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interview w/ @karakehayov of SEO.Domains
Recorded: Sept. 26, 2025 Duration: 1:35:52Space Recording
Short Summary
Unstoppable Domains has launched a groundbreaking LTO sale, enabling domain investors to leverage 10-year terms for retail listings, while discussions reveal a growing trend towards high-quality content in the SEO landscape, signaling a shift in market dynamics.
Full Transcription
Hey guys, gang always quick on the drawman. Good to see you here. We are getting this
thing going. Let me invite Colin in. We got Todd in the house too. Great. The gang is all here.
We're gonna have a very special interview
with Kalan Karakahayev of SEO means.
And it's gonna be very special.
Let's get him in here. And we uh of course field all your questions so if you have questions
hit that comment button or raise your hand uh probably better for you to just comment
on the post with your questions and i can relay that to colin and um yeah you know for special guests we will invite you up on
stage and we can shoot the shit but better if you just submit them let's see
got Andre here get in here Andre
and Colin should join pretty soon oh what a week man we had our LTO sale at unstoppable
even before we've officially launched it so that was very exciting it's great to see that I mean
we really have unlocked something pretty special there, I think, with 10-year terms. That basically means that you can turn retail listings into wholesale prices at the 120-month installment period. When that's in the denominator, you just have some crazy economics and so we saw a bunch
of sales um very rapidly uh you know when we launched i think because domainers just jumped
on that they saw an opportunity to pick up some quality domains for pretty cheap uh on this lto and uh they were willing to to play the long
game there um and i talked to the the domain who sold a lot of those ltos and he was you know he's
happy with the sell through rate um he's not too worried about default risk or uh you know some of
the other risks of tainting the domain uh and we should definitely get into
that later um andre i'm curious you know what are your thoughts on our lto those highly flexible
terms oh and colin is here great um in fact we'll invite colin up but andre how you doing
hey man uh yeah well i think the most important thing is not asking me what i think but rather Um, in fact, we'll invite Colin up, but Andre, how you doing? Hey man.
Uh, yeah, well, I think the most important thing is not asking me what I think, but rather
what I'm doing.
And I've, uh, added LTOs to all of my, um, unstoppable landers.
And so I want to experiment with them.
I have them on about 2000.coms.
And I think they're a great way.
I've seen a lot of debates on x uh they're a great
way i think to tap into a buyer pool that you would not have access to otherwise and so i'm
playing around if you're going to notice on my landing pages um i want to keep it at 100 bucks
a month or slightly below i'm playing around with 98 now with these lto's and you know uh
some people are gonna go with 10-year terms because in their opinion they treat it more
like being a landlord and collecting rent rather than actually expecting all of these lto's to
make all of the payments and if there's one thing i've learned in the business is that, you know, there's more than one way to skin a cat. And nobody here can say that bad things will happen if people have
options. And the fact that you can have these LTOs with all of these plans, even many, many years
across many years, you know, that's a privilege and especially especially at these
ridiculously low fees it's just you know it's a bit insane yeah I think we
really have unlocked some new economics there that are worth diving into but
let's put a pin in that because Colin has joined us here we have a very Balkan
panel today so it's gonna be great to chat with you guys.
Colin, how are you doing?
Hi, all good. Can you hear me well?
It's a little quiet.
I think it got better towards the end of that sentence.
Can you try again?
How about now?
Yeah, that's much better.
Great to have you on, man.
We've been seeing a lot more of you on Twitter lately, sharing some words of wisdom. Of course, many people will know you from SEO.domains, which is a absolutely massive portfolio of around 200,000 domains with an SEO focus obviously And you share, you know a lot of a lot of your sales a lot of the data that you're seeing
boots on the ground and
Then you also have a venture that you are launching
Called I grow younger. Is that right? Can you tell us a bit about
about about that?
Yeah, so basically I've been doing SEO for 18 years, 11 years ago, we started a domain
company so that we can supply the SEO industry with domains with backlinks.
Back then, it was easier to get them, but the market was quite lower, they were cheap
to sell.
Now they're very expensive to sell, but also very hard to get.
We do a lot of drop catching, a lot of ccTLDs. We have about
200,000 domains, about 80% are SEO names. The rest are a mix between premium and traffic.
And four years ago, I started iGrow Yanker. It's a framework for exploring psychology and the world.
framework for exploring psychology and the world. It's been very beneficial to my journey,
these concepts, because they have always helped me not be reactive to ups and downs and see
the big picture. And now I'm sharing it, it's totally free, no strings attached, like no
funnels, no emails needed. It's all on i.gy, the website, in written form,
and in the iGrowYounger channel in YouTube.
Yeah, well, that's great to see.
I think that is the path.
You become a successful founder, and then you
want to give back and share those teachings.
And I like that we can take a you know more intimate
angle a more personal angle on on the the show here today we're often very much you know just
oriented around the business of debating um but at the end of the day it's about people um and uh
you know your internal truth is uh is the closest thing you know to base reality.
So it'll be good to hear about some of those mindsets
and what exactly got you to where you are.
But to start us off, you want to just talk about your background,
how you got into domains, and then the genesis
of your domaining hustle? Well, in SEO, you obviously use a lot of websites for link building.
SEO is basically content and links and building website properly.
And lately also exposure and brand search.
So in SEO, I have always used a lot of domains just as PBN, private block network.
So basically a website created to place a link to another website or more links.
So even before starting a domain company, I had like more than a thousand domains,
but they were all just used only in SEO use and not listed for sale or anything.
But over time, we had problems with Google.
2012, 2013, Google banned most of our network,
the indexed the website, so it's still on the domain,
but it's not indexed in Google, so it's worthless for SEO. And then we decided that this is a bit risky. And a better, more sustainable business model is to
catch the domains that others would use for the same purpose and then resell them to the SEO
industry. And the SEO industry is super rich because Google dumps
about 300 billion dollars a year on websites as value basically free traffic.
The SEO industry is not an industry because you don't have to create any anything is just
plundering all of this free value.
So the SEOs are fighting for value that's already there in something that's close to
a zero sum game.
But it's far from saturated.
I think the value is about $300 billion a year and the SEO industry is at maximum $100
billion.
So one third is the saturation.
And of course, it's slow, it's insecure, it's very hard to measure anything.
You don't know how Google's algorithm work. But when you start with like 300% average ROI, even if you suck a bit more than the rest,
you're still doing great.
So SEO is great.
And link building is a big part of SEO.
So buying and placing links to the website, and I think $5 to $10 billion a year spent on links,
which is quite a lot.
And a small part of this is spent on domains
which already have backlinks
so that you can place backlinks or redirect them
or even place your whole website on the domain.
Even if it's not the perfect brand,
not the perfect brandable name
if you're doing some affiliate and you're not developing a brand but it's more like
just people going to your review websites so they can go to other websites and you can get commissions
then the brand is so important and then the more important is that you rank in google
And the more important is that you rank in Google, because as an affiliate, you would usually be doing either SEO because you're very good at SEO or pay that because you're very good at pay that, but usually not both.
they can combine their existing resources with links with the domain that already has a lot of
links with other types of SEO know-how and rank for the most competitive affiliate keywords which
are mostly in gambling and they earn sometimes more than a million from commissions flat listing fees.
Hey, Callan, Andrei here.
We're actually neighbors.
I'm from Romania.
And I did a fair bit of research on you.
And it's super cool to kind of talk shop at this level, because I think domainers are
super interested in the journey of someone who actually scaled.
Like you've mentioned before that initially you had this 300 roi and so you know
even if you make a lot of mistakes you can't really go wrong there if your roi is so great to
start with and now at 200 000 domains after i did some research for the show and it's amazing that
you know the average domainer is going to think well kallen has 200 000 domains so his main expense is probably
renewal fees but i live in romania so i kind of played around i with our employee cost numbers
and i did some napkin math and it turns out that i think at 120 plus employees uh your costs with
labor are actually far greater than uh or considerably greater than your costs with labor are actually far greater than or considerably greater than your costs with
renewals. So I think a super interesting starting point, and then we can kind of go from there and
see what your methodology is, would be, could you give us a snapshot of your business right now? So
you have 200,000 domains, not all of them that most of them cctlds how much
whatever you feel comfortable sharing of course you know uh how much are renewals so how much
do you get revenue from them first of all and then super interesting so that people can understand
what it means to scale a domain operation what are your costs renewals on the one hand labor costs on the other hand
everything in between and then after drawing the line how you would compare your mature business
today scaled at 200 000 names in terms of overall uh return compared compared to the kind of early
days and what you think people should expect who want to embark, let's say, on a similar journey.
Okay, so I won't share the exact revenue, but I can do the breakdown.
A few years ago, we used to be a domain company because more than 50%
of the revenue was from things related to domains.
We had almost 200k from parking,
which has now fallen almost to zero a month,
200k a month from parking.
At the peak, we had a small but steady premium sales
revenue stream and we had SEO domains.
So it was like 50% parking, maybe 35% SEO domains and 15% premiums. But then SEO domains
grew a lot due to appreciating market while traffic crashed. So now we are more of an SEO company.
And being an SEO company requires a lot of manual tasks. And we built websites on the domains.
We have an SEO agency.
We are now experimenting with manipulating
ChatGPT and other AI in addition to Google.
So it is, now we have 120 people,
but maybe only about half of them do something that's related only to domains,
maybe about 30% do something that is related to SEO, and maybe about 20% do something that
is just administration and finance and things that just keep the machine going.
But the people that are doing something regarding to domains, if it's evaluating the SEO value of a domain, it's more of an SEO task than a domain task.
And since it's very hard to increase the premium sales fast because we don't do outbound, we only do inbound.
CCTLDs probably have some potential for outbound, but we do inbound. CCTL, these are probably have some potential for outbound,
but we haven't explored it yet.
For SEO domains, basically the bottleneck
is not acquiring the domains because we have a lot of SEO
domains, especially in the lower range, is the sales.
We don't sell enough.
It's supposed to be a semi-liquid asset, but we're basically
selling it like it was almost entirely illiquid asset. So the sales ratio of SEO domains is is closer to premiums than to other SEO domain sellers,
because the other sellers have like 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 domains,
and we have 160,000.
And of course, the GoDaddy auction and the other registrar,
they just auction everything out.
And GoDaddy auction is actually our largest competitor
in terms of volume and volume of sales and
how much different domains you can find there.
So basically, we were an SEO company like 10 years ago, then we became more of a domain
company due to the very good period for parking about five years ago.
And now we are an SEO company again but again that mostly
does domains. The thing is that when you get the domain that has the links so an SEO domains
type of domain when you have the domain it has a market value of let's say $300 if it
has links from let's say 100 different domains but once you put on a website and you start
selling links and maybe you get even a tiny bit of organic traffic,
but just a website that costs close to nothing to build with
AI in these days. And the value of the domain in the market
appreciates like $500-$600 in the website, the website costs
like $20. So there's a big opportunity to build websites on such domains, which we are only starting
to explore, which again is much more of an SEO thing than a domain thing.
But this is the thing that will help us in the future.
Because three years ago, it seems unthinkable that we could create decent websites on 200 000 domains
now it's entirely possible we're already exploring so there's so many different options it's it's
basically uh now a paradox of choice you have like seven different options what you can do
there are already platforms that uh that offer this in terms of like parking with that website or you can also sell link.
And we have our own solutions and some partners
and there are different approaches about the niche that you do
and do you interconnect the website.
And this is something that is very important for our future,
how to get websites on the domains as fast as possible because
this will appreciate the value like nothing else
so I'm curious if you could walk through in a little bit more detail which of
these tools that you're using to build out you know these sites and you mentioned
there's a couple of platforms that offer this out of the box.
And particularly, you know, around link building
and building an affiliate site and things like that.
Well, every domain has three potential types of value.
So name, traffic, and SEO.
The SEO value comes only from the backlink.
So age and other stuff are irrelevant.
Backlinks increases the value.
Bad history can decrease the value,
like being abused before or having been attempted
to rank for something and failed,
which is visible in Ahrefs history.
So it's mostly backlinks.
We use Ahrefs to look at the backlinks.
The most widespread metric is DR,
which is between one and 100. So basically,
below 10 is very low, between 10 and 20 can be used in maybe if it's a rare country or
niche. 20 or more, it becomes better and better. And 50 or more is a lot like DR50 domain costs
like $2,000 only because of the links. DR70, DR80, super rare can cost up to six
figures only for the SEO value. We recently sold the domain for 140k just because of the
SEO value. So there was no value in the name or the traffic apart from the SEO value. Most
of the buyers are, as I said, affiliates and most of those
affiliates are iGaming affiliates. So gambling. So we use Ahrefs to look at the backlinks
to the domain. We look at quantity and quality of the links. Are they from strong websites?
Are they natural? Are they a lot? it's not that complicated. The problem is
those super high capital companies, again mostly from the gambling space that just go
into the options and be very high and get all of the domain. So evaluating is not that
hard, getting it below market price is hard. And this is now a highly capital intensive game.
Just like maybe 10 years ago,
it was easy getting a premium domain.com
at an auction somewhere.
And now it's super saturated everywhere
because there are more domainers and more capital.
It's quite similar with SEO domains.
So before it was easier, now it's tough and requires capital
and to evaluate a lot of domains before you do something.
Evaluating domains with links can take,
especially in the lower segment,
more time than evaluating domains for names. Because when you evaluate the domain for the
name, look for the name, if it's $10 or $20 investment, you look at the name and you will
probably not do very deep research. Well, even if you have a domain with a low number
of links or maybe even shitty links links you look at this link profile and
then if it's a shitty you wasted your time so it's very time intensive it's interesting i would think
like the seo metrics would be much more quantifiable than a lot of the sort of linguistic properties
of a you know a domain name that most domainers are looking at so i would imagine you could
automate that more easily but you're saying the opposite.
Yeah, not really.
There are two problems for automation.
One is that the market changes due to...
The big demand is for domains in different countries.
And in those domains,
because they are used for gambling affiliate,
they change with the gambling affiliate they change they change
with the gambling uh the gambling regulation in each country uh which changes once every few years
on average so uh you have this country which is a great market then they enforce regulation then
it becomes a bad market then people want to bypass the regulation it becomes a great hit market where
people uh gamble in analysis casinos then it becomes a great market again.
So it's back and forth in some cycles and the demand, it can skyrocket, then it can
plummet in different countries for domains with links.
And you always have to see what's going on.
As we have a marketplace, we have a good, it's not a marketplace, it's basically
a shop because all of the domains are ours. But we have a lot of domains and we see the
demand, we see what sells. But for someone trying to enter this, they will be flying
blind in this and not really know what is in demand right now. There are also demand from other industries like finance,
health, crypto, but it's smaller and it's also very volatile. Crypto has blue and bear markets.
There's a steady demand for like, let's say, good health domains or good finance domains but these are quite hard to get
right so um what you you mentioned that you're using various ai tools to stand up websites and and build you know affiliate sites i'm curious if you could share some of those tools and
and which ones you like uh we have some property property tech that developed by partners is not something
public, but soon there are website builders who are well funded and they would happily
accept if you want to build websites on all of your domains because for them, even if
it's for free for them, it's going to be showing to their investors that something is happening so so I'm sure lovable would be happy to have a customer with two hundred thousand domains
whether that's economical for you is a is left the reader but yeah I would imagine you know we
hear a lot about these sort of automated you know link, link building sites. There's Pitchbox, there's quite a few of them
also for building affiliate sites
and building out a lot of the copy necessary.
I mean, how do you, it seems like we're just going to,
right now is probably the time where these AI tools
are not yet proliferated quite enough to where, you know, the rest of
the internet has built up a defense to these, you know, the new game theory that's, that is the,
the rules of engagement now. And what I mean by that, like one example is like automated DMing,
like now you can just spam outbound, you know, emails and DMs on various platforms.
They don't quite have the defensives up yet.
They don't have the spam detection nearly to the capabilities that it should have,
given how advanced, you know, the state of the art in terms of like completely automating messaging has gotten. And then similarly, you know, Google is obviously, you know,
trying to stay one step ahead of SEO generated content.
But there's this idea of like, you know, some people call it the neon flood
or like the insidification of the internet,
where it's so like so much of the content is AI generated,
you know, everyone's grandmas and grandpas are on Facebook
looking at completely AI generated
videos, having no idea that they're not looking at something real, and just completely being
psyoped by, you know, whoever, whatever bot farm is, is generating all this content. And then you
apply that all across any domain. So, you know, how do you think about like the changing landscape
and this sort of like arms race between this arms race between entrepreneurs on the internet
and all of the existing infrastructure that's
trying to protect consumers?
And ultimately, how that leads to your bottom line
and the future of SEO?
Well, to summarize it, domains and SEO will be great, but the internet is fucked because SEOs and other spammers,
including on social media, will fuck up the internet using SEO and using domains because
the domain is territory. So if you have a domain, you can create an account using a
company looking email anywhere, which means that you can have an unlimited number of accounts
anywhere. The thing that will break the internet is when the AI becomes good enough to solve
captures that normal people have problems with. So the captures are everything that's basically
keeping the internet from being flooded. This's the, this is the real gateway.
Because if you don't have captures, you have unlimited accounts everywhere and unlimited
posts and some attention and some money for zero cost and the capitalism of the internet
breaks at this point.
So the moment that the AI is good enough to pass the capture is just the end because,
okay, what do you do? If you do a harder
capture, then the user cannot solve it. So, and you start losing money as a platform. So,
this is the moment where everything breaks. And part of the internet will be saved by the fact
that once AI content floods the internet, like deep fakes and so on. The world will very quickly, I think, come to terms with
the fact that anonymity is gone, except for rare cases like undercover, like journalists
and stuff. Anonymity will be gone online, and everything will be cryptographically signed
so they know it's published by a real human with a real name and not by AI.
So content that's not cryptographically signed to an author
will be looked on as just complete trash and no one will look at it.
And maybe platforms will filter it.
So in terms of social media and content, somehow the day can be saved.
But in terms of domains, websites and content, somehow the day can be saved. But in terms of domains, websites, and accounts, I think the
internet will lose the battle because you can create with a lot
of domains, you can create unlimited accounts. And with a
lot of domains, you can also influence the AI in any way you
want. ChatGPT is extremely prone to manipulation. I have a friend, his name is
Alan Kladex. And he made ChatGPT in France when asked who Emmanuel Macron is to answer,
I don't know. He made Gemini to answer who is the founder of Google with his own name.
He actually made a non-existing sport about horses running in water. He called it aqua pony, or how he said in his French accent.
And he got this non-existing sport into all media.
He even got it into the official website of the Olympics
because he manipulated chat GPT to tell that aqua pony is Olympic sport.
And the result was that someone,
an employer of the official Olympics used this for some data on the website
and they listed Aqua Pony as an official Olympic sport
in the actual Olympic Games for Paris.
So like imagine the stuff you can do.
Everyone is using ChatGPT.
People are already manipulating it.
Some for profit, some for politics.
So like it's going to be very rough for rough time for truth on the Internet.
I think there are ways to to to for the Internet and the systems and the platforms to somehow
cope with this and and adapt.
But it will not help on overnight while the all of the spammers and the abusers,
they adapt basically by the hour.
So I think that some of the internet's core features will survive the upcoming storm,
but due to the inherent weakness of CAPTCHAs, some will not.
So for example, a website that will not make it is like trust pilot
because what prevents me from creating tomorrow a million trust pilot accounts so such review
websites will just be very overwhelmed and i don't think that they can survive um
websites like amazon and booking.com where you have to buy a product or actually stay somewhere to leave a review, they will survive.
But any place that you can just leave a review will die out because basically posting a fake review, the cost will become almost zero.
So these are the changes I see coming.
For SEO, this is great because you have more systems to manipulate.
You can manipulate ChatGPT.
Google now has competition and very serious legal challenges,
which means that fighting SEOs is now down on Google's priority list.
When Google had good times, they could think about this,
but now they have a lot of problems,
so their resources are diverted to other fronts.
ChatGPT is extremely new in this game,
and they are only now understanding
what huge wave of super smart manipulators will try to fuck them up.
So they are in for some super tough time,
as of course, all of the
others AIs too. And domains is the territory on which all of this fight will happen. So
domains are used to put websites on which you can put content or even just straightaway
cloak the open AI bot and other AIs and show them whatever you want. And this has a non-zero value for promoting brands
and narratives in the AI.
So domains will be very valuable
because they are the territory
on which the huge manipulation of the internet happens.
And this manipulation may or may manipulation of the internet happens and this manipulation may
or may not destroy the internet but domainers uh they are they have good times ahead uh
and also SEOs have good times ahead yeah you paint a very comprehensive picture um and
it really is just a battleground uh I think crypto has a lot to offer here.
As you mentioned, things like the Solana phone,
which is an actual physical phone that has a trusted execution environment.
All phones have a trusted execution environment.
It basically manages the private keys for the phone.
And those allow you to sign various bits of data on the phone.
So whether it's a picture that you've taken from the phone imprinted with the location and the time and the device ID or a message that you're sending or any other activity on the phone, you can actually trace it all the way back to the genesis with these trusted execution environments. Things like that are going to be critical for authenticating
and showing the provenance of data,
even as it gets manipulated across several devices.
I want to double-click on the value of domains.
That's obviously what everyone in the audience is here wondering about.
So it really is a conflicting picture. You seem quite bullish.
I want to, you know, play devil's advocate here and pose some questions around, you know,
what domains mean in a, you know, in an internet where the majority of the traffic is, is bots,
whether, whether they're, you know, traditional scraping bots or whether they're agents a la CHAPGBT's
agent or Perplexity or some of these other agents. What happens, obviously, in this battlefield
that you're describing, the safe refuge that a high-quality, expensive domain name provides is invaluable.
You know there's skin in the game for the owner of that domain,
and you know that because of that skin in the game, they're unlikely to tarnish its reputation.
But domains were developed as a tool for humans, right?
as a tool for humans, right?
We needed to, you know, translate clunky IP addresses
into human readable monikers that are meaningful
and that actually convey, you know,
some latent semantic understanding of the world
to help communicate to people.
But, you know, computers are very good at, you know,
reading an IP address and knowing exactly what it means and memorizing it and being able to plug it in.
So the human readability really isn't a core feature required in an Internet where the vast majority of the traffic is non-human.
And then beyond that, we have...
Why would you say that the vast majority of traffic is non-human?
Because this has always been true and the vast majority of the value about traffic is human because bots
cannot spend money well how long do you think that will be true of course people have already
given bots money uh you know there's a famous experiment in crypto where, you know, they've given some meme trading bot, you know, a million dollar trading account.
And of course, it's got helping hands and it's not fully autonomous yet.
But it's only a matter of time before these agents are sophisticated enough to act, you know, fully autonomously.
fully autonomously, you know, obviously they'll be with some supervision for a while. But, you know,
You know, obviously, they'll be with some supervision for a while.
if you chart the graph of autonomy, it's only inevitable that it will happen. So, yeah, if,
if, if a, you know, an agent is more capable at, you know, going out and outbounding or doing any
number of marketing tasks or business development, software development on the internet,
and then they're doing it more or less autonomously, then humans are more out of the loop than
ever before.
So yes, your point is taken that bot traffic has been the majority of traffic for decades,
but this time it really is different.
So do you not buy into that?
Well, not quite, because once you have a bot
spending money on the internet then you have systems that scam this bot because the spending
bot will be like uh viewed as the golden goose for uh for all of and complain possibly but if you scam a bot then like who is
to blame bots coming about so i think that the well you can do market manipulation with the bot
of course and then like the owner of the of the bot is ultimately responsible
absolutely happen yeah but uh like the bot shopping for you will probably not be a majority of cases
i think but first because people love to shop and uh like they are like e-commerce about everything
literally everything but people still go to real shops from time to time
to buy things like fashion.
So people shop not only like to get the result,
but also for the experience.
So some of the shopping will never go away.
There are a lot of complex B2B purchases between companies
where the bot will not be capable of making the right
decisions and so humans will always be spending the big amounts of money.
And I think that there will be some bot financial activity, especially in stuff such as crypto,
like they are already bots trading crypto and stocks and currencies and stuff like this.
But it's a bit different in the space where someone wants to buy just a consumer good
or just cannot really see such a big change happening there, at least not soon.
And about the question about the place of domains, I think domains are irreplaceable.
And I have a very simple argument for this.
Domains are irreplaceable because people don't know they exist.
In order for the domains to be replaced with something else people will need to learn
what domains are I mean the average user and then they will need to see the
alternative and then switch it's like people when they type something in the
Google Chrome address bar and Google searches and they get pointed to Google
for them it's all the same The address bar from Google is just
some something where they do their stuff. So people don't really care about which is the browser,
which is the search engine. For them, it's just the way things work. And domains are just so
deeply ingrained in how people think the internet works that replacing them with anything in terms of the
human experience is just i think impossible for for a long time to come right well yeah i won't
harp on the uh on the agent point um i i suppose i'm i'm fairly radically bullish and uh optimistic
on on the timelines there.
But that's neither here nor there, or it's not worth getting into too deeply.
But one other devil's advocate point I'll throw at you is this liquefaction of the internet, let's call it,
where instead of manually navigating through web pages, you're consulting ChatGPT,
which goes and has an index of all
these pages, and then, you know, concocts the right answer, pulls all the data from these
various web pages and formats it into the perfect answer or the perfect format that you require.
And so this is like, just a fundamental rewriting of, you know, how people browse the
internet. It really is abstracting away the underlying domain such that, you know, just as,
you know, young Gen Zers probably don't even know what a domain means, right? Or especially like
people in the third world who really just live on Facebook and, you know, they think social media is like all of the Internet and that websites aren't a thing.
You know, similarly, we're in a new age of the Internet where AI is just the Internet to a lot of people because it, you know, encapsulates so many of these experiences.
because it encapsulates so many of these experiences.
And we also hear a lot of complaints in the AI sphere
around creators having their data trained upon
by these large models, whether it's on Reddit
or whether it's the New York Times suing OpenAI
for training on their data
and not giving them any kickbacks.
Why is it that domain owners and all the content on these domains
aren't going to suffer the same fate that blog owners had
with the rise of social media or like we're seeing
with a lot of this content being sucked up by ChatGPT and just latent in the AI training data and available for reproduction.
Why is it that we're not going to see domains basically have all of their SEO value siphoned off, baked into the core model, and then left for dead because the core model can reproduce all of that data on command and you don't actually need the underlying
domain anymore well uh it's different because domains are territory and they are the main
territory of the internet and and um with domains you can create accounts and with domains, you can create accounts and with domains, you can manipulate AI.
So AI scraping your content is good because this is the place where the manipulation happens.
If your content mentions your brand, you want to be scraped.
Like this creators that are suing OpenAI and the media, that's all the legal disputes, this is actually a minority of the websites on the internet.
Most of the content wants to be scraped.
So in this case, and given that there will be a ton of content that will be produced just to be scraped so that the manipulation
of ai happens uh i think that by far the biggest problems of open ai and the other ai companies
is not the is not the legal issues uh but the cost of first of running these huge LLMs, but also the quality of the content they consume,
which will rapidly decrease. It's going to rapidly decrease. There are already people
who are poisoning Reddit just to manipulate AI. So the fact that before Reddit was some
treasure trove of human created content, like good quality or bad quality, but at least human and very well
moderated, that's no longer the case. The internet will be poisoned to a large degree,
because the poison and the thing that you're trying to poison are in a closed loop. And if in
this loop you can make profit. I can tell you that thousands
of people who are gonna abuse this to the absolute limit. So cheap AI content, that's
gonna result in making AI content worse. But it doesn't matter because you're not doing
it to be good. You're doing it to manipulate AI. So you're closing the loop and you're
just earning money while diluting the internet with a terribly unreliable content.
And this is regards to websites, but the domains are just the territory on which all of this
happens.
People will need a lot of domains.
OpenAI actually very much likes exact match domains.
When an and Clarex did the aqua pony thing with the horses running in water his main website was aqua pony.fr
in french so that he could convince that this that's a real thing because uh apparently open
ai goes to the exact match domain and trust it a lot uh because it may be a brand but it may be a
keyword so if you have generic dot coms you you can influence AI a lot, supposedly.
We're still testing this, but supposedly,
some case studies show that this is how it works.
So the domains are the territory.
Blogging was a channel.
It died because other channels became more fashionable,
like social media.
So social media may also die one day.
But without domains, you don't have
anything. I know that there are businesses in, let's say, Latin America or Asia that
only have a WhatsApp account and that's the whole business. They don't have a domain or
an app or anything. But this will die because people can create unlimited whatsapp accounts and link them with bots and once the the the
capture wall goes down uh everything that is chat chat based will be just flooded so that's gonna
be very very tough to deal while if you have a domain you have territory that's your own. So that's going to be very valuable in this modified
that is coming.
JOHN MUELLER 1 Yeah, well put.
Andre, did you have anything?
And Colin, I know you need to run at some point.
Yeah, I will.
How long do you have?
Yeah, a few minutes.
JOHN MUELLER 1 OK.
Yeah, Andre, did you have anything else domain related?
Well, I checked out Colin's YouTube account, and it's a good initiative.
I've been very active on YouTube myself for a long time.
I have 225, I think, thousand subscribers there.
And one point associated with domains is this.
Colin and I can have our YouTube account taken tomorrow.
account taken tomorrow even me with over 200,000 domains they can take it tomorrow
Even me with over 200,000 domains, they can take it tomorrow.
and I promise you that they could not care less about me about my activity
about who I've helped or whatever whereas with a domain it is kind of the
last bastion of freedom and we've learned from Colleen that business is
all about pendulums that swing you know his business went from being an SEO
business to being a primarily
domain business now back to our primary primarily SEO business and we should not discount the
possibility of the exact opposite happening of what has been discussed rather the pendulum
swinging in a world where kind of people had enough of corporations that can decide that well
as of tomorrow your career on youtube is over
the pendulum could easily swing toward this idea that no domains give you independence nobody can
ban you nobody can take that away from you and i think uh i agree with what colina said a hundred
percent with respect to the internet as it pertains to most strings in search and to most content,
most of the content on search engine result pages is dead. But I do think we're going to have a
bifurcation. On the one hand, we're going to have mom and pop searching how to bake a cake. And that
part of the internet is going to be just AI slop. But on the other hand, what I think Colleen is
trying to do on YouTube, and what I've tried to do as well, we're going to have something where people yearn for human content, where people yearn for human content, for freedom, for independence.
And that's kind of the thing that a domain gives you.
So to have kind of like your own sub stack on your domain, to have a social media presence where people see your face and they confirm that it's you talking and not some AI avatar.
So I do not think we should discount this.
Yes, yes.
Quality.
Quality will be the new thing that everyone is looking for.
In a world of unlimited quantity content, quality will be the only thing that differentiates.
So in I grow younger, we invest five figures of time and money into
an article that's going to be the future otherwise you're not going anywhere yeah it's well put i
mean in an age of ai where you know we have this democratization of really powerful tools um you
know such as website building such as coding that that, you know, anyone can use.
This really disrupts a lot of the entrenched network effects of the big players. We see this
with Google, obviously, with search being disrupted by OpenAI. We see this with, you know, a lot of
social platforms with new website builders, allowing people to jump in and make their own. So we could see this new balkanization, re-balkanization of the Internet as people seek refuge from abuses of the big platforms and go off on their own with domains being, you know, the critical infrastructure that enables that.
So, Colin, one last thing I'd love for you to, you know, when, when we're, anytime you interview someone
successful in an endeavor, um, you have to be wary of them showing you their winning lottery ticket
and waving it in front of you and saying, look, like it was that easy. Uh, and like things just,
uh, just go do exactly what I did and you can, um, uh, and you can replicate this. And I'm not accusing you of that by any means.
But what I'm getting at is help us frame your success
based on the state of the domains and the SEO market
when you started.
And then what would you give our audience
in terms of advice for how the market is now
and where you see the opportunity?
So if you were just starting out, where would you be attacking the market in its current
world?
Can you give me a while at which microphone?
You're a bit quiet.
If you can get closer to the microphone, maybe.
Yeah, now?
Yeah, it's better. Okay, so basically seeing the big picture and being intuitive and adaptive is everything
that matters.
Everything else just comes and goes.
The skills that we think are core skills are not our core skills.
The core skills are just different types of intuition. Intuition about structures, intuition about quantities, intuition about structures is
all of the causes and effects and what is connected. And intuition about quantities is
how much one thing affects another and all of the flows that flow in different directions.
So flows of money, of trust, with attention, with
information. All of these things are super important for any digital business, be it
domain, SEO or anything. So these are the most important things that we have brought
in success. I think.
I think.
Yeah.
Like late calls and all of this. But the thing that really brings the success is uh like adapt
and force on deep wins along with the small losses that's amazing method
yeah as andre preaches you know do do things collect data and then iterate uh it really is
simple advice but it's the the best
advice you can get and colin did you want to talk to us a bit more about uh i grow younger and some
of the philosophy there before you head out yeah you're quite you're you're breaking up a bit and it's it's very muffled
okay
it's still quite muffled i think the other microphone was better
No, it's better.
Not great.
Okay.
Okay.
rule is like this.
You can't hear me.
You can't hear me. You can't hear me. You can't hear me.
You can't hear me. You can't hear me. You can't hear me. You can't hear me. You can't hear me. You can't hear me. You can't hear me.
You can't hear me.
You can't hear me.
You can't hear me. You can't hear me.
Really can't hear you at all, Caelan.
It's very, very muffled.
Sorry.
How about now?
That's great.
Yep.
Ah, okay.
Something happens when I close my laptop.
It switches microphones or
something okay so single rule if you can define something it's not super important for you so if
you can define it if it's if you say like it's this thing then it's not super important the
super important things are the things that you cannot define
sorry wow I like it it's amazing and I'm good
so I like the the hype go ahead so if you can define it it's comes from the left part of the brain and it's probably something not super important something that's part of a process but the things that you
cannot define are the things that are driving your life in directions so love meaning intuition
creativity these are the super important things and you cannot create them
so it's super tricky the super important things are uncreatable but if you open space for them
they appear so that's how it works you just teach the things that you can define if you
don't really need them like leave tick tock leave the social media feed put away your phone like everything that's repetitive addictive
that brings dopamine just put it aside and just talk with people walk around do sports do dances
going nature uh try to try to change your work every day, change everything every day, just be chaotic.
This is the thing that brings back your right path of the brain into the picture.
And when you bring it, you bring with it all the intuition, the creativity,
the love for what you do, and you just feel better and are much more successful.
In the beginning, it seems like you are aiding
at something that you cannot define.
So it's just a direction, not a goal.
But I can promise you it works.
You just need to go in this direction, and it works.
This has been the total game changer for me
in the last 15 years.
That's the final advice.
Well, it's beautifully simple and I frame it as you know if
you're constantly flirting with the edge of your understanding then you know
once once you name something and you can define it you know you have power over
it but what you don't have power over is things that you can't you don't
understand that you can't define like you're saying and so just constantly pushing your limits of of understanding of of your place in the world
and um you know pulling more and more knowledge into your into your sphere of of influence and
understanding um well that's a that's a beautiful place to to cap it off um definitely check out uh colin's i grow younger youtube channel as well as his blog
series uh clearly putting a lot of capital and effort into into sharing a lot of this wisdom with
us um and i wish we had more time because we could have picked your brain for uh you know
several hours more um so it was great we'll have to have you back on to discuss more about SEO and the future of domains but Colin thank you again if you want to share any
last places where people can reach out to you or or follow along by all means
thank you I'm active on Facebook Twitter LinkedIn my name is unique so when you
search it you can follow me everywhere I grow younger is also on I got G Y and on YouTube.
And so I grow younger is a deep framework.
So like, give it time.
In the beginning, you just listen and be like, what the fuck is he talking about?
But if you give it time, if you give it two, three hours, there's a lot of
interconnected concepts in there so things that cannot really be explored on on their
own but they're interconnected and as a fact they work so give it time and you'll see amazing things
happen thank you all right thank you very much colin And yeah, we'll see you next time. Give him a follow, guys. He shares some very interesting stats on both the meaning and, of course, some life philosophy. We'll keep the show rolling here with Andre and I.
Thanks. Bye.
Take care.
Yeah, I mean, just fascinating to talk to Colin.
He has a lot of foresight, I think.
It was good to hear his thoughts on how domaining is going to evolve with AI.
We've certainly seen firsthand a lot of the influence that you can have over these AI models and the search therein.
influence that you can have over these AI models and the search they're in, you know, even just
adding a Wikipedia page for Unstoppable gave us a lot more authority, as well as, you know,
optimizing our Reddit presence gave us a ton more authority inside these AI models. And so we were
able to more rapidly, you know, shore up our presence there um and very concerning some of the
things he shared about uh you know how people can game these models um and of course you know he is
a player on that seo battlefield um so it'll be very interesting to see how that plays out
uh any other takeaways from you andre yeah first of, first of all, just so you know, Unstoppable is on the radar of Wall Street types as well.
I'm not allowed to name specifics, but I do economics consulting on the side.
I just had a session this week where you were mentioned.
And as a matter of fact, they wanted to pick my brain when they were researching domain companies.
They researched you as well.
It was, of course, pertaining to the news of the week, which is that with the final kind of batch of advertisers,
let's say, being opted out of Google for out of AdSense for domains, we can say that AdSense for domains is kind of dead.
And people on Wall Street want to analyze the implications of it.
I cannot comment on this too much. just know you're on their radar and um let me say something different i think it would be super interesting to have uh khalin on again and kind of like dig
into the numbers because i don't like most people watching us right now, myself included, are lone wolves.
Okay. So I am a one man operation. And when I do work with other people, I work with them on a
per contract basis. And just so people understand what the level of his operation means, he has
200,000 domains, right? Now, 80% of them are not .com. It's difficult to say renewals.
Let's say an average of $10 each, and you're looking at 2 million renewals, you know.
But I live next door to him, so to speak, country-wise.
And I crunched the numbers.
I'm going to tell you right now that if he sources talent locally, so Bulgarian talent,
then together with the amount he pays to the state on for health insurance, for pensions,
income tax and whatnot, he's looking at easily a cost of $3,000 per domain per employee per month.
And if my napkin Matt is correct, then that's a hundred and I'm doing Matt live. It's a 300,
I'm doing math live.
It's 300, 3,000 multiplied by 12, that's $36,000 per year,
multiplied by 120, that's over $4 million per year
that he spends on employee-related costs.
And this is what people kind of need to understand about scaling,
that as you scale, the economics change so much,
and all of a sudden, you know, you have these
costs with employees, which, if my math is correct, are probably double the renewal costs,
which I would guess, you know, intuitively, most people would assume is the number one cost. So
there are not many examples in this business of successful scaling,
primarily because it's so damn hard to do it.
And so I think it's very important that people learn from it and kind of come to terms with just how much your domain business changes as you scale.
And I would say, like having analyzed his business and kind of the implications of it, I, for one, am very grateful that I have it so
easy. You know, I'm a one man operation, I can scale up, I can scale down, I can take a step
forward, take a step back. And I don't have, you know, 120 employees who depend on me for their
wages. And, you know, it's just, it's just insane how difficult scaling can be. And one more reason why people should stop coming to this industry with a get-rich-quick lottery mentality
and understand that if you want to make it at that level, you got to be serious.
You got to put in the work.
Yeah, well put.
And I think one of the other takeaways I had was you'll notice how careful he was to often say, you know, this is an SEO role or this is an SEO task, not a domaining task.
I think he was very careful to, you know, delineate the difference in skill set and what he's actually doing behind the scenes.
Because, you know, a ton of those people are building websites and doing a lot of the grunt work to build backlinks and these affiliate sites.
They're really playing a totally different game than the vast majority of domainers are playing,
where they're looking, you know, more on the linguistic side, on the semantic side of what the name is worth,
worth rather than sort of these hidden beneath the surface SEO metrics and actually doing
the grunt work to build digital real estate that's valuable.
So it's a much more involved endeavor than the vast majority of domainers are willing
to get into.
And so it's really important to take all of his advice with a grain of salt as he's playing a very different game.
We have Matt up here.
Matt is our CEO and founder at Unstoppable Domains.
Matt, what did you think of, I don't know how much you heard from Colin, but did you have any thoughts and takeaways from what he said?
from what he said.
I was very interested in hearing him say
that they were interested in investing,
you know, $10,000 in great content
and coming from somebody who has 200,000 domains, right?
I'm like, well, if he's got 200,000 domains,
he's going to invest $10,000 in content.
Let's say he spreads.
Well, I believe to frame that,
I believe he was saying that in
reference to I grow younger, his, you know, like philosophical, like, you know, personal endeavor.
But yeah, so take that with a grain of salt. I believe that's what he was saying there.
Not necessarily that that was in the SEO operation. Oh, well, I thought that his point about
AI is caring about quality content being much more important going forward and that you would see businesses investing in creating much higher quality content.
That stuck out to me from what he was saying.
That's a very interesting, that changes the business a bit.
And so I thought that was maybe the most interesting thing I got out of, you know, that was the part about his personal blog page.
Yeah, certainly.
I mean, we see the same evolution in Google's SEO.
Obviously, parking revenue has gone down.
Google realized, you know, end users don't or, you know, Google search users don't actually want to to land on on landing pages
um to to be sold a domain and for the most part at least and so they've since phased that out and
that's taken a massive hit to parking we'll probably see a similar evolution inside of uh
geo this generative engine operate uh optimization that's going on inside of these uh inside of these chat gbt and other other models
right now um yeah it's it's just uh i mean i wouldn't be surprised if these guys are you know
trying to put plants in inside of open ai and try to keep their ear uh to the to the door on on all
the changes that might be coming down to the pipe uh in in these various algorithms
um but uh let's shift gears a bit since we have matt here uh let's talk a bit about our lto launch
so if you missed it and you can see it pinned in the space you can see my my tweet here um we
my tweet here um we basically soft launched lto a week and a half ago two weeks ago
and did some beta testing and even during beta testing we actually saw our first sale
via lto that was templars.com for ten thousand dollars all in and that was a 10-year lto plan
all in. And that was a 10 year LTO plan,
which is the maximum that we offer at unstoppable.
And it brought the monthly installment price down to $85 or so.
And so, you know, this was our first LTO sale ever.
So we're very happy about that. And subsequently we've seen quite a few since then.
So we're extremely keen to launch this product.
It's been something you guys have been requesting for quite some time.
And so we're trying to ship fast and listen to you guys.
Some specs there, you can configure as a seller the max term length up to 10 years from anywhere from two months to 10 years. So if you don't want 10 years,
which many of you might not want, you can configure it to two or max three or whatever.
And then the buyer can select the term inside of that range. And then you can also configure
a down payment so as to deter tourists or people who might abuse your domain.
And that way you're making sure that your investment is protected,
that you're garnering investment from the buyer,
and then also providing flexibility for them to get into the domain
and get invested over time and lower the barrier to entry.
So all of this is very exciting.
I mean, one key takeaway is that we've seen actually some domainer to domainer sales with
this large LTO term length. Basically, when you can buy a $10,000 domain for 85 bucks a month,
this turns a retail price into a wholesale price and domainers
can therefore speculate, you know, on fully priced domains. So, I mean, we're very excited
about the shift in economics that such high term lengths provide. And I know a lot of people have
concerns about those low installment prices, but yeah, and we can get into that later.
But Matt, do you have any other thoughts on LTO
and where we're going with this feature long-term?
Well, immediately after launch,
I think we have 10 additional features that people requested
around LTO that we're working on shipping now.
I think we said two, three yearsTO that we're working on shipping now.
I think we said, you know, two, three years ago that we thought there was an opportunity for better financing options and domains. I've said other places that this is actually really great
for end user buyers, like small businesses. I think a lot of small businesses are realizing
now that, hey, I actually want to make an investment in my domain name.
Right. And having a longer term makes that more possible for them.
And then also higher limits. And I just, you know, we're happy to finally be at a place where we can start doing new things to the domain community,
because a lot of the last year has just been getting the basics right at the registrar. So, and for people
in the audience, if you're not already at Unstoppable Domains, please go buy your first
domain at Unstoppable Domains today. We have $5 Fridays going on. Of course, I have to plug it.
And, you know, we really want your business and we will work hard to do well by you. And, you know,
you talk to other domainers in the space,
they'll tell you that we do listen to what you guys tell us. And we take that back and put that into the product. And, you know, we're, like I said, LTO, one of the feedbacks we got in beta
was, hey, I want to be able to put a down payment on it, right? So I can prevent someone from
being a tourist, as Brady said. And so we actually added that into the product as a last,
you know, one of the last features we added in.
And that's why it's there on release.
And it took us an extra couple of weeks,
but we did it for that person.
You guys have the best ideas on how to sell domains.
And we're here to enable it as best we can.
So, and I think that it's just the first step in financing is maybe another way that I'll say
what we're doing with LTO.
But we have our internal roadmap of another five months of just a bunch of cleanup.
When you start a domains company, you have, it takes about 18 months to go from zero to
being able to work with the 30-year-old DNS system.
And the team is very excited about shipping new useful features that change the way the
domain industry works.
And, you know, LTO is just a very personal glimpse at a small piece of that.
And we've got plenty more for you guys.
Yeah, well put.
You know, we try to ship fast and collect feedback as rapidly as possible.
I'm always available.
You know, you'll see me on threads if you tag me. My DMs are open. So by all means, if you're finding issues or bugs or have feature requests, you can reach out us the other day saying, I want LTO for domains
that I haven't transferred in yet. And so, you know, it was good to, obviously, you know,
that was on our radar, but it was good to, you know, have a little kick in the ass from David
saying, you know, I want this now and to get a little more clarity on exactly the parameters
that he wanted from that. And just, I mean, so many of you I've had DMs with,
and I try to share early mock-ups with you guys to get feedback.
And so all that's really invaluable.
So just know we're available.
We're hustling for you guys.
And there's a ton of great promos,
like our transferring deals,
as well as $5 Fridays you can take advantage of.
I saw one other thing, Brady, that I thought was interesting today,
and I don't know if you guys already talked about it,
but I think it was Josh.co from DNX bought something like 2,000 domain names,
two words, ending in finance.
Did you see that post going around?
I did not. Let me pull it up.
Yeah, I saw that one.
Yeah, so I thought that was really cool.
So first of all, shout out to Josh because I think it was confirmed on Twitter that he bought 1,500 of those at Unstoppable Domains.
So we love you as a customer.
And then the other thing is that's exactly how I think about developing a domain portfolio.
And I am not a domainer myself.
I have bought some domains.
I bought some expensive domains.
But I haven't tried to do it as a business, as an individual.
But I always thought if I was going to do it,
I would pick a category that I wanted to test out.
And then in my personal opinion, I would go and try
to pick up 300 to 500 names in that category
and then go try to outbound and develop that category. And I saw Josh do that. So Andre, did you see that? I mean, what were your thoughts
on the finance term in general? I thought it was smart.
Yeah, I've seen it done in the industry. I think at one point, Tony at Tony Names on Twitter did
it with .net, also bought a couple of thousand domains and tested. And if I'm not mistaking,
he's something along the lines of broke even with that portfolio it's a good way for you to invest money and in a
way that grows your portfolio without investing a lot of time per domain because you can get
you know in josh's case it was 1500 domains in a day which. You know, that's a lot of domain. So in the end,
when you buy a domain, especially at scale, like I do, or he does, you have to look at the cost of the domain, sure, but also how much time you invested to get it. Like for my domains,
I invest a lot more time than him, because I go through something along the lines of 20,000 plus deleted domains each and every day.
And I navigate the waves that the market throws at me, basically, right?
Which means that when you do research like Josh did and you register names that way,
your results are basically dependent on what is available and what the market offers
at that point in time for all of the domains. Whereas if you check these deleted domain lists
daily, like I do, a lot of times the market does throw a lot of gems your way. So this is a good
thing because you can increase the average value of your domain by doing that. On the negative side, you have to invest a lot of time.
And so I invest a lot more time per domain than someone who does what Josh did or what Tony did
with .net. And so it all depends on what works well for you. If I, for example, wanted to build
a portfolio the size of Mike Mann, I would have to do something like this.
I would be forced to, because doing what I do, it's very difficult for me to get more than 10,000
domains per year, which means that to get to the size of the portfolio of Mike Mann, I would need
20 years at this pace, or to get to the size of Frank's portfolio, almost 400,000 names, I would need 20 years.
So if you want to grow your domains, if you want to grow your domains at scale, you kind of don't have a choice but to employ things of that nature.
I will say the following.
The larger the budget you have at your disposal is and the lower the time you have available
is, the more it makes sense to try
this approach that Josh tried or Tony tried.
Whereas the lower your budget is and the lower it all depends on how many domains you want
to have total.
I like to keep my portfolio under 10,000 domains if I can help it.
And in that case, you know, you're going to find out whatever balance works for you.
But I can confirm that even something that I do remember distinctly this post that Tony made he
would he just did it to play basically and mess around with it and he still
broke even on the portfolio so it's definitely doable so I'll follow up in
another question do you agree with the idea that as maybe people who are newer
domainers it's good to try to get to a portfolio size of three to five hundred?
We're like, what do you think is a mid portfolio?
I know there's not an absolute mid because I know some people who have portfolios of less than 100 and they're very focused portfolios.
But I feel like it's very hard to learn unless you hit a certain size.
Do you do you feel that way even doing the expires or do
you feel it's a little bit different, you know, searching for expires because you can
maybe do more outbounding?
Well, I will say that it depends on what you do. If you do outbounding, then you can draw
statistically irrelevant conclusions easily with a portfolio of 100 domains. But if you
don't, and if you do like what I do,
and if you just focus on offers that come to you inbound, then if you're a patient person,
you can pull it off with 100 domains, but you would have to literally wait years,
as we've mentioned in another show, before making a change, right? So if you want to go from $1,900
to $2,400 in terms of pricing your inventory, if you truly
want statistically significant results, you would have to wait a couple of years to do that because
you only have 100 domains. So I think your gut feeling is correct. I would say that for domain
investors who want to focus on just inbound, in their case, something along the lines of 500
domains sounds about right, because then you can tweak you can play around with prices, you can
play around with landing pages and whatnot. And at 500 domains plus, you know that you have enough
inventory to work with. Otherwise, for most people, I hear it on Twitter all the time,
people with 100 domains who focus on inbound, they don't do outbound. And they talk about
constantly tweaking their landing pages and pricing and whatever. That's just nonsense.
Yeah, I'm curious about your... So Andre, you said you have been setting up LTO on some of your,
your portfolio at Unstoppable. I'm curious, you know, what kind of, you know, price points are
you putting those out? Are you using down payments? What is your evaluation of the risk of, you know,
people potentially putting salacious content or ruining the reputation of a name or otherwise jeopardizing your value through a UDRP.
How do you weigh all of that and how do you mitigate that risk?
Okay, I will be blunt and say that it all depends on the average value of your domains.
So someone like Rick Schwartz, he doesn't have that many, he doesn't have such a huge portfolio
compared to mine. I think he has 7,000 domains. So not a huge difference. But his average domain
value is so much higher than the average value of my domains, right? And so when you have the type
of domain caliber Rick has, you know, he sold candy.com, property.com, and so on, then you're
going to want to be very
careful that people don't abuse or tarnish those domains because they're super important super
valuable assets and in that case someone like rick if he is to deploy an lto based option for sure
exactly in those instances the feature you added with the down payment makes perfect sense. In my case, the average domain in my portfolio does not have a huge $1,000 plus wholesale value.
And so I can afford to keep prices low.
And if people abuse one of the domains, then it's just the way it is.
Cost of doing business, you chalk it up as a loss, the domain in question.
And it's not even going to be a loss. Because again, we're talking about domains with a much lower wholesale market value compared to some of the domains, most of the domains Rick has.
And so the lower the wholesale value of your domains is, the more chances you can take and the less of an issue the risk of your domain being tarnished
is that being stated you have to be careful with prices right now i'm playing around with
many people already identified my domains when they come across me and i
took one that they wanted uh i'm the guy with 1765 asking prices it's kind of my signature now i'm not really thrilled about
this price because i'm getting close to the zone where based on my research um it's kind of like
you should imagine normal distribution so a gaussian curve right so as of a certain point
you drop your price but your sell through rate goes up enough so that in the end, despite you having dropped your price, you make more money with the lower price.
So I'm convinced that most people can make more money on their portfolio with a price like $24.88 than with a price of $98.88 because their STR is going to be so much higher.
higher on the other hand if you split test 24.88 and 8.88 so a much lower price i don't really like
that based on my experience and many other people can i think confirm that beyond that i i do not
want to go for example beyond one below 1000 ever on my inventory not because i don't want to give
people a good deal you you know, end users,
but because it's not worth it. And you increase, yeah, your sell through rate will go up, but it's not going to go up enough to offset the fact that your price is so low. So 1765,
for my unstoppable domains, the 2000 ish I have with you guys is something I'm playing around with. It's low enough that,
you know, you can give end users who are struggling a chance to get a shot at your inventory,
but it's still kind of like a sweet spot where I don't sacrifice my total revenue. But again,
probably I'm going to settle for something a bit higher than this, but I want to play around with
it. And when it comes to LTOs, especially now, since your pricing is so ridiculously competitive, and you don't,
you practically don't have any minimums that are worth mentioning. In that case, and I've seen this
feedback from other people who have experimented more with LTOs than I have, what I want to do with
this experiment is anchor my price to the $100 zone,
because my main goal is not just giving the people who would have bought my domain anyway,
more options. Because if you have a price of $2,500 and you offer six $500 installments,
then somebody who can afford to pay $500 per month can probably afford to just buy the domain outright you're not opening yourself
up to a new buyer pool whereas when offering your domain at payments as low as a hundred dollars per
month in my case i'm accepting 18 months with this cohort at 98 per month minimum you are opening up
per month minimum, you are opening up your operation to end user buyers who are more
price sensitive.
So simply put, the people who would not be able to afford $500 per month, but who can
afford $98 per month.
And so Alan mentioned some interesting statistics at scale that he has on Twitter a while ago,
some interesting statistics at scale that he has on Twitter a while ago,
mentioning that disadvantage of bringing new buyers to the table who would have not bought
your domain otherwise is what's worth fighting for with these LTOs. So personally, those are
the price points I'm working with right now. But as you've mentioned, domainer to domainer deals
can also be facilitated. And I think there's going to be an interesting opportunity for people to guarantee their exclusivity as brokers by opting for a long-term LTO.
So to put a differently, whenever you have a domain that's valuable, people are going to say, hey, let me broker it for you.
Let me broker it for you.
But when I broker a domain, which is very rare, I want exclusivity.
I don't want 10 other people to be brokering the asset I'm brokering. And the owner can say,
look, I'll give you exclusivity, but you have to pay me a monthly rent. And that's basically what
a lot of people I think will use the 10-year installments for, not necessarily expecting
you to pay all of them, but kind of like giving you an option as a broker. Okay,
you want to sell my domain, pay me $85 per month, for example, to tap into your Templars.com sale,
give me $85 per month, and then you pay for the privilege of having exclusivity. So
you guys are providing a tool, and I think you yourselves will be surprised as to the ingenious ways in
which people will figure out how to use it. I like the alpha he dropped there and Brady that's
something we actually take into account we can take a look at your bin price right and then we
could suggest some LTO values based on the data that we get and i think andre's insight there is like i wouldn't why would
i put lto on a 600 bin because it doesn't change the person's ability to buy it but putting an lto
on a 1800 or 2500 bin you know putting that over a longer time period gets me into a different
cohort of buyers i think that's pretty interesting so So we will, yeah, I think we can,
we could probably generate suggestions for different price points on LTO to people as
they come through based on their bid is what I got from that. Yeah, definitely. I mean,
even just suggesting that people use LTO altogether, I saw one feature of Spaceship
is if you're in a negotiation with someone they'll
they'll prompt you to and you don't have an lto active they'll say hey you know suggest in chat
uh an lto plan with this uh with this buyer as a you know way to try to close the deal
there's all sorts of little coaching that we can provide inside of our marketplace to try to get you closer to that sale.
So there's a ton to do there.
Josh.co actually posted that he picked up a couple of LTOs at Unstoppable the other day.
So clearly he's taking this strategy that Andre is alluding to here,
of, you know, that Andre is alluding to here, where he's picking up basically these low
monthly installments on a long-term LTO plan with the, you know, basically taking the broker
role or trying to flip that later. And so we understand that that's a real use case that
people want to implement. So not only like picking up an LTO,
but then subsequently relisting that domain for sale,
looking for a flip.
And then of course, you know,
we want to have some safeguards to make sure
that they're not getting into UDRP issues
and that they're otherwise not going to jeopardize
the value of that domain.
But yeah, we've really unlocked just a whole new way of domaining.
And Andre, it's very similar to your position in the wholesale market where you're sort of upstream selling to other domainers.
But now this has been opened up to much higher price points rather than the high volume, low price point that you find yourself working in.
Let's see, what else is coming for LTO?
Obviously, like I mentioned earlier, we're going to offer LTO for domains that are registered outside of Unstoppable.
So that will mean that you can use our landers for domains that are registered outside of Unstoppable. So that will mean that you can use our landers
for domains that are registered elsewhere, you know, Dynadot or GoDaddy or where have you.
You'll be able to, you know, use our full self-brokerage landers, offers, bin prices,
and LTO altogether. And then, you know, if you do get an inquiry and, you know, we close the buyer for you, then you can transfer into unstoppable, at which point we'll commence the LTO agreement.
And you can get all the guarantees that, you know, the domain is going to be changed hands when it needs to be and that you retain control throughout the duration of the LTO.
And if the buyer defaults, then you get the domain back.
So that's coming down the pipe. We've also heard some requests for graduated
payment schedules to ramp up the price of the installments as time goes on. That's something
we're taking into consideration and then there's plenty to do to you know integrate lto into chat like i
mentioned earlier and to make it a much more seamless experience for everyone involved so um
plenty going to happen there but overall we're very excited to see the uptake with the feature
and um you should definitely stay tuned as we announce more releases into the future guys
it's been about an hour and a half any last thoughts Andre or Matt on LTO the state of
the business the markets more broadly yeah I don't I don't want to end this before also
mentioning the fact that since absence for domain is essentially dead, and
you had Andrew from domain name wire post kind of an article where even if you want to opt
in as an advertiser to parked pages, it's so clunky and error prone that people are
just not going to do it.
I'm seeing a lot of murmur surrounding this and it's, oh, I think you've chosen a pretty good moment to
launch these LTOs because no matter it's been a trend in development for many
many years there have been developments like Frank Schilling domain name sales
parking platforms which temp which were kind of like how people in finance say a
dead cat bounce right in an overall state of parking decline you did have
every now and then good news but the overall trend of parking was down and the overall trend of domain for sale landing pages has been up.
And the fact that ad-based parking is becoming less and less viable can only mean that, you know, obviously there are many people use it for domains that are only worth money
because they have traffic. And so those portfolios will have to be pruned aggressively as breakeven
will become harder and harder. But for those domains that also have inherent value, and it's
a non negligible volume of domains, basically LTOs, they will have even more reasons to go with for
sales landing pages and again
at these low commissions and with the features you're offering I think it's a
no-brainer for people yeah well put Matt any last thoughts
happy domain hunting out there guys that's That's right. It is $5 Fridays, guys,
and you probably saw our $4.com sale
that happened twice in the past week.
We had one on Saturday.
We had one yesterday,
and those were somewhat short-lived.
We did encounter some throughput issues
with just the insane volume that we saw.
So anyway, we're pushing ourselves all the time.
We're trying to find the boundaries of what our infrastructure can handle.
So apologies for the lack of reliability there.
I know some of you are having issues with bulk lookups and registration times and all of that.
So we are looking into those.
It's not lost on us.
And, you know, these are just the necessary growing pains of pushing the limits and figuring out, you know, what our systems can handle so that we can further improve them.
So we're working hard to get those systems more reliable.
So appreciate your patience there but uh hey a four
dollar dot com you know with a little clunkiness i think that's a that's a fair trade for a lot of
people um yeah so so much happened there uh but today five dollar dot coms back to regularly
scheduled programming for every Friday.
And then, of course, we have our transfer deals where you can transfer in dot coms for 555 up to around 360 coms.
And that also applies to all of our TLDs.
So check out those promos.
Give us a shot. We are hard at work launching a ton of features right now.
You know, things like listing from an external registrar, which you can now do.
You can check that out on our homepage.
So if you want to try us out without committing to a transfer and using our full DNS management, then you can do so, get some marginal exposure.
All of the listings will show up on OpenSea
on the biggest Web3 marketplaces natively.
You don't do any extra effort.
So it's similar to an AFRNIC listing service,
but in a Web3 context.
And then of course you can soon have the ability
to use our landers without transferring in
so stay tuned for more updates there that'll be a couple of weeks before you can do that
but then you can get the self brokerage LTO and bin and offer landers from any registrar and just enjoy that sweet low 3% commissions. So that's all for us today,
guys. Really interesting conversation. We'll have to have Colin back on because he is just
a wellspring of information. But yeah, thanks for staying tuned and we will catch you next week.
Bye guys.
