story: .xyz is a crappy extension. Noted.

Actually, it is not. It is on a par with some of the non core gTLDs like .BIZ, .INFO and .PRO in terms of usage.

Regards...jmcc

 

[900Worldwide]

Actually, it is not. It is on a par with some of the non core gTLDs like .BIZ, .INFO and .PRO in terms of usage.

Regards...jmcc

I agree with it’s not a crappy extension but it’s definitely not on par with .info

 

[SpareDomains]

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

 

[Cristi Marin]

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.
✌

 

[maya-zir]

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

 

[Darryl Lopes]

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?

 

[GoWebnames.com]

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.