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

 

[Henry Y]

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

 

[creataweb]

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.

 

[Etim Abasiama]

Wow.. Nice read, lesson learnt @Darryl Thanks

 

[Future Sensors]

I think @biggie or @Future Sensors did something similar? Any feedback, guys?

Unsuccessful here (.xyz)

 

[Darryl Lopes]

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

I think the registrar would hope for renewals, it definitely dipped the second year registrations. Thanks for reading!

 

[namemarket]

...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 how much traffic did Analytics show they received on that day?

 

[dande]

Most times I see hundreds of stupid names dropping at exactly the same time and I wonder if the registrants were hallucinating when they registered those junks. Never knew @Darryl Lopes was one of them

Glad you learned your lessons. $200 was not bad gamble. It would have been catastrophic if you'd allowed them go into auto renew.

 

[IMEZI]

i have two coleaques, one register 100K while the other register 600K and they were happy with their decision. I'm sure they got enough net profit from those purchase.

 

[frank-germany]

I think the registrar would hope for renewals, it definitely dipped the second year registrations. Thanks for reading!

really ??

do you really think they were hoping for renewals?????

no I don't think so

 

[BrandMart]

meh .. regged 20000 domains in a couple of nights? were you high on meth?

On another note, good that you let them drop.

 

[CJ6]

$200 for a valuable lesson learned..that is cheap compared to what many of us have spent to learn a lesson. Thanks for being honest and helping out others.

Looks like there are a few sales each month. I still hold one (a single) .xyz domain.

https://namebio.com/?s==QDN0UzNxcTM

 

[Bob Hawkes]

After the first year some paring of the portfolio occurs but 80% of the domains are renewed

A lot of truth in your post, @garptrader , but I question the 80% (I might be wrong). If you look at average hold time in most new extensions, it is only slightly over 1 year, implying that most are not renewed I think? Now I know some of the registrars claim renewal rates comparable with yours, but I find these hard to make consistent with the third party average registration period data.

e.g. according to NameStat the average period for .site is 1.01 years and it is about the 55th percentile in terms of all (ngTLD?) domain names. Or am I misinterpreting this data? (thanks for any guidance from those more familiar with the stat)

https://namestat.org/site

Speaking personally (but I think some others have similar operation) I try hard to sell a domain name within the first year. In most cases, if I have no offer within that period, I will significantly reduce price in last weeks (to get $$ enough back to cover costs), but not renew. There are exceptions, mainly in technical terms that I think will be more popular in a few years that I do renew for multiple years. Also, if I have had interest, even if a sale did not happen, I tend to consider renewing, if cost not too steep.

In this regard I think fundamentally most .com and ngTLD investors operate differently, since in .com a higher percentage get renewed.

 

[Smiles76]

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!

The sale thru rate for most domains is 3% tops with .com's. It's probably far less less for .xyz domains.

 

[900Worldwide]

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.

I still love good info’s.

 

[LamsuanlunT]

I would love to reg some domains for a penny. Tell me where I can do that!

 

[Umesh1]

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

thx for sharing ur thoughts bro.

 

[Ootsa]

Honest and open story.

By offering .xyz for $0.01(penny) each the registry was betting on making it ROI on the renewals. Unfortunately by doing so they also deflated the perceived value of the .xyz extension brand for who knows how long to come...

 

[maya-zir]

you could sell them in bulk or for $3-$5-$10 each one.
I sold some .xyz in bulk and finally even got some extra

 

[DOMAIN ILLUMINATI]

I think, no one is really surprised, that the registry's "attempt", "to turn $0.01 USD 20,000 times into $12.88 USD" * or, in other words (numbers), "$200.00 USD into $257,600.00 USD" * has miserably failed.

* shematically meant

 

[jmcc]

e.g. according to NameStat the average period for .site is 1.01 years and it is about the 55th percentile in terms of all (ngTLD?) domain names. Or am I misinterpreting this data? (thanks for any guidance from those more familiar with the stat)

gTLD - New - Deleted - Retained - Est Retention (01-01-2016 - 01-12-2016)
xyz 5,591,801 5,252,875 338,926 6.06%

Peak XYZ:
July 2016
New 3,373,359 Deleted: 3,284,057 Retained: 89,302 Ret%: 2.65%

Regards...jmcc

 

[omelet]

you are not the only one Darryl
. I registered about 1000 .xyz names, i also withdrew 95% of them

 

[triplec0886]

Very interesting and informative story @Darryl Lopes. As a still-in-infancy domainer(been at it for 5 months), I can see myself doing something similar with the same thought process. Glad you were able to learn from it and share it. I also learned something new.....test out your domains with Google Analytics......

 

[welluyu]

@Darryl Lopes Thanks for sharing your experience..
I checked several good names .in xyz taken.. and several sell with high price..

 

[dragtastic]

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.

 

[NickB]

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