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Future of Domain Names
Recorded: Oct. 12, 2024 Duration: 2:44:38Space Recording
Full Transcription
This video is brought to you by S.T.A.L.A.L.A.L.D.
Hey guys, sorry, I was having issues with my Wi-Fi, it seems, and I wasn't able to come
on, but I'm glad you guys were able to find it.
I'm going to update this on my page, and we'll get it started.
Boom.
How's everyone doing?
What's up, Mike?
I sent you an invite to speak, someone to Harrison.
Anyone who wants to come up, feel free to come up.
Hey, what's up, Michael?
Good morning, good morning.
I can hear you just fine.
All right, good, good.
I guess it's a bit delayed.
Well, these guys are still...
I was having Wi-Fi issues.
But I'm glad I was able to come on.
Happy Saturday.
Welcome to the Future of Domain Names.
We do this room every Saturday, so it's kind of like a weird one, three minutes late, but
we're here.
And Michael's here, Harrison's here, you guys are all here.
Usually, you know, it's an open conversation about what we all love, which is domain investing.
We share different perspectives.
We share different perspectives.
We agree, we disagree, but we keep it light and respectful.
It's just a bunch of friends having a conversation virtually.
So, hope all has been well with you guys.
Last week was a really good one.
We ended up doing it for over three hours.
Batteries were blowing out.
Phones were getting hot.
And we had to cut it off eventually.
But I could do this all day.
I actually genuinely enjoy doing this rooms.
I learn a lot.
I share a few things that I know.
And I always feel very blessed and honored that we can all gather here.
And it's always good to, you know, feel you guys' vibes, even though I don't see you.
For those of you that want to be seen and value the power of networking, just a quick reminder,
Domainer Expo is coming up real soon.
There's a conference in Dubai on November 5th as well, which is Domain Days.
So, if you're in that part of the world, definitely check that out.
Looks like a very, very amazing event that's shaping up.
And right afterwards, a month later, we'll be doing Domainer Expo, which is the second edition in Las Vegas.
I haven't announced the specific venue, but most likely it will be at the Venetian.
I know Micah will be there.
Harrison's confirmed to be there.
Ufo.xyz will be there.
And hopefully we'll have King Sing and the rest of you out there.
But I'm telling you, if you want to take a Domainer to the next level, get out to a Domainer event.
Whether it's NamesCon, whether it's Domain Days, whether it's Domain Summit, whether it's Domainer Expo, it doesn't matter.
You just need one connection to make more money.
And it's not just about money.
You're taking your network into a different level.
And you know I always say that.
Your network is your net worth.
So, yeah, man.
With that being said, sorry about my rant.
Welcome to my TED Talk.
Michael, what's new with you, man?
It all sounds good.
I'm excited about the event.
Yeah, Wi-Fi.
It sounded like Wi-Fi was dropping out a little bit.
So, if it drops out for me, I posted pictures.
I'm actually working on a β I'm inside a military container right now.
So, I got Wi-Fi extended outside.
So, hopefully, we're all good.
But just playing around at home.
But, yeah, what a β
Military container?
Man, feeding coyotes and foxes in the mountains.
You're like the Renaissance man, man.
Well, you know, it's like domaining where we come across these things and they're just too good to pass up.
So, there's a military base in Barstow, California, and all of this material comes back.
It was coming back heavy after Afghanistan.
And it's just too good to pass up.
You just got to have the logistics to move it and you got to have a place to put the stuff.
So, I have both.
So, it's been a lot of fun.
And it's basically a fancy way to keep bears out from the kitchen.
I'll just assume you're ready for the end of the world, Mike.
Yeah.
I like the setup, man.
I'm β I'm in the sky in downtown L.A.
Yeah.
If it goes down β
You have to come visit.
You're like way out there.
It's all good.
But what a week last week.
Got a lot of good feedback.
I was hoping actually to do some stuff, you know, with Wayback.
But it looks like Wayback's been down all week.
So, I'm not going to get too into Wayback.
Because it seemed like I got a lot of questions after last week about MX, email leakage, data leakage.
Domainers don't realize the value of that, you know, if you're picking up domains.
Or if you have a .com, let's say you have a shortened version of a company, .com.
So, I've actually got one that I was going to share where it's just a shortened name of a business.
And my .com gets emails for the business.
And I get everything from their PayPal information where it's like, oh, you're trying to reset your passwords.
And sometimes they're fake, but many times they're real.
I get people trying to order.
I have a yoga site that it's the exact match for a geo, but mine's just without the geo.
And people email me wanting to sign up for classes.
So, those are the kinds of things where it's an extra value to be able to show people that, hey, you know, if you pick this up, you just turn it on.
You're going to be getting the business.
So, I don't know if I'll get more into that today.
It might be a little too complicated for some folks.
Yeah, we'll keep the complicated stuff for the conference so that we can give people maximum value and have substance in our conversation.
Well, in that case, at the conference, I'll get into it deep because it's extremely valuable.
You know, it's really.
Yeah, I mean, that's the whole point of these type of events.
It's not just shaking hands.
It's about sharing knowledge and things.
Not everything ought to be discussed publicly.
And, you know, people, it's one thing to give.
It's another thing to want to always take.
I think life should be give and take.
So, when we share stuff out here, you know, there are people that, I mean, they know not to fuck with me because I'm not a nice guy.
Michael is a very nice, warm guy.
And they slam his DMs.
I just ignore the DMs.
You know what I mean?
Like, because it's like, dude, like, yo, Google search away from the question you're fucking asking me.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, what do you want from me, bro?
Like, you're asking me questions that you can answer that you already know the answer to and you know where to find the answer.
And, you know, when I do the space, you don't come up and have that question.
You know, we spend hours every week here and then you want to just keep squeezing and squeezing.
And it's a bit one-sided and selfish.
I think that people...
So, that might be your Wi-Fi dropping out.
Is everybody hearing that?
Is this dropping out for others or is that just for me?
Yeah, it's it's on my end.
Oh, man, I'm sorry.
Can you guys hear me?
We can hear you, but every once in a while you drop out.
Horrible.
Well, anyways, let me try to sort that out.
Let's say hello to everyone on stage.
I know Harrison was here and then we have Adam and Harrison.
I think Adam had more sales this week, too.
Adam has a sale every week.
Yeah.
It's just shit.
Yeah, Adam is the man.
Adam is like an all-star.
Harrison, what's new with you?
Just recovering from my vacation.
Travel and back from the UK.
Had a good time.
And just been getting back into the swing of things and not looking forward to travel until December.
So, that'll be nice.
Learning to drive on the left side of the road again, huh?
For the first time, it was pretty intense with like a minibus full of family.
It was fun.
It's all good.
It's all good.
Glad to have you back.
How's Steakweb going?
And I know you have another angle to it.
You want to talk about that?
I sure as heck don't.
Okay.
I'm going to say more coming.
And I'm looking forward to Domainer Expo speaking there, meeting people.
And I'm tight-lipped about this new angle.
So, yeah.
We, yeah.
We're getting back in the swing of things and looking forward to showing, not telling.
I love it.
Showing, not telling.
But building.
Building is very, very needed.
We've got to respect people that are innovating.
There's a lot of stuff being built.
We'll talk about that as well.
We'll talk about just kind of like all the innovation happening today.
I saw that there's another marketplace that sprung up, Domain Easy.
I think that's pretty exciting.
I saw Adam post that.
Yeah.
There's a lot going on, man.
Dot.io.
Is it going to make it?
Is it going to be phased out?
We'll dive into that.
I'll talk about some of the people speaking at the conference.
Because my goal is to get you motherfuckers out there.
All right?
So, this is the part of the year where I start talking about the conference in my sleep.
I talk about it every...
You'll be rudely interrupted a lot to remind you to go register for the conference.
So, yeah.
If you guys want me to shut up, just go register.
Anyways.
Adam, what's going on, man?
Hey.
How's it going?
I'm just chilling out.
Just to bring up a point from before, I don't normally get sales every week.
Just been a really good few weeks.
And it was a small sale.
But I've had another one on hold for like three, four days now.
So, I'm hoping that'll turn into a sale next week.
So, that'll keep my little trend going, which is nice.
Because a lot of times, I'll get maybe just like one, maybe two sales a month.
And so far, it's been a lot better.
But it might just be that time of year or something.
I don't know.
Yeah.
I think Q4 generally is better than the summer months.
I think, you know, I've been going through a dry spell lately.
But I'm ready to kick that thing in the right direction.
You know, all we can do is just adjust prices.
You know, make sure that we have our names listed and all those things that domainers do.
And the rest is really just a waiting game, right, for the most part.
But I've seen a lot of people making a lot of sales.
Shout out UFO.
He's been kicking butt with his sales, like backs and backs and backs.
You know, it's funny.
The sales come in threes.
I know it was Bruce who said that.
So, when I get one sale, it's usually not a loan thing.
It's usually I'll get a sale, then another sale, then another sale.
So, sometimes when you guys are dealing with this drought, just know that at any moment, you might just get a trifecta, you know?
So, just be patient.
Be realistic with the prices.
Acquire good names.
And it's inevitable.
You make sales.
It's just the nature of the game.
Yeah.
On that, hey, first of all, morning for you guys.
What up, Eric?
Pacific side.
And you guys my side.
Good afternoon.
Hey.
Yeah.
On that note, I just want to jump in because there is a reason for that I've found over time, right?
Especially for somebody like yourself who does a lot of, you know, well, not a lot, but you do, you know, outbound as part of your game.
Well, a lot of it is when you have a couple of sales and like the very recent memory, your confidence goes up, right?
And there's no doubt that when it comes to sales, when you have the heightened confidence, well, you know, you will get more sales, right?
It's just, it's a weird thing that, you know, when you're talking with people and doing negotiations, the moment you have a confidence there, somehow or another, it comes out in your transactions.
Obviously, it's not the only thing.
And obviously, if you're more passive like me and you're only inbound sales, well, it's going to be a little bit less so.
But, you know, it's still, I've noticed the same thing and I'm inbound, right?
But it's because sometimes I deal with my own leads.
So, you know, it's, I've certainly had those waves where it's like, yeah, all of a sudden it's like, you just can't stop making the sales, right?
And then the inverse is true as well, right?
When you're in a drought and you're frustrated and all that stuff, that comes out as well.
And it'll be like self-fulfilling sometimes.
Yes, sometimes you just go get a massage.
I know Michael knows a thing or two about that.
I really believe in that.
And I feel like a lot of this stuff, like when I pray, I pray for a sale.
Like, I'm very intentional about it.
Domaining is hard work, man.
It's really hard work.
You, we're kind of like in a feast of famine business.
And so sometimes you really do deal with those droughts and the self-doubt kicks in and you question what you've been doing.
And it's such an illiquid asset class.
And, you know, there's a lot of pros and cons, but sometimes those cons can really creep into your psyche.
And you just go, oh, fuck, man.
Why did I buy all these fucking names?
And then when you sell a name that you bought for $10 for $18,000, I know you guys saw that post-type post.
I put it on the jumbotron.
You buy a name for $10,000, you list it for $18,888, and someone's negotiating with you to buy for $15,000.
And you feel like a genius.
So I do think that you're right, Ari.
If there's definitely something with the energy you put out, let's just summarize it at that.
You know what I mean?
So let's get some business.
Enough of the high-frequency vibrational stuff.
I know you guys don't want to hear that shit.
You guys are like, man, how do I make money?
Hey, that's our stuff.
High-frequency vibrational.
That's how you make money.
That's it.
Hey, that part.
Don't give away the secrets, man.
You make money by sliding in other domains.
That's where you get the top dollar for your names.
Yeah, right.
No, but all jokes aside, a lot of interesting stuff, a lot of news going on.
Let's talk about .io.
So I don't know.
What do you guys think about this .io situation?
The summary is there's a nation called Mauritius, which is on the east coast of Africa.
It's an island east of Madagascar.
So when you look at the map of Africa, there's kind of like another small mass of land, and
Mauritius is usually not on that map.
It's a very small island nation of about 1.2 million people, and they have a bunch of
different islands that are scattered around it.
And, you know, they've been under British rule.
And they just recently reached an agreement that, you know, the British are going to give
them their independence, kind of like how other countries have had their own independence
from the British, the French, or whatever, right?
Especially in that part of the world.
And, you know, the British Indian Ocean Territory was what led to .io.
So there's a standard, there's an ISO standard that every country has its abbreviations.
They have these codes.
The U.S. is obviously .us.
The U.K. is .uk.
You know, Antigua Island, Anguilla Island, excuse me, is AI.
And so on and so forth.
CO is Colombia.
Mexico is Amex.
Australia is AU.
We can go, we can do a quiz on this stuff one day.
And we'll see who knows all their, all their CCTLDs.
But now that this island is no longer going to exist, it's all going to be Mauritius.
The speculation and reasonable speculation that that means that .io could be phased out.
But there's a reference when Yugoslavia split into different countries, Croatia and all these other countries now.
There's no longer Yugoslavia.
There used to be a .yu, an ICANN phased out .yu.
So it's not just ICANN.
There's also IANA, which oversees CCTLDs.
And there's the ISO standard, right?
I read this in a Compute World article, which you guys can, I'll share that on the Jumbotron.
And, you know, everything has to be sort of aligned.
It's not just some random stuff.
It's not just, oh, we're going to pick this CCTLD code.
Those CCTLD codes are part of an international standard, right?
You know, the U.S. is there.
We don't like U.S.
We want to use .am for America.
It doesn't work that way, right?
But the reality is .io has a lot of momentum, over 1.5 million sites, very well adopted.
And what will happen most likely is, you know, ICANN will have to make a ruling.
But they have these standards that they have to abide by.
And so one can speculate that there's a strong possibility that .io will be phased out.
Now, it doesn't mean that you're going to wake up tomorrow and your .io website or your business is going to be shut down.
It usually takes about five years from what happened in the past.
So with that being said, I want to get people's perspectives and views on this.
I just wanted to give you an overview of the facts.
What are you guys' thoughts on that?
Do you think that this makes .io speculative?
This makes .io, .io is not going anywhere?
Or what the fuck are we going to discuss this?
Because whatever we say doesn't really matter.
The thing is, like, they don't β I mean, the guidelines are there.
Standards are there.
But ICANN and other institutions, they don't have to go by them, right?
They don't β like, I mean, it's not set in stone that they need to.
They use those standards.
But, you know, in cases where, like, you'd say that the other one everyone has always talked about previously was .tv, right?
Because that's a very popular one.
And it's Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation that's, like, not sinking in the ocean, but the ocean is rising to it, right?
It's going to disappear by the end of the century, I think it is, right?
So what happens to that?
And, again β
It's sinking, right?
No, it's not sinking.
It's the oceans are rising, right?
Global warming.
So it's β yeah.
It's not going to be there.
Yeah, it's the same thing.
Same thing.
Yeah, it's looking like it's sinking.
But at the end of the day, it's like they don't need to deprecate them.
Like, I know with .su, the Soviet Union, they had β so they sunset it.
But, like, the sunset period is, like, it was something ridiculous, like 35 years or even more, right?
And so it's β and it wasn't from the end of the Soviet Union.
It was from when they made a decision, which was less than 20 years ago.
Yeah, about β that was part of the request of the Soviet Union, was what I read, right?
Yeah, and I think part of it is exactly that.
Like, is there demand for it?
Is there somebody who wants to keep on using it?
I think in the case of Yugoslavia, it was, like, the countries who were separating, like, they were, like, at war, right?
So there was nobody who was interested in keeping Yugoslavia as a nation.
So that was easier to sort of dissolve and deprecate.
And I don't know how long that lasted.
He says five years, and that makes sense.
But, you know, even, like, there's weird stuff like .eu, right?
.eu, they kicked out at all β anybody from the UK, now they can't use a .eu, right?
So there's certain rules that change a little bit here and there within the rules of the actual TLD itself.
But when it comes to ICANN, they can β there's wiggle room, right?
And if there's one and a half million domains of .io's that are out there, they're β look, ICANN is ICANN.
They do weird things sometimes.
But usually when it's stuff like this, they want stability for the Internet, right?
So I think the worst-case scenario that might happen is that at some point they might either β they'll either switch it over from, you know, the British sort of control to Mauritius control,
or they might go, well, this is no longer in the standards, but we're not going to deprecate it.
We'll make an exception, and we'll let this continue, but as an NGTLD, right?
Like, that β I don't think that's going to happen, but I think that would β
Yeah, but the thing is, not to cut you off, and that sounds like the positive outcome, I respect that,
but structure doesn't have a two-letter NGTLD or GTLD.
Correct.
There's usually three or more.
In terms of jurisdiction, from my understanding, and again, I'm not a dumb attorney or anything like that.
I'm just a guy who stupidly buys domains and has an addiction problem with it.
It has β what should I have, what, 150.ios, and I've sold a six-figure.io, and β
You're cutting out a lot.
Can you guys hear me?
Can you guys hear me?
Thanks for letting me know that.
No, we're good.
We're good against you.
Let me β okay, good.
So there's IANA, right?
IANA oversees CCCLDs, right?
The standard is called ISO 3166.
And because the British Indian Ocean Territory won't exist anymore,
I.O. is going to be removed from the ISO standard, right?
IANA CLDs are in sync with the country's ISO 3166 code.
Yeah, but the Indian Ocean Territories are already British, and now they'll be Mauritius.
So in theory, they might still say, well, it's a territory, but under different control, right?
So there are a lot of β
Yeah, yeah, hear me out.
Mauritius is already assigned .mu.
So from that country's β well, I guess you could say it's their right because they now own that territory.
They could easily say β and this is, again, why we talk about the risks with CCCLDs.
They could look at it like an Anguilla Island and say, oh, shit, we β you know, could β they could foolishly just phase it out.
Or they could say β they could maybe petition to keep it.
Now, what I do know about .io is .io, like other CCCLDs, they have the sovereign right to be managed by private entities, and I know that.
It's managed by Identity Digital, who bought out Affilius Network, which used to manage it.
And so I believe Identity Digital would do everything in their power to keep .io.
So I don't see how, you know, they're not comfortable or β
You're breaking up again.
But, yeah, just to jump on what you're saying while you hopefully reconnect.
Yeah, you're exactly right.
Again, I know people say ICANN is all this big, you know, organization that likes to have everything by the book exactly.
But, yeah, I do think β it wouldn't be up to Identity Digital to petition it,
but they would certainly petition β they would go to Mauritius and go, well, let's continue this contract.
We'll just put it under new β sort of new ownership.
I think it's now Mauritius, and Identity will run it for Mauritius, and so it'll be a seamless transfer.
Like, actually, nobody would know.
It's just that Identity Digital will be paying whatever fees or dividends or whatever it is, royalties, to Mauritius instead of the U.K., right?
So β
All right, let's just β let's paraphrase that with allegedly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You're back now.
I was going to say Matt was wanting to speak, but I'll β go ahead.
No, we can't.
We can just β you're coming in and out.
Matt, why don't you go ahead?
Michael, you want β Matt, go ahead.
Hey, guys.
Can you hear me all right?
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, I can hear you.
I'm calling from the airport.
Flight's delayed, so I figured I'd join the domainer spaces.
Nothing better to do on a Saturday.
The IO thing, I think it's interesting.
I actually think it's a complete nothing burger.
And, you know, I think that β
Yeah, for now.
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what.
I'll tell you what.
We'll put a blog post out.
I mean, I just think the pressure for ICANN to maintain .io is going to be super strong.
Matt, can you guys hear Matt?
Okay, we're good.
Yeah, we're good.
I think they have to maintain it.
I'm not hearing Matt.
Yeah, I can hear him.
I'll tell you when he's done.
Yeah, I think they have to maintain it.
And I'll tell you what, and you guys are going to be the first people to hear this on the spaces.
If ICANN deprecates .io, Unstoppable will map it one-to-one to .io on the blockchain for the owners, and we'll get rid of renewal fees.
So no matter what, there will be a .io in the future, and it's in ICANN's court.
I mean, that would be a huge loss for them, and we would definitely pick it up.
And I don't think we're the only people that would do it, but I think we would probably have the best system for it.
So, you know, I just don't see there's any place where .io would get dropped by ICANN.
I don't think Community Digital would want it to be dropped, so I'm sure they'll work it out.
But I'm just saying, you know, ICANN's not the only game in town, and they have to respond to competitive pressure.
And if they're not going to deliver TLDs that domainers want, then we'll find other ways to get it done.
Well, yeah, but I mean, the thing is, the problem is, you know, not to get into this whole debate again, but, like, the IOs currently resolve, right?
That would be the main thing, is that they want to continue to resolve.
I think you're right.
I think it's nothing.
I don't see them allowing one and a half million domains to kind of just disappear, right?
Like, they're meant to be there for stability, and stability does mean structure and regulations, however, also means not taking things away from people who have it there.
So I'm pretty confident they'll have an exception there.
It's just a question of how they'll actually, like, legally handle it.
But I think for the end users, it won't make any difference.
Is she back?
You know, Michael, can you just take over for now?
I'll be back in about a minute.
I got to go somewhere much better.
My Wi-Fi is β I think my modem is fried.
So I'm just going to take a walk.
No worries.
Okay.
So β
Yeah, but β
Yeah, I can hear you guys.
From what I'm hearing, from what I'm hearing, good input.
My first thought was this is a nothing burger as well.
You guys may know more about this than I do because it's something that I don't pay too much attention to.
I don't have any .io domains.
But it definitely sounds like β I guess we'll see.
We'll see where it's going.
What were the thoughts on, like, how many people have .ios as well as their .coms and their .nets?
Or is this mostly people that are on .ios that don't have .coms or are built out on .ios?
Any thoughts on that?
Yeah, I think it's mostly, you know, the people who are most concerned are the people who are using it as their primary domain.
There's people out there who use it as a primary domain.
Like, nobody wants to use iofirst from .com, but sometimes it's the only affordable option for people starting off, right, if they truly want, like, a one-word.
So, yeah, there certainly are people who are using it.
And it's β you know, over time, it's becoming a little bit more viable extension.
You know, it's still not β grandma and grandpa still don't know what the heck that is when you tell it to them.
But, you know, there are people in tech and many people who are technologically inclined that, you know, I'm starting to understand that there are domains other than .com.
You know, it's still an uphill battle to get the 100%, but it's β you know, there are people who use it.
I don't invest in, you know, most ccTLDs other than β actually, it's not true.
I got in a little bit with .cos, but I kind of stopped.
I'm down to about 10.
And I have about maybe 10 .tvs, but, you know, my portfolio is 4,000 domains.
So, not too heavy into ccTLDs.
But there certainly are some that are turning around.
Dave, you heard the news recently that Candy.com is rebranding to Candy.io.
This is something they might have to rethink if the .io extension gets retired, even though I don't think it's going to get retired.
But imagine that.
Imagine switching to the .io, getting rid of your .com, and then suddenly the I.O. is not going to be a viable alternative anymore.
They might be a little worried over there.
Probably not too worried, but they're probably thinking about it right now.
Yeah.
Yeah, I just don't think anybody β sorry, I don't think anybody is going to go β and I saw that too, but I don't know who's going to go from a .com to β
forward to their .io, but I don't know that anybody would drop their .com.
My guess is that they have a very, very interested buyer at a price that's probably more than what the business is worth, right?
So, oftentimes, there'll be that as well, because you're right.
It makes no sense to go to the I.O., especially for, like, Candy, right?
Candy β if you're selling Candy, like Aqua Candy, and you're not using it β if you're using it as a tech brand, you can use Candy as a tech brand, right?
It's a brandable domain.
I don't think they've got any money.
That's why they're selling, and it's a good time.
Or Candy.io or Candy.com, whatever they call themselves, they're an NFC company.
Yeah, exactly.
And the NFC space is in the dumps right now.
Exactly.
So, I think β
We all know they paid a decent amount of money for that domain name.
So, there could be a way that they look at that name as a way to put in some capital infusion.
Yeah.
And in the web through the world, it's .io, you can argue, is just as strong as a .com.
Yeah, definitely.
I say this because most of the marketplaces, even when they acquire .com, it forwards to the .io, OpenSea, MetaMask, and many other examples.
So, it could have been a smart plan on their end to look at an asset that could be replaced for some cash.
Yeah.
I think it was a wise move, right?
I don't have any IOs, but basically, now's a good time to be buying them because it will just get β
But, yeah, no, but back to this .io thing, I think we're all in agreement that it would be unfortunate.
And I agree with Matt that it's sort of a nothing burger, at least for now.
I think what will end up happening is, you know, how does it affect .io as an investment?
Do you see more brands shelving out or more end users going, I'm willing to pay half a million dollars for .io now?
Prices are down.
It's going to be a watch and see.
Prices are down.
They'll have got candy for really cheap, probably six months ago, a year ago.
And it's β remember, IOs got a really strong community, so β and it is tech, and the reason why I'm on them.
Can you guys hear me?
Yep.
Yeah, we can hear you.
Oh, yeah.
Can you hear Ryan?
I don't think you can hear Ryan.
Can you hear Ryan?
Can you hear me?
No, I can't.
I can't.
I think I'm going to lie.
It doesn't show me Ryan.
Yeah, Ryan's been talking on top of you, and you've been talking on top of him for the last minute or so.
No, no, it's all good.
It's all good.
It kind of made sense a little bit.
It almost sounded like you knew each other were there, but I kind of got the gist of it that, yeah.
No, Ryan's β
What's going on with X today, man?
Come on.
This man's making flying cars and abandoning Twitter.
Go ahead, Ryan.
Oh, no.
I was just going to say, like, the IOs got a really strong community, right?
Same as stocks and shares.
Stuff goes up.
Stuff goes down.
News is a big indicator of value.
And IOs got a really strong community.
The reason mum and pups don't know about it is because they're not tech people.
Candy.com will have been liquidated out.
It'll have been done 18 months ago, the plan.
And they'll have got candy.io at a really good price.
So, for me, when there's fear in the market or blood on the streets, there's always a good time to buy because IO will definitely be safe.
They're not going to let it collapse, right?
It just moves from Britain to β back to where it should have been originally.
So, yeah, no.
And NFT and crypto are dumpsters anyway.
The whole industry is a dumpster.
So, go on an IO or an XYZ.
Happy days.
They don't really understand domains that much.
IO, they do, but not XYZ.
Oh, go ahead.
No, I just switched phones.
So, I think it's going to be better now.
But if I caught up to what Ryan said, we're kind of like in sync in the candy.io situation.
But my question was, do you guys see this as this news of the speculative, unstable nature of .io now?
Do you think that it would affect .io sales?
Do you see companies, more companies being concerned like, oh, maybe we shouldn't buy a .io or build on a .io?
The actual irony is that I don't even think most end users are even aware of what's going on, right?
Well, eventually they will be.
I mean, it's becoming β
Yeah, maybe 5%.
I mean, look at all the issues.
I'd be more actually worried right now about .ai than .io, right?
.ai is run by one person, he's changing the rules on the fly to squeeze out money here and there, hiding the who is information.
You know, there's a lot of stuff going on there that, again, countries are allowed to do what they want to do.
But, you know, if you're playing ball in their country, you have to apply β abide by their rules.
And even if their rules change, like, from minute to minute or year to year, right?
So, I.O. β sorry, AI has shown a history of changing rules as they go along.
Plus, there's other rules that are really serious that they haven't started enforcing yet, right?
Like, you can't have anything to do with gambling.
You can't have anything to do with crypto.
You can't have anything to do with cannabis.
And even if you β your domain isn't involved with that, as a person, you can't register stuff.
So, they have a lot of rules.
And, yeah, it's the type of rules where you'll think, yeah, they'll probably never enforce that.
But, like, what if one day they do, right?
What if one day, you know, that one person gets booted out of control of the TLD and somebody else comes in who's like, well, no, I'm for the government.
I think these domains should be for our citizens.
Anybody who's not a citizen and has a domain, now you're off.
Your domains get cancelled, right?
They can do that.
Bet.ai nearly sold something like six months ago for $350,000.
And then it fell through legals because they found out that you can't basically gamble on a .ai.
So, basically, it's too β there's always going to be a sweetheart to the con, right?
But .ai is just β it's ubiquitous, right?
It's just not going anywhere.
And it's a pump-and-dump scheme as well.
That's the other thing.
Why do you think it's a pump-and-dump?
Well, because a bit like, you know, on Twitter, you get like .si now, superintelligence, right?
And ultimately, AI is going to β
That's a nothing, that's a nothing by the β
No, but you get these domains, they pump them up and it's like β and it gets traction and other domains buy in because you can β you know, you're getting in cheap.
But the reality of the situation is AI is going to become IA anyway.
You know, intelligence automation where humans are in control.
It was coined by IBM in 2014.
And I have β I had IA on my books.
And we were turning down like 8 million, 10 million, 12 million.
And the reality is AI is going to be gone pretty much, I think, in the next 12, 18 months to be replaced by humans at the forefront of it.
So, you're saying artificial intelligence in general is just going through a hype phase?
No, it's a transitionary period.
It's going to become intelligence automation, which is essentially lots of AI systems governed by a human.
So, AI is a technological solution to mass computation, right?
So, if you think about the benefits of AI, where it works well is, say, for example, if you can map out your ambulances within a given territory, you can get to an accident quicker.
And in politics, it works really well because the politician can't speak to every person in the whole country.
But AI can collate the data and then push it up the chain so that people can make more informed decisions.
So, they talk about AGI.
But that's β the reality is that's very unlikely to happen.
However, lots of AI systems working together.
It's called IA, intelligence automation.
It was coined by IBM in 2014.
And IBM never really get it wrong.
But, you know, AI has been around since 1930 or something.
It's nothing particularly new.
It's just that there's mass awareness of it.
A bit like VR.
You know, VR has been around since β well, they tried to crack it in the 90s, but they couldn't.
But it's getting pretty close.
And when you team these things up together with quantum computing, the future is looking pretty cool.
But it's not what people think it will be.
So, are you saying that, in your opinion, a year or two from now, the sole.ai naming trend, specifically to domains, will die out?
Well, I mean, they're going to have some kind of legacy.
But the reality is that AI is ubiquitous.
So, why would you run off a .ai?
It doesn't make sense.
You want the com.
Every company is going to want the com.
You know, out of the 10,000 companies that have started in AI, how many are going to survive?
Yeah, but there will always be β here's the thing.
Like, in theory, when it comes to, like, new technologies, I kind of agree with you that most of the time, they get β the technology gets folded into the company, and the company still has their own name.
It's not like company AI, right?
However, I think the one difference with AI is the irony that there's so many companies out there that are trying to pretend to be AI that aren't actually AI technology, right?
They're just fancy algorithms or whatever it is because everyone's saying, well, anything that has, like, you know, some kind of logical sort of flow thing, and where they're pulling data from sort of databases, well, that's now AI, right?
But as long as they're updating the databases, but that's not really AI, but I think a lot of companies still want that perception.
So I think, like, as a rule of thumb for technology and advancements, yes, normally the term gets deprecated and, like, you know, like all these, like, wireless technologies, like 3G, all of a sudden nobody calls their companies 3G or 5G or even what the next one is, right?
It happens in the beginning.
Some people use it for marketing, and that's why there's a buzz.
And then, as you said, there's that initial gambler phase of demeanors who are coming in and trying to, you know, guess the next big thing, and, you know, oftentimes they mostly get it wrong.
However, I think with AI, I do think there'll be some staying power because, again, there's a lot of companies out there who aren't real AI but who want to pretend to be, and the best way to pretend to be is put it in your brand name, right?
So I do think, as in brands, it will stay.
What you're saying technology-wise is not necessarily untrue, right?
I don't really know how much it will be, you know, changed and whatever it is.
I think it's here to stay, but it will evolve, as you said, and the way people see it is a little bit different than how it will turn out.
But I do think there'll be a lot of companies out there who want to pretend to be AI, and they're going to use AI in their names more than the real AI companies.
Remember, there's only three suppliers.
Yeah, I can't remember who was telling us this last week that a lot of companies are finding it very difficult to raise money with a .ai now, where, you know, people are starting to look at that as a gimmick.
And I think a lot of VCs and investors are starting to understand the consequential threats of using a .ai from a security perspective because of those rules from the registry and other factors.
But I don't know how true that is, but I think .ai.
It's very true, but it's not just AI, right?
That's always been an issue for people.
The venture capitalists, they always say, you need the .com.
Not only do you need the .com, you need the root.com, right?
You need, like, candy.com.
You don't want to invest in something that's like greatcandy.com.
So it's really, once you're getting into talking millions of dollars in venture capital, they know that a good domain is really imperative for growth and for, especially if you want to get word of mouth out and all that stuff.
So it's not just the AI.
It's everything.
But yes, AI, even more so because of what you're saying.
And well, I said it a little bit last week and this week too.
The dangers of the rules and there's only one person operating it and what's going to happen in the future and they're changing the who is and all this other stuff.
So, yes, even worse with AI, I would say, but it's still with all the other ones.
So I'm assuming, Ryan, you don't invest in .ai names.
Ryan, do you invest in any .ai names or you stay away?
No, stay away.
Com's the gold standard.
Can you go, Zoe?
Because we operate like a bank.
So basically, it's only comms and UKs because we're in the UK and we want the market to do well.
But we will broaden out.
We were in discussion with a couple of people to come on as analysts.
So we probably will venture out into other extensions.
But, you know, com, net, org, IO, but not AI.
No, not for me.
There's only, remember, so the biggest thing that's going to happen next year, we're launching OR.com as a hosting company.
So pretty much going toe-to-toe with GoDaddy.
And the difference between us and GoDaddy is that GoDaddy have gone down the AI route because they can't hit the returns for investors.
So that's why they scrapped all their staff and that's why they've gone down Aero.
But the reality of the situation is we'll go in with humans.
I don't know if Ryan is speaking, but I can't hear anybody.
Yeah, he's talking.
I'm talking.
So, yeah, we're going in with humans because of my art business challenges.
You know, having quality designers, coders, SEO, all that kind of good stuff.
People need it.
We can help them grow their business.
And one of the biggest things that OR.com is going to do is spin up a shitload of AI servers.
So we've got, like, Llama, Llama 3, Midjourney, all the other good stuff because businesses next year are going to go nuts for it.
And it costs about, it's probably about three grand to spin up an AI server because you need GPU and stuff.
But literally every company next year will have their own AI.
People have been talking about it for a while.
Probably next year it's going to happen.
So we're a bit ahead of the curve.
And it's exciting when you run your own AI server.
It's really cool because it learns.
It can save a shit ton of time.
And that's why when I talk about us IPO-ing for 100 billion, it's because technology is here.
I've watched GoDaddy for 20 years and just sat back and waited for this moment for technology to be here where you don't need as many people because AI can list it for you.
These are good points.
We've moved from .io to .ai, and it's sounding like, again, we circle back to .com, and it sounds like everybody's in agreement on that, that .com is really what you want to have.
Adam was mentioning the importance of the .com for if you're going to IPO.
And then that's something I've mentioned as well for the MX value and the data leakage.
So that's something, again, I think a lot of people don't consider.
But if you don't have the .com, you risk losing data.
You risk somebody getting catch-all email on your company's email.
So those are all important things.
And on the server situation, I think that's pretty fascinating.
I just started looking into it.
It's not β I know it's not a domain topic, but having our own AI servers, I think, is going to be pretty phenomenal.
Ish, is that you making all that noise?
Yes, sir.
But can you elaborate on that, having your own AI servers?
Well, for my case, so you guys see I've been making β you guys got on me last week because I didn't have any billboards.
So I decided to get back making some billboards and the video billboards I started making.
So like most people, I'm buying credits, and I was burning through the credits fast.
So I thought, well, let me find out where β I'm buying credits, so where am I buying them from?
And then I find out that he's licensing an API from somewhere else.
So I went to the somewhere else and then just started seeing, well, can I just license an API to myself?
So that's not necessarily my server, but that's at least getting closer.
So where there's going to probably be a situation where then I can have my own video AI server and just kind of computate that stuff all the time without having to pay any credits to anybody else.
Yeah, it just comes down to what kind of business you want to build because I've spoken to a few people and they're spinning up servers and whatnot, and that's fine.
It's no different to back in the day as a company, you might have your own server or you use GoDaddy or something.
Just remember there's only three suppliers.
There's OpenAI, there's Copilot, and there's Llama from Facebook or Meta, whatever they're called.
But the reality situation is there's three suppliers, there'll never be any more than three.
Apple's done a deal with, well, I suppose you've got Google as well, but Apple's done a deal, it must be with Google.
So there's only four suppliers, and thankfully Meta are making it open source.
So, you know, anything along those lines.
It's a world of wrappers.
Everyone's using somebody else's product and repackaging it.
Exactly, that's life, that's business, isn't it?
Unless you, exactly, yeah, that's pretty much business.
Yeah, but AI just takes us to the next level.
And I think, how does that all fit into domaining in terms of, like, content and stuff like that?
What are your thoughts on that, Ryan?
But how can we leverage AI to be more profitable?
Yeah, so, I mean, so, for example, with us, what we're doing is things like Afternic allow you to now capitalise the domain name, right?
It's super simple with a prompt to go, give me the root words of the domain, store it in a database, and then you don't need any humans to do any work.
You know, we have a bunch of categories that we can go in and do.
We ask it for colours, we ask it what niche it would fit into, and then you take all that data, and then suddenly you fire it through when the world catches up.
And then, you know, then SquatHelp or Atom don't have a product anymore, because that was their product, because humans, it was hard.
But the key thing here is what I would do, and what we do quite a lot of with work, is just we're always researching.
We're always like, cool, this is the latest thing, let's get it up, let's play around with it, let's get good at it.
Like anyone, remember, you're going to need a domain name to go anywhere in the internet, that's not going to change anytime soon.
You might get Web3 and whatnot, but nothing's going to change with the domain name, because that's just, it's too intrinsically, otherwise, how else do you access anything?
Ryan, let's talk about domain parking.
It's a space that you've declared that you want to innovate in.
Are you leveraging AI for that?
Well, we will do in terms of analysing traffic and working out where the traffic should go.
And then stuff like, so there's three parts to it.
There's like for like, what's there already, but using affiliate links, so booking.com, whatever it might be.
And that's one system.
The second system is lead gen.
So if you go to mortgageadvisors.com, you'll see an example of one of our lead gen sites.
That's doing really, really well.
And then the third part is domain UI.com.
What's the URL, sorry?
Mortgageadvisors.com.
Mortgageadvisors.com, got it.
Yeah, so it's lead gen, and essentially we can spin up a logo, we can tweak things on the form.
And essentially, it's just pure lead gen, because what we realized, so this isn't something new.
I've been working on parking for like maybe a year now or 18 months, just proof of concept with a small handful of domains.
And then I was due to start in January to June to get large scale, so 50,000, 100,000 domains, proof of concept, or proof to.
But I started early, so we'll probably have 10,000 active domains automated by the end of the year.
So we're slightly ahead.
But the third one is that domain UI.com, which is essentially building a store on a domain that's semi-automated.
So it's spinning up content for you.
It's doing your title and description.
It's doing your logo.
It's product picking.
And between those three things, the whole β well, everyone knows, right, that domain parking has been a shit show for years.
It works for the parking companies.
It works for traffic arbitrage.
But for 99% of people, it doesn't work.
But there is really strong brand recognition, because everyone has seen a landing page.
So if you tap into that, I mean, we're going to absolutely crush it, because it hasn't been innovated for in 20 years.
And then when you innovate against it, you actually realize you've got a product to go up against Google Ads.
Yeah, why do you think that there hasn't been that much innovation in parking, even though the output has been in a decline?
Like, you know, companies like Botus and ParkLogic and the β
Yeah, well, you needed a Google feed, right?
So the only way of getting one was to buy a company that had one.
They've sat back.
Like, the reason often people don't innovate is because people are happy in terms of the suppliers.
They're all in cahoots, but everyone's making β has made a shit ton of money.
They don't really want to R&D it or β why would you add anything new if you're doing 50 or 100 million a year?
Why would you even bother?
And other than Frank Schilling, I don't know anyone who's actually innovated in the domain world at scale.
You know, and GoDaddy bought him out.
So I don't β and it comes down to the fact that domaining as a business is very profitable and it's very easy.
You can work two hours a day or two hours a week.
You know, you can have 3,000 domains or 100 domains.
You can outbound.
There's so many opportunities for an easy life.
When you get into building platforms and your servers, you're into DNS, you're into a whole range of skill sets that domainers typically don't have to do it on mass scale at a really high-quality level.
And everyone I speak to says, are you going to sell to GoDaddy and all that?
And the reality of the situation is GoDaddy is β basically, I really like them, but they're dead in the water.
Same as web.com.
They're dead in the water because they have to hit 18%, 20%, 22% returns for their investors.
And they're not β that's why they're flogging out their portfolios.
So, yeah, it's really interesting what's going to happen in the next 18 months because there is innovation like AJ's Domain Outbounding, Paul's Domain UI, Pseudos.
You know, but these are all quite small entities.
Even Pseudos, great idea, but you get it now in Dynadot.
It's all integrated because it makes sense.
And it was just a shame that Dan sold out because they β I don't β well, basically, he wasn't a domainer, whatever his name was.
And, yeah, there's going to be, like, you know, Titan Research.
They're on par with us in terms of data analysis, and that's Richard Lau.
But it's super interesting to see how things go.
But no one β even saw .com, right?
They've got massive knowledge of selling domains, but they've put it on a subdomain, so they're never going on TV.
They're never going to really go toe-to-toe with GoDaddy.
Well, let's talk to Matt.
I don't know if Matt can still speak because while we're talking about innovation, you guys also built a marketplace, a UD marketplace.
And you're very big on tokenization of domain names.
Are you able to chime in on that?
Yeah.
Yeah, and I apologize.
I'm at the airport.
There's a lot of background.
But I'll be honest.
We just got our ICANN license this summer, and we're still on the steep, steep learning curve for how the domain industry works.
And it's very different than the Web3 crypto domain industry.
But I do think there's opportunity for innovation, especially on the secondary marketplace.
We β I think it's great that Dan.com has mentioned.
My team is coming through Dan.com.
They're talking to previous Dan.com customers.
What was the best thing about Dan?
What are the features we need to replicate?
And we're going to try to get something that's as close to Dan.com as quickly as possible for domainers.
And we're going to then, you know, continue to improve on that.
So I got a lot of great ideas on this spaces from you guys using AI to generate websites easily for parking pages, for instance.
I mean, that seems like a great thing that we could take a look at next year.
So we're hoping to bring innovation to the space-ish, but we are in learning mode right now.
That's why I'm here listening to you guys.
So I'm going to jump because it's so loud here and let you guys continue the conversation.
But I've loved it so far.
All good, man.
Thanks for chiming in.
I think there's a new marketplace that's emerging, or two of them.
There's Aftermarket, which acquired domains.io.
Sorry about that.
I'm taking a walk.
There's a fire truck driving by.
Yeah.
And then there's also Domains Easy, which was announced this week.
What do you guys know about those two platforms?
I mean, Aftermarket sounds good, right?
But the thing is, you don't need landing pages from the marketplace.
What you need is advertising and marketing.
So Domain.io is nothing particularly special technology-wise.
The other one you mentioned, Easy Domains.
I mean, you know, are they going to do any marketing or advertising?
I'm not sure.
And from our perspective, we've built Web2 platforms, and we're going to be on the blockchain.
So we're going kind of, I guess, the opposite of Michael.
Because you should be on ETH and AVAX and all the rest of it.
But it's just interesting which way around do you attack it.
Yeah.
If you go to NoonPost for the last 10 years, every month, there's somebody new who's coming up with the latest and greatest marketplace, right?
And there's nothing new there.
And you can have the best features and all that stuff.
But, you know, as Ryan mentioned, what really counts most are eyeballs and distribution, right?
And that's a fortunate thing where AFNIC has the biggest positioning there.
So whether they're a good platform or not, technically speaking, it doesn't matter because they have the syndication, right, to all these other registrars, including GoDaddy.
So that's where you need to be.
You need to be where the eyeballs are.
I'm just not even convinced by that because we've got marketplaces and there's been this rhetoric around pricing of domains.
What happens when you just price your domain is that they circumvent your platform and they go to the contact page.
And I know because we get for every one inquiry, we price them for 18 months or something.
For every one person that bought a domain, we get five people trying to circumvent it by going through the contact page.
So I'm not convinced the AFNIC network is actually that strong.
I think it's just a bit of smoke and mirrors, a bit like pricing of domains.
Yeah, that's the real crazy thing is that it's always been frustrating me is like what percentage of AFNIC sales is through syndication and what percentage is through the landing pages, right?
And they do tell people certain things, but that's the real black box.
That's why I'm so frustrated because it's like I don't know whether it's worth my while to go and do my own landing pages, right, as it might be, right?
And I think the real unfortunate answer is that depending on the type of portfolio you have and the type of domains you have, you might have a different answer depending on your portfolio, right?
So, you know, if you're selling higher-end domains, people tend to be more knowledgeable, not always, but, you know, tendency, and they will go to, you know, the who is and all that other stuff and try to find you out because they always want to deal with the end user to try and get the biggest deal, right?
They know that if you don't pay a commission, well, if you don't pay the commission, you're willing to give them a little bit of a discount, and they might also haggle with you, right?
So, yeah.
The one thing that AFNIC has, or more importantly, GoDaddy has, right, is brand recognition.
So when you're trying to sell something, you want the process to be as frictionless as possible.
So, yes, you can build your own landers.
I mean, we're going to release a marketplace for free because now I reckon you could build a marketplace in the weekend.
You've got Stripe integration via API.
You've got PayPal integration via API.
It's super simple on escrow.com to integrate those things, and they're all trusted payment methods.
So that's step one.
Step two is just giving the, for someone that doesn't know about domains and they're buying it for the first time or spending 10 grand or whatever it is, they just like GoDaddy because GoDaddy is, you know, not necessarily advertising domains, but certainly everyone knows GoDaddy, and that's super expensive and super hard to achieve.
Yeah, but I wonder what percentage of sales come through GoDaddy and what percentage comes through other marketplaces that aren't necessarily household names.
I mean, the biggest one for me, obviously, you've got MLS as well, but the biggest, I think, I believe the biggest sales platform is Network Solutions, as in multiples of X over what everyone else does, which I was quite surprised by.
So, wow, me too.
Yeah.
Yeah, I know, I know, because we bought a large portfolio from buy domains last year, so we, and also I know the private equity company or the big investors behind web.com and also GoDaddy, they're basically private equity.
And, yeah, it's just interesting to see what happens in the next year.
Let me ask you guys all a question.
If there was a wish list of features that you would like to see on Afternic, assuming you were having a conversation with them directly, what would that be?
For me personally, I wish they could have a lot more transparency.
You know, I feel like, you know, there's a lot of data out there that we don't have access to, you know, I don't know if it's rightfully so is the right way to phrase it, but I would suspect that a lot of their emails and their outbound efforts end up in a spam folder.
And that obviously impacts conversions in a negative manner.
And so I loved the Dan feature where you could have that engagement directly with a prospect.
And I think that, you know, there are talks about them bringing that back, but they can't bring that back soon enough.
But the rest of you guys, what are your thoughts in terms of, like, what features Afternic is missing?
I think that was absurd that they made the switch without having the features ready before.
You know, ready to go as the switch was made for, you know, be able to manage your own leads.
You think that was probably intentional, right?
It could only be intentional because otherwise it's just bonkers, right?
It just makes no sense.
But because it's a big feature for many, many domain investors is that they want to deal with their own leads, especially since, again, like, I don't want to paint every Afternic broker in the same boat because there are some that are truly really good brokers.
But there's also a lot of horrible ones, right?
And that's what happens when you have, like, 100 brokers working for a company, or I don't know how many they have, but, like, it's certainly more than anywhere else.
Remember, the biggest problem with GoDaddy, right, is that they're not transparent.
They're representing buyer and seller to get the most money out of the deal.
The data that you want, and the only slight issue I've got with domainers is that they feel that they should leave as little money on the table as possible, right?
So when I build a platform, support's key.
I mean, we have an amazing platform that hasn't launched because we need a domain for it.
But on Domain Managed, we've got auto outbounding.
We've got sales, sale pages.
We've got the data we're going to give people is IP address, name, email, telephone.
We've got Salesforce integration.
So the data we're gathering is massive.
There's a company called Leeds Forensics, which essentially, if it's a business, it follows everything.
And the data that you get is nuts.
At the London Domain Summit, we spoke to a company that essentially works with mobile providers.
So when someone goes onto our website, pops in their mobile phone number, we're getting a credit score if they're a business.
So we know straight away whether it's a legitimate opportunity or not.
So all of that data is going to be in our platform.
And the biggest feature that no one ever talks about is the make-offer process.
So the make-offer process, we've got, at the moment, you've always had a two-column layout.
We've got something super cool that basically, based on your offer, it's going to spin in a video.
It's going to spin in a survey.
It's going to help you, if you know nothing about domains, understand why the value of the domain is the price it is without giving them the price.
It will just keep fucking around with them.
So they have to keep, like, they'll do a little quiz.
Then they'll do a game.
Then they'll learn a bit more.
Then they may or may not increase their offer.
But that stuff, we've only put a bit of traffic through it.
But when we finally get our domain, whichever one it is, there's three or four, I just don't even think you've realized the innovation that's already kind of happened.
The way I'm imagining it, that sounds actually cool.
I'm not sure if the way I'm imagining it is the way it's going to be implemented, but there's potential there.
And so going back to the afternoon issues, the lead center, I thought, was fantastic, right, in theory.
And they built a structure for it, but they're not using it.
The brokers barely put any real tangible information in there, and the line codes are just horrible.
Like, there's one code that they use.
It's like client call logged or something like that, right?
And, like, I reached out to the brokers once.
I was great.
So what did the person say when they called?
And it's like, no, no, I reached out to them, and I didn't reach them, right?
So that one line code could mean anything from the client was really excited and called in, it's like a mega hot lead, to the broker just responded to somebody who punched in random numbers in the form and didn't get through, right?
Like, if you're being transparent, you would record the call, and the seller would have access to the call if you're being transparent.
And I think if you, in the next week or so, there's quite a bit going up on DNWE, and that is like, that's really, really, really cool.
I'm really pleased in the intermediary stage of DNWE before we launch the app and the rebrand.
It's super cool.
You can list domains for auction publicly or privately.
We've got the portfolio side going in.
It's going to be nuts, and the design is looking really good.
So anyway, DNWE is a bit of a sidestep, but again, we can pull in that data so that people wouldn't see it and stuff.
So the biggest thing here is you need to think of our company as a hedge fund.
Yeah, sorry about that.
I accidentally hit the mute button.
Go ahead, Ryan.
No, I was just saying, so we have like 14 businesses, which are super complicated over the last couple of years.
We've whittled them down to two, right?
And so one business is a hedge fund.
We use proprietary data to trade domains, buy and sell digital assets, so websites, social media, and the whole lot.
That's very cash generative.
And then we have a tech platform where all our marketplaces are and all this good stuff that we've built and haven't quite released for different reasons.
And that's the bit we'll IPO on the tech.
And we're going to give away all the information because essentially, why wouldn't you?
Because if you want to be empowered to negotiate your own deals, why wouldn't you have that?
Why wouldn't you have the sale?
You know, if you want us to broke your domains, why wouldn't you be allowed to hear the conversation we've had with the clients?
Yeah, I think that transparency is a very attractive feature.
The lack of transparency is a bit frustrating.
But I really think that, you know, the key thing here is, you know, if we had a wish list again, what would you guys like to see?
You know, so more transparency, what else?
Because we all agree that it's not perfect, right?
I mean, you should only represent one party.
So, for example, on any of our platforms that are publicly facing, we represent the seller.
We're very, very clear about that.
So we'll push out.
If you want to hire a broker, it will be media options or it will be e-naming or it will be grit brokerage or it will be someone, SOAR, whoever it is, don't care.
But that transparency is key and it's fundamental.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Adam, what would you like to see as an improvement from Afternic or other marketplaces?
Well, Afternic is in a league of its own for things that need improvement.
Just fixing the bugs would be great or having working checkouts.
But that's a different issue.
I think if you take a lot of the different marketplaces, they all have a lot of good options that they all could use.
Like SAW, you know, is pretty new.
I really like all the information that SAW gives.
And they do have a chatbot which gets more information.
I don't really know how effective that is, but it's kind of a neat idea.
One of the things I've found when using these services is if you list your own names, for some reason you get a lot more spam, like people just sending junk offers.
And I didn't get that as much with Afternic and even Dan.
So I guess there's kind of like a little gateway that they have to get to to validate it compared to a lot of the other services.
I just recently started playing around with Domain Easy.
As you mentioned earlier, I tweeted about it.
I actually moved over some of my names to it, the ones that didn't have any prices attached to them.
They were just make offer.
A lot of it because I wanted to use my nifty little logos that I made a while back.
But, you know, the pages look pretty nice like that.
And I put it up last night, and I've already gotten two junk offers, you know, within like 12 hours.
And I usually don't get anywhere near that many.
And, you know, it has a CAPTCHA too.
So some way to weed out a lot of these bad offers, having the Afternic brokers, even though I prefer to self-broker, one of the good things is you kind of weed those out.
You don't have to deal with them.
They'll just, you know, determine it's a low quality score, and they won't really bother you with it.
So that would be something nice that a lot of the services could use.
But, I mean, the only reason, as I mentioned before, the only reason anyone uses Afternic is because of their partner network.
GoDaddy just gives you so many sales through their network.
If they didn't have that, people would be dropping it left and right.
That's why we kind of had the semi-golden age before they bought Dan, because you could use Dan as your lander, or actually any service as your lander, and you wouldn't really be penalized too much from using non-Afternic page.
And now we're kind of stuck with their commission increase that they give to you if you're not having your name servers pointed to them.
So we're kind of stuck.
It's like, are you going to make more with lower commission putting to your own pages?
Are you going to make more pointing to their pages and having a much larger audience viewing your domain names?
And I think for most domain names, the smaller price ones, you have to be on that network, because those are going to be people who are registering.
They're going to be impulse buying.
It's the bigger names that you can definitely have your own page.
And I definitely wouldn't suggest putting a high six-figure name, mid to high six-figure name on Afternic or GoDaddy, because most of the people are going to be coming to your landing page, because it's the big companies that are going to be wanting to buy that.
And they're not going to go to a registry path and think they can register it and go, oh, it's registered.
They're going to actually go to the domain name and see if it's in use, and then they'll see a landing page, a for sale page, and they'll go on from there.
So there's no reason to share your commission.
I mean, that could be hundreds of thousands of dollars of commission if you sell it to their page.
So it's a mix.
But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of improvement, and I hope there is some more innovation in the space.
And I do see a lot of new companies jumping up, so it's a good possibility we'll see something.
Go ahead, Ryan.
I was just going to say, I've got to shoot in five minutes just because I'm having dinner with my parents.
But I think Darpan's doing the future of distribution with Atom.
I think what they're doing is innovative, working with accountants, companies, house, that kind of thing.
That's the future of distribution.
And it'll be interesting to see where that lands.
The other thing I was going to say is the biggest spam leak that no one ever talks about is escrow.com.
We have private, we've got like five or six escrow.com accounts with private emails on, and yet we're getting spammed with domain sales.
So escrow.com are allowing a transaction to be set up.
I think they might have changed it recently, but the damage is already done.
But when you set up a transaction, you can get the seller's email.
And then crappy domainers are going in and setting up wonky transactions and then basically spamming the shit out of everyone.
So that's really escrow.com was, they may have fixed it when I last looked two weeks ago, may have.
But that's where all the spam is coming from.
But anyways, yeah, so I've got to shoot for dinner.
But it was great to tune in and I'll see everyone next week.
Yeah, we appreciate it, Ryan.
We'll catch you next week.
Um, again, um, just some updates.
Domain's Day in Dubai, November 5th.
Domain Expo, December 5th and 6th in Las Vegas.
Hopefully we'll catch you guys there.
Um, registration is live right now.
And, um, you know, it's going to be a great networking event.
Last year was inaugural.
And, you know, with the support of the likes of UD, we pulled it off.
We had 102 quality people there.
So it's a quality versus quantity thing.
Um, we expect to have 300 people this year.
I'm excited.
It's shaping up nicely.
You have a lot of moving conversations with GoDaddy, Cito, and a bunch of other companies
that have an interest in being there as well.
So, yeah, it's going to happen sooner than later.
Right?
So just try to make plans to be out in Vegas, um, and network with people that are going to
be there.
I know it's a tough time of the year.
People have, you know, a lot of travel in the fourth quarter, but, um, I think it's
a catalyst for your own personal growth and domain and for sure it's to be in those, in
those, um, type of atmospheres.
We got UFO.xyz, which has joined us.
Um, he knows a lot about these marketplaces.
Like, this is one guy that I, I hold backdoor conversations with and he's always given me
tips and insights on how to optimize after Nick.
I'll, I'll summarize.
What are your thoughts on this conversation, bro?
Rene, are you there?
Sorry.
Can you guys hear me?
Yeah, now we can.
Yep.
Sorry.
I was, um, I was on mute.
Sorry.
I think that sometimes, um, you know, if, you know, we all love domaining and we love,
you know, most of our, most of us are passionate about it and whether it's a side hustle or
your main income, I think sometimes you got to step back and say like, you know, domaining
can provide a great opportunity to make money.
Um, no matter if you're just flipping quick names or you're, you know, um, whatever your
strategy is.
So I think even myself, I've, as I've kind of evolved, I think I try not to complain as
much anymore and try to just say, you know what, given the rules and parameters and where
technology is and where we can list and the landers and you can drive yourself crazy.
And I've, trust me, I do it.
And sometimes where I'm like, look, just keep buying names at prices that work for you.
And I think name selection, and they always say money's made in the buy.
So I think all the other stuff is just noise.
And I think it's really hard.
And I always, you know, kind of just say, Hey, do it, you know, put your names here,
try to get as much, as much exposure as you can and just play within the rules we have.
Yes.
But I love to have other competition and other ways to do it.
And I think what Ryan is trying to build a building sounds great, but at the end of
the day, you know, we have to just go with what we have.
And I think sometimes people just, you know, it's easier to try to find excuses of why
things aren't working.
And, you know, a lot of times it's self-reflection.
Like I didn't have any sales for four or five weeks.
I went on vacation and I came back and I've sold three names for almost 30 grand just in
the last 10 days.
And my cost is 80 bucks for all those names.
So the point is, is that like, you know, I got those names for the great prices.
And yes, they're great ROIs.
They're great flips.
But, you know, I just grinded and grinded.
And then, you know, the ironic part is that two of those sales, one for 10 grand, one for
6,500, were through GoDaddy auction path.
OK, and I think people are sleeping on this is that when you list your names on Afternick,
by default, they'll float through the GoDaddy auction path.
Now, the mint offer is always 65% of your bin.
That's how the auction path works.
So if you have a name for 10K listed, it'll say mint offer 6,500 or there's a number you
can call.
Well, the last two sales I had recently, they called an offer lower than the mint offer.
But one of them, I got up to 10 grand from an opening offer of five and one was opening
offer of five and I got to 6,500.
But the point is, is that, you know, they didn't go to the landing page.
And these are end users that bought these names.
So a lot of this talk about landing pages and this, yeah, I have them all parked and I
have different things that I do.
But I mean, the GoDaddy auction path is producing a lot of sales from recently and also other
domainers on Twitter that I follow are on X.
It's picking up a lot.
Maybe that's because Afternick's search is gone now.
I don't know why.
But I don't care what someone's building.
But the fact that two end users found my names in the GoDaddy auction path, I mean, no one
talks about that really, but it's happening.
So and that's because I listed it through Afternick.
So I mean, is someone going to create like what my thing is, where would that end user
have gone to found these two names?
I can't think of any other place.
I don't know.
So no matter what you're building, you know, and I don't think that's the goal of a lot
of places.
Let me create my own auction place to people buy names.
But that's where I had my last two sales.
So yes, I can bitch about Afternick and GoDaddy.
Like, I just won a name today at auction through GoDaddy.
And I had the winning bid.
And then they said, oh, it's canceled.
The person renewed it.
Well, I'm like, I thought that wasn't supposed to happen once there's a bid in there.
So but again, I just moved on and I bid on other names instead.
But the main point is just keep your head down.
Try to stick to a system.
Try to refine it.
Try to make sure you're and I'm still learning every single day.
I'm pinging domainers, talking to people, learning.
And that's all you can do.
I mean, the sales will come as long as you have a system.
You know, you have an idea of what you want to sell your price, your name
and what you're acquiring them at.
Then the rest is just takes time and people finding your names, however that might be.
And you never know.
I got an offer through Daz.com.
One of my names are now.
It's pending payment.
Most people don't even know what Daz is.
I only know what Daz is because I have a couple of .in names and they're overseas.
And I can list my portfolio.
It takes two minutes in bulk and just put MinOffer on all my names.
And MinOffer is $500.
And I got an offer through there a couple of days after I did that.
And we're in negotiation now and it's settled and they're just paying.
So, I mean, like, you just never know where they're going to come from.
I mean, so it's just about exposure.
And Cito is, you know, gets me a couple of sales here and there.
And, you know, it's just that's kind of where I'm at.
I know it's just a long-winded answer.
But I don't have to have a wish list because everything I do want them to do,
they're such a big company that it's not an easy fix.
I love it.
I think one of the things that the main thing that I got from what you're saying is
it all comes down to name selection and pricing, right?
You got to have good names that people want to buy and you have to list them to sell.
I think that's just the key to it, right?
No matter what a platform does, no matter what the commissions payouts or ratio is,
if you have horrible names, you're not going to make any sales.
That's just the reality.
Yeah, like the people saying, I'm going to cut you off for just one second
because this is really important about people.
I've saw Domain Sherpa and other people say, who are they working for?
Is it you or the buyer?
And I've had some frank discussions with two different brokers recently
and I got some interesting answers.
And at the end of the day, you know, you tell them, you have to communicate with them.
On that one that I just sold for $7,500, the opening offer was $5,000.
I said, I'll take 5K, but try to give me $7,000 to $8,000.
And they got the guy on the phone and they got him to $7,500.
They could have executed it at $5,000.
I gave them the green light, but they got me more money.
So I'm not saying it happens in every example, but you just have to be open and communicate
and say, hey, and again, that name cost me $5, so it doesn't really matter about what I got.
But the point is, is that the last three or four deals, I've told the broker,
I call an afternoon, I don't speak to the broker or I leave him a note in the message center saying,
hey, here's what I'm thinking.
Here's my thought process.
Here's what I would like to see for try to get this price, but I'll accept this.
And Tony Names is great at that, too.
He always communicates with the people saying, hey, here's this.
I'll lower the four to this.
Do what you can and let them do their job.
You know, I mean, that's kind of where I'm at.
I can't sit back and think, oh, are they working for me or the seller?
I mean, I don't have names that are six-figure names right now,
so that's a different discussion at that point.
But for my inventory and the price points I have, I tell them, hey, here's what I'm willing to take.
Here's what I'd like to get.
Do what you can.
And then before you execute, tell me the max they can spend, and I'll say yes or no.
And it sounds simple, but that's what you've got to do.
I mean, that's kind of my mentality now is I used to think like, oh, you know, who are they working for?
But no, who gives a shit at this point?
I mean, unless you're selling really expensive names, that's a different discussion.
But for 99% of domainers, just communicate, hey, here's where I'm at.
Here's what I'd like to see.
Here's blah, blah, blah, and that's it.
And then once you've done that, then you did all you could.
There's nothing else you can do.
And that's when I think that's important.
I'm going to jump in and say I do the same thing, right?
And that's part of my frustration with APNIC is that you have some fantastic brokers who communicate with you exactly like you're saying.
But then there's others who you reach out to, you'll leave messages for, and they never reply, right?
So that's my issue is that there's no consistency.
But you're right.
You have to do those things, right?
Because that difference between $5,000 and $7,500, well, at the end of the year, those really add up, right?
Especially, you have to pay for all the domains that you don't sell.
You have to pay for all your renewals.
So it's not that when you say it doesn't matter, you only buy it for $5.
It's not quite true, right?
Because you also have whatever percentage of your portfolio that you have to pay those renewals for.
So it is important, right?
You can't just buy it $5 and sell it $100 because then you're still losing money with all the other renewals.
But that's just good.
Congratulations.
I'd like to say it doesn't matter in the sense that, like, between, in that case, like, the one that was $5 to $6,500 or whatever, I had a couple of them that, like, at that point, I'm saying it doesn't matter because I'm willing to accept $5,000.
That's kind of what I meant.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I got what you meant.
I was just clarifying it for people down below.
Like, I'm in the same boat as you, right?
Like, I get a lot of closeouts and whatever it is, and I flip them for, you know, mid-four figures.
But, yeah, I mean, that's, again, I'm saying one frustrating thing with AFNIC is, like, obviously the platform is a little bit of a disaster, right?
But that aside, it's also, you know, again, the brokers, not all of them get back to you, right?
And that's why, for me, the lead center was really amazing, potentially, when it came out.
I was like, oh, this is going to be really good because, you know, there's nothing better than being able to work directly with the broker for doing exactly what you're talking about.
Reaching out to them going, look, I listed it for, you know, $10,000, but my minimum is $5,000.
But, you know, try to push them up, but I'm soft on it, right?
If he really pushes back and can't go above $5,000, well, sell it for $5,000, right?
Because that type of information could really help a broker, too.
That's why I don't get why they're not using it to its full potential because it'll help the brokers more than us.
You know what I mean?
It's just, it's bonkers that they're not leveraging something that they already built out, and it's just, they have no idea what they're doing.
And I was in Vegas in January for the ICA meeting, and while they were there making their presentation, I mentioned that.
And, like, it's how many months since January are we, right?
And they still haven't changed it.
I specifically said that line code that they use, you know, buyer call logs.
I go, like, make, like, three different things, you know, like, make it so that, okay, the buyer called in, and if it happens, make the broker put notes about the call, right?
Or if it's just a broker who tried to reach out and hit a voicemail or didn't get in touch with the person, the person never answered the phone, we'll put that, too.
Because the difference between those two things are, like, you can't get any bigger, right?
It's, like, one is a dead lead almost, and the other one is, like, the hottest lead possible.
If you have a person who wants your domain who's calling in, like, that's, like, super hot, right?
And the same things, too, sometimes you don't even get the email, like, ah, whatever, I'll let you guys talk a little bit more.
Well, no, no, this is important because, like, I spent time figuring this out.
So one thing that people have to realize, and it's not always the case, but it's worked well recently, is, like, the notes on the account.
So when it says buyer call log, I had to call in and say, what does that mean?
Does that mean that you just called and you couldn't get a hold of them?
Yeah, that's what I do, too.
Then the flag will change to engagement occurred, and then it'll flip to, like, negotiation status.
That's when I know, okay, now this is my attention.
When it just says buyer call log, email sent, like, okay, that's just, like, not foreplay, but that's just, like, the warm-up.
Like, okay, until it says active negotiations or the flag flips, then that's when I kind of will get more serious about it.
But at the end of the day, you know, we don't have other solutions.
So, yeah, it's great.
Everyone's building something and this and that.
But, like, until you can prove you can compete with the 800-pound gorilla, then it's just all talk is cheap.
And until a product's in front of us that we can all use, I mean, it is what it is.
And I'm all for using other resources and more exposure.
But everyone talks this game about building this, building that.
And it sounds great, but, you know, you've got to put your money where your mouth is.
If you don't have the eyeballs, yeah, if you don't have the people coming to you, then that's the big difference, right?
Then it's just the power of the domain itself.
If it's only the landers that are making your sales, then you don't need a thing.
You just do your own, right?
You'll get FT or whatever it is, Adam White Label or, you know, something with a very low commission that is really just there for the payment side of things.
And you're good to go, right?
But, again, like if people are calling in, that's the unfortunate where Aftonik kind of has a stranglehold on this industry because they have the largest number of leads that are coming in, hot leads that aren't necessarily landing pages.
And even worse is that we don't know what percentage of our sales are landers versus those leads sometimes, right?
Because they don't really distinguish when you make a sale, well, what was the source, right?
Sometimes you can guess.
They all give it to you.
But, yeah, you have to call and ask.
Well, let's move on.
I want to talk about something else.
Yeah, this has been very insightful, and hopefully we'll continue to see improvements in all marketplaces.
We definitely need them to be more profitable, and it's a win-win relationship.
So I'm sure they're just as vested in the improvements as much as we are as well.
Obviously, we'd love to see more transparency.
I like what Ari said about the buy-call-lord being more insightful versus just being vague.
I think that's a great input.
But, yeah, I want to talk about something.
Domain King, Rick Schwartz, announced his acquisitions recently, and a lot of people pointed out that most of them weren't even .com.
It seems like, you know, Mr. Everything Else's Bullshit is diversifying quite a bit, right?
And I was just on that, on his page.
And, look, this is not a knock on the guy.
I think, you know, people that are intelligent are fluid and flexible in their approach in life, you know?
Rick Schwartz is a very successful domainer, and, you know, a lot of people sort of, like, follow his moves and what he does.
And he also probably follows what the market is showing him.
So he bought a bunch of .ai names.
I don't know if he's made any sales.
He bought, I think, a .tv and a .co, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, and some .coms.
The summary was he spent, so far in 2024, he's spent $112,000, and he's purchased, I don't know how many names this is, but 30-something names, I believe.
I don't know if you guys see the tweet, but he has names like Reconstruction.ai, Trick.ai.
He spent $24,977 for that.
He bought SmartKitchen.com for $10,123.
Biotech.io for $2,469.
Asian.ai for $8,100.
But he's picking up a bunch of .ai names.
What do you guys think about that?
I saw that list.
I thought it was a fairly, you know, interesting-looking list.
And I think it's exactly what you said, where, you know, you might talk .com just like I do.
And in my case, I don't buy those.
But it's one of those where, if you do have the intelligence, it's kind of like leaving money on the table.
So he's probably figuring, he's playing with house money here.
You know, I'll put $100,000 in, and if he thinks he can flip those, he'll flip those.
It might not become his new model.
He's set.
But it's like we walk into the casino, and all you guys are making money on the craps table.
I'm going to walk over and probably put some money down, same kind of thing, and go, hey, I'll play along with this as long as this is hot.
So I think it's something like that, where he's probably figuring he can make some money in there.
And I think it's a good sign, because it shows that, you know, there's more to this than the .com.
There are opportunities out there.
You guys certainly show that with the flips that I see.
Yeah, and I think in terms of the .coms, my favorite is list of smartkitchen.com.
The rest look like names that I see normal people buy, like designmanagement.com.
I would say that I have numerous names like that in my portfolio.
I'm sure you guys have similar names in your portfolio.
Ultimatesleep.com, you know, metlab.com, camgirl.org, unionmaid.com, dogpod.com.
You pay $3,500 for that.
Regenta.com sounds like a brandable.
But I think the difference between him and other people is how he sells his names.
He's very, very adamant on, I don't list on marketplaces.
Do you think that that strategy is still practical?
I mean, I'll take a stab, but I mean, I saw the list, and the one that interested me the
most was that smart kitchen, because the last episode of Dominion Sherpa, they're talking
about coming up at auction as smart kitchens, the plural.
And I think that that's just interesting to see what that one goes for.
He might even buy it defensively.
I'm not sure.
But I think, I mean, look, that's a drop in the bucket, 100k, compared to the names he
sold in the past, and probably just the amount of money he brings in from his names, from
his revenue sources and affiliate, whatever he does.
So, I mean, it's an experiment for him, probably.
It's a small percentage of money.
So, at the end of the day, if it goes to zero, I think he probably would say, well, you
know, he tried it, and that's pretty much it.
That's just my opinion.
I don't know.
I mean, he personally blocked me on Twitter, because I sold an XYZ for 10 grand, and back
in the day, he was blocking anyone that sold XYZ.
But I used to follow him a lot, and he had some good insights and stuff.
But I just think that with the names he has, you're not going to go to the reg path and
type it in.
You're going to go to the lander.
So, I mean, he has high-quality names, most of his portfolio, and that's really, he doesn't
need to have it listed in marketplaces.
They'll just come to him.
Ari, what are your thoughts?
The domain king is rolling dice with Go.AI.
I don't see anything wrong with it.
I mean, he's getting the right ones, right?
He's getting the tip of the iceberg ones, which is what you're supposed to do.
Many people try to get in, and they get the, you know.
What do you mean tip of the iceberg ones?
I don't think there's.
Well, I mean, a lot of people, when they come in, they hear .ai is hot, and they start
buying domains that would be, the SLD is what would be good for .com, right?
And you can't do that.
Many people make that mistake.
That's the biggest warning I have when people get into anything but .com, is that unless
you give them further context that you can't, you can't get, like the two words and the
phrase domains, I sell regularly in .com, would never, ever sell in .ai, right?
Not in a million years, right?
But a lot of people buy those domains thinking, oh, well, .ai is an expert thing.
I could do the same thing, get the same ones I see selling in .com.
And it's not, like he got, what was one was he mentioning, like agent.ai, right?
That's like.
No, Asian.
That's like exactly.
Asian, like the.
Oh, Asian.
Oh, well, I don't like that one as much.
I was going to say.
I heard agent.
I'm like, for 8,000, that was an amazing buy, agent.ai.
But, oh, agent.ai for 8,000?
Yeah, you overpaid for that.
I don't, again, that's one that I don't know if it works, right?
I mean, what you want in .ai is, well, what kind of companies are going to use .ai?
It's tech companies, right?
So you want tech keywords or brandables.
Are you giving Rich Schwartz advice?
Oh, yeah.
Well, I mean, look, he's got intelligence, like, I mean, not intelligence, but he's got, like, data intelligence that many of us don't have, right?
Say hell yeah.
I'm not.
No, I'm not.
Yeah, yeah, I'm not, like, I thought it was Asian.
I thought it was, like, I'm really impressed.
I don't like that one either.
What the fuck?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But that's the thing.
It doesn't, it doesn't work for .ai, unless, unless he has insight, right?
Like, unless he knows somebody buys a lot of, like, like, domains, just the word Asian.
And then, well, maybe there's something there, right?
That's the thing.
You can't always criticize totally blindly.
And with Rick, I don't know if he buys based on information and data or on gut or a bit of both.
That's why it's, like, it's hard to say.
Like, if you had information, if you had data points for that, then okay.
But I don't see it.
Asian.ai for 8,000, that's going to be tough to flip at a, you know, a good multiple.
You know, you might sell it for 10,000 or 20,000.
But, I mean, when you're buying domains at 8,000, you want to be selling them at, like, 50,000 and up, right?
He doesn't sell names at that price point.
Yeah, I get a feeling that Asian.ai is going to be either an Asian-based AI robot or something, you know, in that space that he has a tendency to have some domains in the adult space.
He's got quite a few.
And so he probably has a pipeline for buyers for things like that or at least his own, you know, where people come and look at his stuff.
So I would think that's going to probably go down a path like that.
Yeah, and in that context, what you're saying, it makes sense, right?
That's what I'm saying.
Like, for certain people, it's a little bit different, especially if he's got, like, a buyer pool.
Well, then his risk-reward ratio is very different from someone like you and me, right?
Like, oftentimes you'll hear on Domain Sherpa, right?
You'll hear Andrew, he bought a domain.
And, like, sometimes it's like, ah, you paid a bit much for that.
But the real issue is that, like, because of his Rolodex, he can afford to buy for hire because he has so many more contacts that potentially can buy their mains at higher price points than we can that he can afford to outbid us at any auction, right?
Because at the end of the day, his Rolodex gives him an advantage, right?
And that advantage means he can sell for hire multiples or have a higher sell-to-rate, which means that he can afford to buy for more than I can.
Well, this is like being a Carvana on Craigslist, right?
Those of us who are out there trying to buy a car for a deal, and they'll come in and say, well, we'll just buy 50 cars in this area, and we're okay to pay more because we know we can brand them and sell them for more.
So it's definitely a similarity there.
Yeah, and I'm sure, like, you know, one thing I know that he's very big on traffic, so he's probably thinking about that keyword from a traffic perspective.
So while we're on the topic of the AI, I don't know if we're still on Rick's topic, but did anybody this week watch the Tesla 1010 event and sit with GoDaddy open and start registering domains, or was that just me?
I think that was just you and the Web3 guys.
I saw a lot of RoboVan.x, RoboVan.dat.
I don't understand how people don't understand that there are trademark concerns with those type of names.
And I saw that RoboVans, I think, was it RoboVan was available for $50,000?
I don't know.
What do you register?
So I already have Robo registrations from years back, and I have taxi registrations.
So I'm basically sitting on these, you know, in anticipation.
But I have β so Robo itself, the word Robo is not a trademark as far as I know.
But, yeah, if you're going to do CyberCab, things like that, I think that those domains are still available.
They're all registered.
I'm just .com.
I do have things like I have RoboInjuries.com and RoboTrauma.com because it's just a matter of time before people start having injuries.
And so we'll have attorneys jumping on that, and it's just kind of a space that I'm sort of in.
So one of those where if they come in and have interest, I'll be ready for that.
What about RoboLawSuit?
Because when they start choking people out, it'll be class action lawsuits.
Michael, what are your thoughts on this?
You're the attorney right now on people registering RoboNames.
David, sorry.
David Michaels.
Are you there?
Oh, I thought I added him as a speaker.
He's on there.
He just might not have heard you.
Man, this stuff is really weird today.
Oh, there he is.
So what are your thoughts on Robo-related names from a trademark perspective, David?
Well, I own RoboMarket for the last few years because I think there's going to be a huge market for selling and renting robots.
So you have to look at a trademark search and see are there any registrations that cover specific use cases.
If they are, they're very narrow protections.
They're not smarts.
Suggestive.
Maybe that's what Rick Schwartz is thinking about with Asian.ai, like Asian robots or some shit.
Who knows?
Like, we would have to ask him.
Let's talk about the top 10 sales this week.
Her name by him.
Number 10 was Blasio.com for $18,000.
That was on GoDaddy, meaning that it was expired listing.
And then we had Alphabetter.
That was sold on the 5th.
So it's been about a week for $20,250.
And then we have a .ai name.
Simulation.ai sold for $25,000 and some change.
And then we have an interesting one, which we can expand on quite a bit.
This is a .hosting name, but I think it's a killer .hosting name.
It was VPS .hosting.
We talked about VPS previously.
Maybe Michael can give us an overview.
And this name sold for $26,000.
Do you think that's a good deal for an end user?
VPS .hosting.
Michael, what are your thoughts on that?
As far as the .hosting, I don't know too much about it.
I mean, it sounds great.
So it might be one of those things where it's a good play.
But me personally, I would prefer the straight up VPShosting.com.
But heck, it could be an affiliate link for something.
Or they could just run more hosting.
We're all still looking for hosting.
So I think hosting domains and VPS-related domains are still hot.
Yeah, I was talking to Dreamhost about the conference.
I have a lot of moving conversations with a lot of companies right now.
And, yeah, they should be there.
And they were talking about β I told them, I was like,
one of the things that we'd like to learn more about is VPS.
I think it's one of those things where for those of us
that want to pursue a little bit of development,
it reduces the cost, right?
If you can set up your own VPS, something I recently learned,
it drops the cost significantly, right, Michael?
Every domainer should have a VPS.
I mean, that's kind of a β if you're going to develop,
because now you can put 50 domains on there.
You can put 100 domains on there.
And we're talking about not stuff that you're going to, you know,
get thousands of visits to, but you can set up scripts like domain parking scripts
and then build out your own landing pages.
You can set up WordPress so that you have 50 installs of WordPress
that all use the same plug-ins, things like that.
I mean, it takes a little bit of technical ability, but you can always hire that out.
And, you know, it's just β it's worthwhile if you're going to be doing stuff with your names.
One of the things I've been doing is β I've mentioned a bit of this,
so I've been adding more domains on my VPS, but I still have them listed on Apternix.
So I'm okay paying those extra fees if a sale goes through that channel.
But I'm also, you know, building my own landing pages on the VPS.
Yeah, cool stuff.
Moving on, another name that sold was OPE.ai.
I remember OPE.com sold recently for a large amount of money,
but OPE.ai sold for $28,000.
So .ai is still selling, most of them from the expired auction.
Ultra.ai, I could have sworn I saw this as a sale before.
So obviously they remade on the payment.
This one sold for $28,000 as well.
Then you have 858.cc.
858.cc sold for $32,601.
Expired listing.
And then we have Audience.ai, which sold for $34,833.
And then the top .ai sale, which is the second largest sale, was Quran.ai.
Quran.ai previously sold for six figures, $101,000.
Clearly they didn't buy it.
They didn't pay for it.
And it got resold for $37,000 via Dynadark.
And then the top sale for the week was ASEI.com, which sold for $45,000 on saw.com.
So what are you guys' thoughts on that name?
ASEI.com.
What was the one that you mentioned that didn't pass through and then it sold again?
It was Quran.
Quran.ai, which is like the most important.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting when it doesn't sell and then you get a lower sell in the future.
That's a significant haircut, right?
Yeah, that was significant.
$37,000.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And if this guy doesn't pay the $37,000, he'll be back on the auction block.
So I think a lot of the .ai narrative and a lot of the shock factor we've seen has been
because people get excited and bid on these names without any consequence.
And when they don't pay for it, we still think, oh, yeah, that name sold for this amount.
And then you see the same names.
I'm pretty sure I've seen simulation.ai announces a sale before.
So it seems like there's a pattern where people don't pay for these names.
They just win the auction.
Hey, Adam.
Yeah, it used to be, it used to be like on, well, I mean, actually all the marketplaces,
but I think Namejet, there was an issue for a while where it was pretty prevalent.
I also know what happened on GoDaddy auctions as well, where you'd have like people in cahoots.
So you'd have like two people right away bidding up the price like extremely, extremely high
to a point where they know nobody else would be interested.
And what the default was in the past was that, you know, if the top pair didn't pay,
well, then the next highest bidder would be offered the domain, but like not at the second highest price,
but at the highest price, the second bidder bid that wasn't challenged by the top bidder.
So if there was a third bidder involved, let's say who bid like up to a hundred bucks,
and then the two other top bidders bid up to the $2,000, well, then the second bidder would
have been offered the domain for $105, right?
Now, since then, GoDaddy has changed it.
I think they do it more in context.
Like if they suspect collusion, then they just, you know, cancel the auction.
But there used to be a much bigger problem in the past.
So it could be a situation where that was there.
I don't know what the policy was in the AI auctions for if, you know, if the first person doesn't pay,
was the second person offered?
Like, I mean, don't forget, $101,000, that's kind of ridiculous for Quran.ai.
But you also have to remember, like, to get to that price, there need to be two people bidding on that, right?
Like, there's one person who doesn't really understand the value or who got it because he wants to build an AI
that lets you speak with God or whatever it is, right?
I don't know.
But that there'd be two people, that's a much bigger, like, I don't know.
It makes it a little bit sketchy.
That's all I'm saying.
I did see astrology.ai sold for $72,000, and it's already built out.
As a matter of fact, I get their ads.
It was purchased by this guy who goes by Dr. Alex, and I think that's a great name.
He paid $72,000 for it.
So some of them actually do go through and are built on.
I think astrology.ai is a great domain name.
Yeah, we talked about that one last week.
I think that's actually a fabulous domain, and for AI because it's something where you can incorporate AI into that.
I mean, daily horoscopes, all of that stuff, that stuff, I think that could be a really great site,
and I mentioned that last week.
I had to look myself, but if anybody's studying that market, looking for terms that might be related to that,
that could be a hot space.
Yeah, I was inspired by that sale, and I hand-registered AstrologySI.com.
So now I'm a fan of super intelligence, but I'm still sticking with the .com, you know what I mean?
We'll see what happens.
Adam, what's new?
What are your recent purchases?
Well, actually, I just sold a name while we're on this chat.
A sale a week, man.
Yeah, it was the one that was on hold, so they ended up doing a lease, a lease to own for three months.
Oh, that's not bad.
That's the best way to do it.
Do you mind sharing the name?
Yeah, I just actually posted it on Twitter, too.
It's tbox.io.
So it's an I.O. name.
Congratulations.
And it's for five grand.
So I just bought it earlier this year.
Wow.
Nice.
Yeah.
I guess they still sell them.
I'm curious.
How was your lander set up on that?
Was it like max duration three months, or was it six, and they just chose three?
I'm just curious.
I think I had it maxed for six.
So I guess they decided they wanted to do half of that, still wanted to.
I don't know.
But yeah, that's the minimum price that I set.
Basically, 5K gets the six-month lease to own.
Anything under that is, I think, just buy it now.
So they just got it under the wire.
There's really not a lot of risk.
So as for...
So here's the question I have to ask.
Oh, I was going to ask.
So tbox, right?
Like the letter T and then box?
What was the reasoning for buying that domain?
Does that term have any meaning to it that might not be wrong?
Not to me.
I mean, basically, I was testing out a new strategy earlier in the year.
I was like, you know, these IOs are selling, COs are selling, you know, a lot of these kind
of low, you know, 5K, you know, under 10K sales.
And I'm looking at other sales, and it just seemed to be random names, nothing that I would
have thought.
So what I told myself I'm going to do is I'm going to be looking at the drop lists, especially
at the IOs and the COs.
And I'm going to start looking for names that have the high TLD count.
And I'm going to, you know, just kind of see what sites are out there, what companies use
that name.
Ends up, there's a lot of companies that use names like this.
And I'm like, well, this is a pretty good upgrade.
I don't need to sell it for a huge amount of money.
So I went out and I bought a bunch of names similar to this.
And I just started pricing.
I mean, I sold another one in May, linkit.co, L-I-N-K-I-T.co, because I noticed a lot of
people were using Linkit as their domain name.
And I sold that one for 7K.
This one I bought a few months earlier than that.
And, you know, I picked up, I didn't buy a ton of them, but I picked up a bunch of them,
you know, and I priced them around this range.
You know, some of them I thought were better.
I priced a little higher, some worse.
I priced lower, you know, and I'm just seeing how that goes.
But, yeah, I mean, it seems like kind of a safe buy, just because there were so many
other sites using this domain name with a different TLD, and a lot of them were a lot
worse TLDs.
So, I mean, I thought the demand was there.
So that's how I bought that one.
I just looked it up.
I mean, the first page of Google, there's eight companies that are T-Box something else.
So, I mean, and it's taken over 100 extensions.
So I didn't think it'd be that many.
So that's a good sale, man.
And it's, you got it pretty smart.
So that's a good one.
Yeah, thanks.
Yeah, and I wouldn't have thought it either.
I mean, if I would have just looked at the list like I normally do, I would have glazed
over that.
But I said to myself, you know, I'm going to look at these with higher TLD counts and
kind of research a few of them, you know, research the ones that look good and see.
And I was surprised that there were so many of them that had a lot of good metrics that
seemed to be, you know, good buys.
You know, I picked up a T-Box for $263.
So, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't a bottom of the bucket buy, but, you know, it wasn't
that expensive either.
And it was a quick sale.
If you bought it earlier this year.
Yeah.
So, yeah, you didn't even have to pay a renewal on it.
Of course, I bought a bunch of other ones too that haven't sold yet.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, but I'm sure this is paid for a bunch of those.
Congratulations on that sale.
And we're great timing.
Hello.
Ismail, I have a question for you guys.
What's up?
Yeah, what's up, Abu?
Yeah.
How are you guys, everyone?
The question I have, I already understand why this .ai owner is trying to control whatever
he wants to and how he wants to.
So, therefore, I do understand what's going on, but I'm not able to understand the rules
where the who is information, it is not complete.
For example, you cannot tell the expiry date.
I'm sure the answer is done by the owners of .ai.
But why is that way?
Is why he's hiding expiration dates?
I'll tell you exactly why, because when the domains expire, he does not want domainers
to try to contact the people who are letting the domains expire, right?
That will bypass the option by the way.
I already told you that.
I do understand that part.
I already know that.
But what I'm saying is, ICAN rules, privacy, is okay.
No, no, no.
CCTLD do not apply.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Hold on, I understand.
You already talked about this.
But I am still curious about it, why this information is missing by rules, by all other
extensions where it's available, why this guy gets exception to do this?
It's not an exception.
It's not an exception.
This is all CCTLDs can make their own rules.
That's why I'm saying when you invest in CCTLDs, you have to be careful.
No, no.
Arif, I'm sorry.
I don't want you to talk, okay?
Please.
I understand what you're coming out from.
But my question is totally different.
Why I'm asking you, hear me out first.
I understand everybody have options.
But nobody take that options away where you are hiding the who is information.
I mean, the expression date, okay?
It must be another reason why he's doing that.
Because if he wants a sale or if he wants this thing to move further, I mean, why not domainers
should be involved, right?
So I think it's more to it than what we know already.
I think this is what I'm trying to say.
I think Arif answered that question.
Because .ai is a CCCLD, you know, a country code, top-level domain, they have a different
set of rules that allows them to be able to do that.
And just because other CCCLDs don't do that, doesn't mean that .ai cannot do that.
So he's doing what's in his best interest by, you know...
No, even .ca in Canada, no, you cannot see the information, okay?
That's the way that they even set it up.
Totally zero.
Totally zero with the .ca, okay?
I understand that.
But he's opened up every other information but the date.
Yeah, because he doesn't want people to know when it's expiring.
So here's the difference with .ai is that it's a one person who's running everything.
Yeah, he pays royalties to the government, right?
When the government's very happy.
But ultimately, it's this one guy whose profit profits directly from how the registry is doing.
So he wants to make as much money as possible.
And one way of doing that is instead of letting a domainer contact the end user for an expiring
domain and get it from that person and the registry only making $69 per year, he wants
the domain to expire and put it for auction because don't forget, the registry, sorry,
if people have been advice passed by, but people in the registry, you know, when it goes to
auction, that registry makes the money, right?
They give a cut to Dynadot, I think it is now.
But, you know, the registry makes, like, if it sells for $50,000, that registry is probably
making about $40,000, maybe even more.
I don't know what the cut is exactly that Dynadot makes.
Yeah, but what happened to the UDRP cases?
What happens to the code cases?
What happens to all this information you require if you are challenging any of this .ai
domain?
That's the problem.
That's why it's a mess.
Because he's allowed to, they're allowed to take it away.
And all these other processes have to do without having the data, right?
And so, yeah, if you want to, if you have a UDRP, let's say a company's coming after
you, and the company's only existed for three years, but you've had the domain for six years,
well, now you're going to have to make sure that you include that information in your
response to the UDRP claim, because the panelists might not be able to see it, right?
And there might be some legal ways of, you know, having the registry kind of certify that
it's the right date and whatever it is, they probably will implement some, some, some ways
of making it, you know, that information legal, sorry, available for, for legal processes.
It makes no sense if I'm trying to take you to the court, and I don't even have the information,
how I'm going to approve that?
When did you have this?
That's the, that's, that's the problem.
That's, that's it.
So therefore, he's not supposed to do this.
He's not supposed to take that information.
But there's no rules against it.
That's the thing.
There's no rules.
They can do what he wants.
So yeah, it sucks.
And it messes up legal processes and whatever it is, but he can do it.
And that's why every week after week, I'm telling you, watch out for .ai, right?
Because there's nothing, there's nothing, there's nothing to do with something else.
So you're telling me he's ignoring the law?
Is that what you're saying?
No, there, there are no laws.
There are no rules for CCTLDs.
So I can, I can go to UDRP without giving any information and then can, I can take you
to the court?
No, you, I must prepare myself to take you to the court, right?
That's why it sucks because you won't be able to prepare as well.
Listen, wait, guys.
Can I just say one thing, guys, real quick?
There's rules.
If you can look up online, they made it very tricky for UDRPs with .ai.
You have to own three of like the top 10 or five, whatever extensions, just to even get
a UDRP filing going.
You have to own one of the .net, .co, .com.
That's hard enough as it is as a barrier.
Then there can't be any UDRPs on names that are three letters or shorter.
There's a lot of rules that they built in to avoid UDRPs.
Now, do you want to research?
There's articles out there about it, but UDRPs are not going to be that easy on the .ai.
And so that's another thing, too, is that forget about all the information.
There's certain rules where you can't even get a UDRP filing unless you meet all these
criteria.
Well, the .sa, sorry, sap.ai got transferred a couple of weeks ago.
That's a three-letter word, dictionary word.
But again, that's what I'm saying.
The rules and the guidelines are there.
But again, we don't know if that's upheld.
That's what I'm just saying.
So even the own rules that are posted online, like by the territory, I think they must own
more than three of the extensions.
I'm sorry, I may misspoke.
You have to own at least three extensions if it's X amount of letters or less, and they
probably do.
Yeah, but you're assuming all that, right?
You have no written information or been told, right?
No, no, no.
There are new rules that were set.
Yeah, it's written down.
No, I'm asking you, like with this .ai guy, did he actually said that?
I'm not going to show who is information of the expiration date.
Does he ever said that?
He took it away.
So we are all assuming whatever he's in his mind, right?
What do you mean we're assuming?
The expiration date isn't there.
So he took it away.
There's no other explanation for it.
Yeah.
I think this is a point where you can actually complain to whoever the authorities are.
So here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
You can complain to the Antigua, no, is it?
Anguilla.
The government of the country.
Anguilla.
Anguilla.
You can complain to the government and ask them to change it.
And again, it's the country.
They can do what they want.
They can change it tomorrow, and they can change it again next week.
Dude, when it comes to this CCCLDs, it's always a shit show.
There's a country in West Africa that has a CCCLD that I approached about doing some consulting.
And it's ran by a guy in Norway who sat on the CCCLDs for over 20-something years.
Their website hasn't been updated since 1997.
I literally registered some names, and it blocked the registrations.
Like, very similar situation.
And then the excuse was, oh, you're not a resident of this country.
So I found someone who lived there, who registered the names.
It goes, ah, I'm not going to, let me think about it.
So in this type of situation, most of these names, most of these small CCCLDs are ran like dictatorships.
In cahoots with the government.
Exactly.
The government doesn't care.
This guy's bringing them a lot of money.
Well, no, they do care.
That's the thing, right?
But the thing is, whoever comes into power next could care about different things, right?
They have different priorities.
This guy for .ai, he's all about making the maximum amount of money possible.
Most countries run their CCCLDs to benefit their people, right?
Which in many cases means that the rule that they set is it's only for citizens or businesses,
which is a fair rule to make, right?
That's the whole point of the CCCLDs, to benefit your citizens.
So that's a fair rule.
But a lot of domainers don't like it because it means that, like, you can't invest in those countries
or you can't sell it to people outside that country.
Right?
So there are limitations, but, like, I mean, it makes sense, right?
If you have a country and you have an asset, well, you want that asset to profit your citizen.
You don't want other people to come in and make money off your back and not get anything in return.
And Canada is the example.
Of course.
They are strictly doing it for Canadians only.
Yeah, and as a Canadian, I think it's a good thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
As a Canadian, I think it's a good thing.
So, I mean, so then why people are buying, still buying, when they know that it's going to be any time changes
or they have a full control and then do whatever they want?
Why do people...
Most people don't know.
Yeah.
A hundred of thousands of dollars.
Most buyers don't know.
Most people don't know.
And most people are following the trend and they're FOMO-ing it.
So, it's like you're seeing a trend where people are building on .ai, even non-AI-related companies.
And remember, like, earlier during the year, people were saying, .ai is a new .com.
I mean, we knew that that was bullshit.
But, you know, end users out there had some sort of confusion.
A lot of people bought .ai to sort of, like, you know, use as a redirect because they felt like, you know,
they were going to miss out if they didn't do so.
And a lot of people actually bought .ai to, you know, leverage acquiring an SLD because the .com wasn't available.
The same way they do with a .io.
But I think right now with .ai, we're going into a different phase where the honeymoon period is coming to an end.
And, you know, it's going to be more speculative.
But I still think that's going to take a while.
So, why not a guy like Elon Musk take over something like this since he's into .ai heavily?
Why doesn't he just buy my domain names?
Come on, man.
I mean, those are just hypotheticals right there, you know what I mean?
So, I think at the end of the day, a lot of AI companies are not going to have the word AI in their branding.
And if they do, it's going to be keyword AI with a .com.
I'm still bullish on those.
But I think if you look at most of the AI companies that are thriving, that have raised a lot of money, they tend not to have AI in their branding.
I mean, some do, obviously.
But I think with time, that's going to fade off.
Kind of like you don't see companies with the word internet online as much as you probably saw in the early phase of the internet.
Yeah, I agree almost with you because, you know, even Google, Google can own it.
Elon Musk can own it.
Apple can own it.
And they're not talking about it.
And that's a good sign.
I mean, this thing is .ai is useless.
Google doesn't want to be in the domain business.
It's sold their domain business.
I don't think Apple is interested in the domain industry.
And I don't know.
Google, I think they still have their registries.
Like the extensions they got, like .page and .book and . . .
There's a few other ones they have.
They still have those.
So they're still in it a little bit.
But, yeah, the fact they sold all the registrar part to Squarespace is pretty big.
David, are there any legal insights you can share with us or updates?
Any recent interest in UDRPs?
I don't think David can hear me.
Yeah, I can't.
Sorry.
Well, the SAP.ai was a bad one.
Sorry about that.
Yeah, the SAP.ai was a bad decision.
You know, the panelists said, oh, well, SAP is as famous as IBM.
I'm sorry.
It's not.
My mom knows about IBM, but she never heard of SAP.
I barely heard about it a couple times in my life.
So it's not famous.
So that was a bad one.
Let's see.
There was a couple other ones.
Let me look at them.
David, what is this thing I read about reverse hijacking of names with UDRPs?
And he's like, can you give us an overview on that and how we can protect ourselves?
Are you there?
So when that happens, it's, you know, RDNH.
It's abusive.
But they don't do that.
They don't declare it RDNH normally.
They try to avoid it.
They just try to find a reason why to deny it or transfer.
It's a very rare instance.
But say you get your domain name hijacked, which your answer is, is you go to court and
you try to overturn the decision.
Where do you, what court do you go to for .ai?
Well, if you register through Dynadot, you go to the Northern District of California and
you sue there if that's the mutual jurisdiction that they agreed to because they go by the
UDRP rules.
So the two choices are your home jurisdiction or the Northern District of California.
Personally, I don't like that court because the lawyers, they're expensive.
They're not enough domain name lawyers.
They're experts.
And it trips up a lot of lawyers.
Like one case costs the IMI.com guy over $450,000 in legal costs.
So it's not a good place to be.
That's why I don't have a big portfolio at Dynadot.
It's not a place I want to be.
Arizona is a much better place.
Interesting.
So if you get a UDRP, the registrar is the jurisdiction of the court, Aaron?
It can be.
It's one of the two places.
It's either your home jurisdiction where the address on your who is registration or the
registrar.
And so you're saying that because GoDaddy's based in Arizona, it's more favorable than
your experience.
Yeah, GoDaddy's spaceship, name's Silo.
There's a whole bunch of registrars that are in Arizona.
What if you are dealing with a registrar like a foreign one, like a nicknames or one that's
in the Cayman Islands or something?
Well, I don't know.
Like you got troubles there.
Like you're not going to really be able to litigate in the Cayman Islands, are you?
And then the other alternative is your home jurisdiction.
If the planet says they want to be at your home jurisdiction, then that's the place they'll
So try to get like use a local registrar or use Arizona and our LA or Arizona for you
because you're in LA, I assume, right?
Yep.
Yeah, that's interesting.
I don't want to deal with a UDRP.
If you want the name that bad, you can have it.
God damn it.
Well, no, like for example, say you registered a domain name or you bought a domain name
that had a registration date from 1995 and some new trademark owner comes along and says,
well, you know what?
I want that name.
So I'm going to file a UDRP and he'll get a transfer order because you just acquired
it recently.
So he'll get, he'll win.
But then it's up to you to go to court to overturn that because the Ninth Circuit has
a rule that says, hey, if the actual creation date of the domain name is what matters, not
your acquisition date.
And that's the big difference between the UDRP and courts.
And the other thing is a lot of UDRP panelists gloss over the issue of legitimate interest.
So courts can resolve that a lot better than the panelists.
I guess those are the two big things.
And if you get a complaint, the first thing to do is see if the trademarks are vulnerable
and try to file a petition to cancel them, either in the TTAB or whatever place they're
registered.
And if you can't do it there, go to court.
You can always appeal a decision from the TTAB in a federal court, either the federal circuit
or another circuit that has jurisdiction over the parties.
What would you say is a good threshold that a name is worth fighting for, like in terms
of the value of the name?
It's not always the value of the name.
It's, it's your reputation.
Because every time you lose a UDRP, it counts as a strike against you.
And so you'll lose more UDRP in the future.
So you have to take a scorched earth approach and go after them and try to claim damages, especially
if they misrepresented something in the complaint, find that misrepresentation and, you know,
amplify it and prove damages to some extent.
But their statutory damages is up to a hundred dollars, sorry, a hundred thousand dollars.
But courts usually give around 50,000.
So figure that out.
You know what I mean?
But you have to have a budget for litigation.
I'll just come with one thing, if you don't mind, because it's very, I was going to say
exactly what you were saying.
I got hit with a UDRP and the name didn't cost me that much money.
And I talked to one of the experts in the industry and he goes, it's about your reputation.
He goes, you know, if you get a decision against you, then you're going to be labeled in the
future.
It's going to be a lot harder.
And there's something that you can do.
It's a something transferable that I was actually able to use because it was a company from South
Africa who went through some intermediate in Europe, I think it was through Switzerland.
And basically, I just did a transfer something form and they get a credit back.
So they pay $1,500 for the UDRP as only one person panel.
They get like $500 back and then I get to settle it and know there's no public record.
So if you ever do get into UDRP and it's at that stage and you don't want to risk going,
there is a way you can do it where you can say, hey, you know, whatever the case may be,
let's do this.
They'll halt the proceedings.
You probably know the exact procedure, what it is, but we did the process.
They got $500 off of their $1,500 and the names were transferred out.
And that's how it was resolved for me.
And I learned a very valuable lesson.
Thankfully, I didn't go to a decision because I was going to get the name away anyway.
And when it already starts, there's only certain ways you can get it to where you can
pause it, get this kind of settlement per se, and then there won't be a decision against
you.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, most lawyers don't know about that, or if they do, they don't care.
And they actually want to get a strike against you for some reason.
Sometimes some lawyers are like that.
They don't care about getting $1,000 back.
Yeah.
I'm just saying it's like, if you're already in this position and you don't want to spend
a lot of money, it is an option that sometimes they will, depending on the name, mine wasn't
very valuable in that sense.
So it just worked for me.
I had no idea.
And I see one of the best experts, and that's what they told me to do.
And it worked.
And I basically was able to get the process halted.
They accepted.
We agreed.
And then they got the name.
And then there was no decision against me.
Congratulations.
That's good.
That's a good outcome.
Most lawyers do not know about that.
I don't even think their own legal counsel even knew about that, because when I emailed
in this whole exchange, I had to call over to Switzerland and tell them, and they said,
here's what you got to do.
And I submitted the request.
They halted it.
And then they just basically said, okay, so you're basically saying that we're correct.
We don't have to go in front of a panel.
And, you know, just we get $5 less, and, you know, and they got the names, and that was
So, but the more interesting part about that, that UDRP, I can talk about it, was that,
and this is something that most people do not know.
So be very, very mindful of this.
I had the lander at Afternic, okay, make offer, I mean, price requests.
They submitted in, and in their documentation, I got to see exactly what Afternic responds
with, what they say to any inquiries coming in through the price request.
It was extremely valuable information.
I wish I would have learned it in a different way than this.
But what happened was, is they used that as a evidence, along with two other valuation
tools, one from GoDaddy, which is a free tool, which is, no offense, not that great.
And they used another independent party valuation tool as evidence against why my asking price
was too high.
And it was, they used some word where it was like, that didn't justify, because I just
got the name.
I want an expired auction, and they're saying that you're marking it up too much, and that
based on these two independent tools and something else.
So it was just crazy how detailed this law firm was, and it was over a name that didn't
cost me much.
And it was just, you know, I probably could have fought it, but I didn't want to, because
I don't want my reputation to be hurt.
But just be mindful that even though you didn't know, I didn't know, that GoDaddy didn't tell
me that this person, they emailed them all this stuff.
It just said, Lee created, and it just said, stalled.
I never knew there was emails back, you know, emails sent, and this and that.
So it was very interesting where I got to see what was told, how they presented the
name, why they, here's the price, the premium name, blah, blah, blah.
And then that was used as support as an exhibit in the UDRP, saying, you know, that that was
their effort to get a price.
And then they thought it was too greedous.
And then the fact that they used GoDaddy's appraisal tool as a reason, because the appraisal
tool said it was worth $80.
And my asking price was, I think, like $3,000 or $2,995.
And so, I mean, that's just nothing.
They went after a name that wasn't even, you know, the UDRP was $1,500.
So it's one of those where it's nowhere near worth your reputation, especially me.
I have a large portfolio over a name that small.
But again, I learned a very valuable lesson.
I was fortunate.
And, but yeah, just so if anyone's ever in that position, you know, try to do some research.
And don't ever, you know, if you don't like the name or it didn't cost you much, if you
can get the process halted and get that decision without going in front of a panel, it'll save
you your reputation.
Let me ask you a question, David.
If you're outbounding a name to a trademark holder, let's say you have a .com and they
use a .org or .io or .xyz, what are the legal risks with that?
From, you know, from a, from an IP protection standpoint, are you exposing yourself?
It depends what kind of trademark they have.
If they have a trademark on the supplemental register, it's worthless from a UDRP standpoint.
So that's not a threat.
If you're, if you register a name in the, you know, 10 years ago and they just got their
trademark last week, well, you're not exposing yourself there either.
So those are two situations where it's usually clear, but I try to outbound generic stuff,
stuff that's geo or generic.
If it's matching a trademark that's just got applied for, yeah, that's an easy one to go
for also.
But a lot of people will not even spend money on the domain name until they get their trademark
approved, which takes about a year now.
If they turn you down and start giving you threats while it's in the pending process,
you could always file a notice of objection or something with the trademarks office and
submit evidence that the name is generic or confusing with another mark or something else
like that.
And you pay a $75 fee, but sometimes it's worth it.
But they don't give you a response.
They don't say it was good or bad, but you just got to make sure it's a good submission.
Yeah, it's very cloudy.
It's like so much you got to worry about as a domain.
The legal side is where you don't want to have a slip up for sure.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, does anyone have any other questions?
We can wrap it up.
If not, quick reminder, don't forget to register for Domain Expo, DomainExpo.com.
You guys want to talk about any recent pickups?
Rene, what did you pick up?
I'm always buying names.
Give us your favorite last three pickups.
Well, let me just say, I stepped outside to take my dog out, so let someone else speak
and I'll pull my email real quick and I'll give them to you in like about a minute.
What about you, Michael?
I picked up one at the, let's see, this week, MarsDiscovery.com.
Expired domain, I think it was about 27, 28 years old, uncontested.
So you guys were sleeping on that one.
MarsDiscovery.com?
Uh-huh.
Yeah, that's for Elon.
Yeah, it was just like, you know, it's just, it's still a topic, you know, so not something.
Yeah, I see your friends are Elon's mom.
Well, a lot of people don't realize, you know, I'm very, very interested.
So her mom was famous long before him in my world.
So in the chiropractic world, her dad was a pilot, and there was a group of chiropractors
that would fly around the United States and did all kinds of crazy stuff.
So, you know, I knew her through that, and, you know, he was famous in his own right.
So there's a history in that family of chiropractors and people that did exploration.
Interesting.
Any other pickups?
No, that was that, quiet week, you know, I was going to bring that up earlier because
normally I use the way, I use Wayback to check everything, and with Wayback down, I was just
like, yeah, I think I'll just take the week off and focus on other things.
Yeah.
But I'll be back next week.
I got my, my queue is full.
I probably got 30 names in the queue right now.
So, Rene, UFO call.
I'll share a couple with you.
Yeah, hold on.
I want to share something before you speak.
You sold alttextgenerator.com.
What was it for, 6,500?
7,500, yeah.
7,500.
So I was like, what is an alttext generator?
So I went through this rabbit hole of doing research on what it was, and I realized that
the alt stood for alternative.
So I, just last night, I hand registered alternative textgenerator.com, inspired by you.
So I just wanted to mention that, and I haven't even listened for sale.
Some people don't even know what that is, and it's so important because it's for people
that can't either comprehend or they can't, yeah, they can't, so you have to, you have
to place underneath the image.
That's what it is.
So it's very valuable with AI.
I mean, if you look up alttext.ai, that's what they, I don't know, I'm not saying they
bought it, but that's what they do.
I mean, so it's a big industry, and it's needed, and I just saw the name, and I got it for five
bucks in Namecheap last year, and then it came for renewal, and I was like, you know
what, alttext is good in generator, and I'll renew it again, and it sold to me.
They, you know, they offered five, I wanted 10, and we sell this at 500, so it's an Asian
buyer, so I don't know what they're going to use it for.
Maybe it's, I think it's in China, someone who bought it, but who knows.
There's alttextgenerator.net that shows what it's used for.
Yeah, correct, yep, so there's that too.
I mean, again, but again, I basically bought it because I like alttext by itself and put
generator on the end of it, and I figured somebody will come along, and that's on the
higher end.
I probably would have sold it.
I repriced my name recently about, I don't know, two or three months ago, so a lot higher, and
I'm willing to negotiate a lot more now, and with the new landers, I have a bin to make
offer on all of them, so, I mean, I'm willing to negotiate and also overpriced to anchor them,
but that's just a little shift I did, but I picked up a few names.
I mean, nothing crazy.
I grabbed the logo, builder.com.
That was a pretty good name.
That was uncontested, and logos are a huge thing, right?
And so I grabbed that one.
I grabbed Orion.energy.
I like that name.
Apex.solar.
Just stuff like that that I'm just branching out a little bit.
You know, most 85% of our names are .coms, but I'm adding a couple other different extensions,
and when the left of the dot makes sense, like those two, they're pretty much no-brainers
and they're uncontested, so, you know, I'm not competing on those ones.
Yeah, I really like the logo, builder.
It was pretty good, I thought, for five bucks.
You said Orion.energy or Orion.energy.com?
Orion.energy.
Interesting.
Yeah, most people let me know that that's an extension.
You know, Orion's a really good word in Prezwell's energy, you know, and then I got Apex.solar.
Those are really, you know, and so, again, I mean, I'm not trying to recreate the wheel,
but I need some of those other extensions with strong, you know, left of the dot to basically diversify away from,
you know, I don't want to have all .coms.
I mean, you know, I have plenty of those, and if I find them at the right price,
I'll add other names all day that are, you know, $30, $20, $40, or just whatever the reg fee is
because they're uncontested, and, you know, a lot of those, I have some dot groups.
Those are really selling, you know, pretty well now, so, I mean, dot digital, so.
Yeah, I think a lot of these GCLDs are starting to report great sales.
I read earlier today that someone sold DeFi.app for $150,000.
That's amazing.
Yeah.
DeFi.app sold for $150,000.
I know Adam had a .app sale recently, right?
Yeah, yeah, I had a small 2K app sale.
Most of my app names are, none of them have the premium pricing, and so, you know,
most of them are just, like, of average quality.
I do have two very good app names that are priced a lot higher.
One is Dapp.app, D-A-P-P.app, and the other one is Pickleball.app.
So those are my big ones.
Wait, what's the first one?
Dapp, D-A-P-P.
Yeah, Dapp, yeah.
I love Dapp.
Those are really good names.
Yeah, so Dapp app goes pretty well together.
It's a tongue switch, man.
I'm seeing, I don't know if anybody's got a bit on this,
but it looks like it's going to end in a few minutes.
It's expired auction is Lantus.com, double L.
Right now it's at $85,000 on GoDaddy.
So somebody's definitely interested in that.
And it looks like it's a Spanish word for something related to tires.
It might be a tire brand.
So that would be an interesting one.
Another one I got recently that I like a lot is I got staking.cc.
I also own staking.world as well.
But I like ones like that with CC for cryptocurrency and staking.
I think that pair as well.
But again, just small stuff like that.
I mean, I don't buy, spend too much money, you know, on the many names.
But that's a few of my pickups I'll share with you guys.
Yeah, low risk, high reward names.
I love it.
What about Arif or David?
Any recent pickups?
No, nothing from me.
I've acquired, yeah, I've acquired about 600 domains in the last six weeks.
Oh, you're going crazy.
You got a couple of others?
Yeah, it's more than I've bought, I think, in the last four years combined.
I went from zero to about 3,000 from 2016 to 2020.
And then since then, I've only bought a couple of little stints here and there,
combined for maybe about 500 or 600.
But then in the last six weeks, I just kind of went all the crazy.
You guys know, I've got some stuff going on and real-world stuff,
family health issues that just got me crazy.
And Labor Day weekend, I just kind of took a break from stuff.
And I went a deep dive into the exploration list.
And then next thing you know, I'm hooked again.
But getting some great stuff, so I can't really complain.
Yeah, speaking of interest in sales, I think Coin.lol sold for what?
Was it $15,000?
I saw it.
That was good, yeah.
Yeah, so that's another interesting one.
But, yeah, we're going to keep...
Dot what?
What extension was it?
Dot L.OL.
Well, you know, Cardi B...
No, I'm sorry.
Scratch that.
We saw VPS.Holson for $26,000.
Coin.lol, I think, was $15,000.
We're just seeing a bunch of random SLDs with a CLD, with a matching CLD.
I don't know if it's a trend or these are one-offs.
But it's always cool to diversify with a bit of those.
You know, Adam has reported a sale.
What was his name?
Tony Names reported a sale of a Dot Tools.
Was it Group Dot Tools?
For about...
I don't remember how much.
$2,500.
$2,500.
Yeah, there you go.
So, yeah.
I think it's just a good idea to...
If you find them, pick them up.
They're resonating with...
Yeah, the real question with all these ones is, like, how many others are they holding, right?
Like, I know he's profitable, right?
But just for the sake of argument, like, you know, he's got, like, you know, 100 other Dot Tools.
And he only sold one in a year for $2,500.
But the real costs are $50.
He only had one, and that was...
No, that was a...
That was a...
Oh, even better, then.
That's great, then.
Yeah, again, with him, I'm not really too concerned.
I'm talking more just, you know, theoretically for the room here.
Like, you know, sometimes people, you'll hear these...
What seem like, you know, decent sales for a lot of these extensions.
But what we don't know is, like, how many other domains are domain holders holding that don't sell, right?
So, you have to be profitable as a portfolio, not on individual domains.
Because, as we all know, individual domain sellers are almost just luck, right?
But as a portfolio, you should have a sell-through rate that as the portfolio gets larger, the consistency gets more and more.
It doesn't mean you're making more sales, but, you know, if you're having a 1% sell-through rate and you only have 50 domains, well, it means you're making one sale every two years.
But, you know, again, that's on average.
You might not make your first sale for three years.
And that doesn't mean you have a bad portfolio.
It just means that you don't have a large enough sample size to really, you know, know how your portfolio is doing.
So, always just be careful of hearing these stories in the news about these one-off sales.
Like, how many other domains are being held and is it really a profit or not, right?
That's why you hear all these big investors sometimes and you all get these big sales.
But, like, yeah, how many are they actually making and how much are they paying for renewal?
That's a really important part of the question.
You can't hear about the sales without knowing what their sell-through rate.
Because without knowing both, you have no clue whether somebody is successful or not.
Now, you know, again, Tony Names is an exception.
He's given a lot of evidence and a lot of shows so that he is successful.
But, I mean, just, you know, be careful when you hear that data.
Yeah, and also, I think, I don't know, I've always argued back that sell-through rate is a very, it's a vanity matrix.
You know, I prefer profit-loss, right?
Are you at least breaking even?
Well, yeah.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sell-through rate is a meaningless number without knowing the actual sales amount, right?
You can have a 10% sell-through rate, but if you're only selling your domains for 50 bucks each, you're bleeding money, right?
And that's, like, 10%.
It's like, wow, that's an amazing sell-through rate.
And conversely, you can have a sell-through rate well under 1%, but if you're moonshotting all those sales and you're actually making sales, well, then you can be quite profitable, right?
So it's really context to everything.
When I talk sell-through rates more, because, like, mine, you know, is about 1%, but that works for me, right?
Like, I sell my domains, I buy most of my domains in two figures, and I sell them for mid-four figures.
And if you do the math, you know, it means I'm profitable.
But it doesn't need to be that same thing for everybody, right?
In fact, it shouldn't be unless you're doing the same, buying the same type of domains I am.
It will probably be quite different, but you have to know your numbers, and they have to work, and you have to know about your sales prices and your sell-through rate, and then you have to put those two things together.
Because without them putting together, one or the other alone is meaningless.
Same thing.
Like, you hear all these, again, these big-name ancient domain legends that are, you know, they share their sales, but, like, are they profitable?
Like, you know, who knows, right?
You can sell a domain that's, like, $10,000 that you would have thought, well, it only should be $5,000, so it's amazing.
But, like, how many times did he say no to $5,000?
If he said no only one other time, then he's kind of, like, doing about the same thing.
But, like, if he said no five times, then he's actually losing money compared to what he could be doing.
So it's really, you know, you have to know the whole aspect of it.
You can't just take, you know, he went off sales and take them as, like, okay, a success or a failure.
Most of the time, there just isn't enough information to know.
Absolutely.
Arif, we're going to circle back to you.
We want to hear the three of the names you recently picked up.
But we got a guy who just joined, Joshua.
What's up, Joshua?
How can we help you?
Hey, how you doing?
Yeah.
Yeah, I was just listening in.
Good conversation you guys got going here.
Appreciate that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
A lot of knowledge in this room.
I actually got a pretty good domain not too long ago.
It's warehouse supply.
Warehouse dot supply.
So, kind of working on an angle right now to figure out what exactly I'm going to do.
I was thinking about listing it, like, in the auction, you know, or maybe even building it out, then listing it.
So, I think I'd share that with you guys.
I'm sorry.
Can you repeat that?
Warehouse dot supply.
What about it?
Oh, so I acquired that domain.
Oh, that's a good name.
What are your intentions for it?
To sell it or to build on it?
Well, so I was considering sitting on it, maybe building it out a bit, you know, kind of build, you know, somewhat of like a Amazon for warehouses.
Interesting.
But, yeah, I don't have too much time, so I'm considering just maybe just auctioning it out.
Well, let me ask you a question.
I'm looking at your bio.
You're a futurist.
I like that.
Yeah.
And I think we're all psychics here, right?
We buy names and we envision someone building a dream on it.
But what I like is you're also a Web3.
You're into Web3 and you're a full stack developer, right?
Yeah.
When you build projects, how important are domain names to you?
I don't know.
I think they're in a kind of a.
You know.
Like, would you, would you, like, what's the most you've ever spent for a domain name?
You know, I haven't spent too much on a domain.
I just kind of find domains here, here, and there and pick them up.
But I think, I think the domain is crucial as far as like whatever type of enterprise you're looking to, you know, build out more or less.
You know, in the case of warehouse.supply, you know, when you, when you look at that name right there,
you have an idea exactly what it is.
So, you know, anybody that, you know, would want to work with, you know, such a domain,
they're going to build a solution, you know, that works around logistics and, you know,
some type of commerce functionality that getters to that audience.
You know, the same goes for Web3 domains, you know, what is your, what is your use case?
What are you doing?
You know, so as far as like, you know, names, you know, they're, they're crucial.
Yeah, understood, understood.
Do you, do you value, like, what extensions are your favorite?
Or, you got them in the name, correct?
Um, I mean, they all, they all have, um, you know, different purposes.
You know, um, I don't really have a favorite per se, you know, but I think, uh, the trend of,
you know, TLDs relating to industry type, you know, there's, um, how do you say it?
A lot of names that, you know, you could do some unique stuff with that haven't been acquired,
you know, so diversifying with, um, industry specific, you know, uh, extensions, you know,
is, uh, I think if you build an app, you know, it's a good thing to look, look at, you know,
with whatever initiative you are working towards.
Interesting.
Yeah.
I just wanted to get a perspective of someone who's not a quote unquote domain investor.
Um, thanks for sharing.
So let's go back to Eric.
Eric, share some of those names you have and then we'll wrap up the room.
Where's some pickups?
All right.
Let me get some of those there.
You have three best where's some pickups.
Oh, I can't go over the best ones.
I just, I'm just keep the list up.
I'll give you a couple that are just like there.
I like couldn't be better.
It'll all be .com.
That's good.
I couldn't be better.
What is it?
From the floor up.
Could be better.
Couldn't, couldn't be better.
Yeah.
Like I couldn't be better, but couldn't be better.
The shortest way of doing it.
Couldn't be.
T O U L D N T B E T B.
T T E R.
Uh, like storybook.
Was that an expired list listed?
Uh, yeah.
I think that wasn't a photo.
Interesting.
Most of them are probably.
What would you list?
What would you, what would you, what would you list a name like that for?
I'd probably list it at five and then take probably, you know, anywhere three and above.
Interesting.
Uh, yeah.
Um, I haven't really did it too much.
I usually, when I actually do my pricing, I'll Google and see what it is.
But, uh, phrase the means, I really like phrase the means for memorability.
You know, then I got it from like, you know, apartments, 411, storybook romance, uh, self-help techniques, um, capital funding pros, um, gymnastics guru, gummy expert, managementology, uh, scheduled content, emergency bracelets, stuff like that.
That's like my portfolio.
It's pretty much, you know, really good roundables based on a good strong root word or two words that, you know, make sense together or phrase.
That's awesome.
Yeah, that's, I like those type of names.
I picked up, um, a geo name.
It was draperutah.com.
Um, I'm super excited about that one.
What do you guys think about that?
I didn't hear.
What was it?
It was draperutah.com.
It's a city in Utah.
D-R-A-P-E-R.
Yeah, if that's the full geo, that's a good, that's a good name.
Yeah, I thought so.
What's the population?
Um, I don't know the population.
I can, I can check real quick, but there's 22,200 monthly searches.
Why, you want to do a deal?
I've never been to Utah, so.
The population is 50,731.
Okay.
It's not bad.
All right, Ish, I'll share one more, all right?
And it's the best one I picked up recently and for the price point.
I picked up odysseywallet.com.
Odysseywallet.com.
Yeah, that's a good one.
Odyssey.com is on by Brayden, and I think he wants three to five million minimums.
So, that's a great name.
It's in a thousand company names, at least, with a wallet.
So, that's my kind of wheelhouse, those kind of names.
Yeah, blockchain, right?
Those are, those are holds.
You know what I mean?
Oh, yeah, those are holds, and I'll wait for, there's a ton of companies called odyssey that
are getting, you know, backing, and unless I want to pay out for odyssey.com, and, you
know, so that's just kind of my thought process sometimes when people ask, what do you think?
And I picked up that name every day of the week, you know?
So, the gentleman who said he picked up warehouse.supply, and my observation is usually end users
or builders that will pick up those type of names.
So, warehouse.supply, you're like, oh, hand registration.
But, um, the renewal is probably 500 bucks a month, a year.
So, that's my problem with those type of names, like, the renewal is...
The .com is asking 24,000 of that one.
I just looked it up, so, I mean...
Yeah, there you go.
So, yeah, it's, it's, it's one, if you're not building out on those type of names, um,
they're not really worth holding.
But if he's going to build something on it, obviously, 500 bucks becomes a small expense,
you know?
So, the other thing I think that's...
That's important-ish, and I see that, uh, one of the domains is a James, I think, or
he's been posting recently, some of it's private acquisitions.
I think at some point, you know, we don't talk enough about, like, I've been trying to...
I picked up a lot of names privately in the last, you know, six months.
There's been great deals out there.
Um, if you can network and talk to people, I mean...
Now, he's on a higher level, obviously.
He picked up payx.com, which is an amazing name.
But that's where some people really are, you know, that impresses me when you can get names
like that away from these diamond hands or whatever it was.
That was a network solutions.
I mean, that, to me, is impressive.
By the way, I just looked it up.
Warehouse supply, warehouse not supply, it's only $28 a year for a decision in the year.
Yeah, that's correct.
So, it's not that expensive.
What's that?
It's not that expensive.
Yeah, yeah, it's not one of those ones that cost a ton.
So, that's a good end of it.
So, I got lucky on that acquisition.
Very, very lucky.
So, I'm kind of like the same vein.
We're talking about high cost.
I only bought one domain name this past week, which is like a record for me.
And it was kind of an accidental situation.
I usually do my research and put in my name from back order.
There's one name that I saw was going to be expiring really soon.
It was spend.co.
That's a good name.
I quickly put it on my SAV back order list.
And this was, you know, near, it was like early evening.
And it was dropping that night, actually.
And that night, it said, I got it.
And I paid $999.95 for it.
So, what happens is .co has those premium renewal, not renewal, premium purchase costs.
So, you pay all the money up front for it.
And then you pay regular renewal fees every year.
Well, it's my fault that I didn't spend the time, no pun intended, to look at what the actual cost of it was.
Because most of the ones I've been buying that are pretty good, I would get for like $275.
That's like the first tier for the .co's.
Yep.
And then $995, I think it's like the third tier.
There's another tier in between, I think.
I don't remember.
But anyway, so I ended up buying that.
So, more than I wanted to spend for it, because I'm not really sure how much that name will go for.
At $275, you know, I feel like that was a good price point.
At basically $1,000, I'm not going to make the greatest ROI on it.
But I still think I could sell it.
But just the moral of the story is to always check those fees before you bid on a name, because that can get you.
Absolutely.
Very common mistake.
Well, I did that a few years ago back on SAV also.
I purchased Favorite.xyz.
Now, back then, they didn't tell you how much the renewal costs for domains were.
They didn't show the premiums.
And I didn't really know.
I was kind of new to the XYZ space, so I didn't really know.
So, I ended up winning it.
Then I find out it has a $3,000 a year renewal fee.
So, I basically bought the name for over $3,000.
But, you know, I'm thinking, okay, I did not want to spend this.
And I tried to get my money back.
But they said, nope, we already took the money out.
So, I got stuck with it.
This is when XYZ was pretty hot.
So, foolish me, I'm thinking when renewal time comes around, yeah, I'll pay the renewal again.
You know, I've seen all these really big XYZ sales.
So, I went in another $3,000 deep.
And then XYZ died, pretty much.
You know, it dropped out because crypto went down.
And then the next year came around, and obviously, I let that drop.
So, it was a bit of a costly lesson.
I think XYZ is the most vulnerable.
Is the TLD the most vulnerable to?
Make that mistake with it.
Because their renewals vary based off what the registry determines.
It's not like, oh, yeah, you know, two letters or whatever.
It's word by word.
So, yeah, a lot of people will see an XYZ name and start bidding for it without looking at that renewal.
Yeah, very scary mistake to make.
Yeah, you got to always check that renewal.
Well, that's it, ladies and gentlemen.
I appreciate your time today.
I hope you guys make a sale soon this week.
Thank you to Michael, UFO, Adam, David, Arif, Ryan.
Everyone will join us.
I learned so much.
And, yeah, we'll catch you guys next week.
Cheers.
Thanks, Ish.
See ya.
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