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Live Domainer Q&A with Ish Milly and Domain Gaffer
Recorded: March 28, 2025 Duration: 1:22:58Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, domain investor Adam Masonette shared insights on the evolving landscape of domain registration, highlighting opportunities like $5.com Fridays and the importance of premium domains in the crypto space. The conversation also touched on trends in affiliate marketing and the integration of blockchain technology, signaling a shift towards decentralized digital ownership.
Full Transcription
I'm still waiting on a name.
Ish doesn't like the domain game, so I gotta go back to the ChatGBT gulags and find another
name to brand ourselves with.
Yeah, we can't use a domain game because the great Domain Shepard game has a domain game
set.
Understandably, we have to defer to them.
Yes, that makes sense.
Domain Street?
I'm trying to think of
it's too corny, right?
It's too corny.
ChatGPT 4.5 is not yet
on the level to where it can come up with
a classy, yet punchy
podcast name.
But anyway, here today we've got Adam Masonette, who is a long-time domainer.
We've been sparring on Twitter, going back and forth.
Adam is an OG and has a ton of knowledge to share, so welcome to the program.
Thanks for having me on here.
Should be a lot of fun.
Yeah, we're excited to pick your brain.
So just some table stakes for everybody out there.
It is $5.com Friday at Unstoppable.
So for the next 13 hours, each one of you can get up to 100.com domains registered for only $5 each.
domains registered for only $5 each.
And so yeah, go out there with this newfound wisdom and apply it in real life and register
some new names.
We've also got $1 XYZ Wednesdays with all the same terms, no promo code required.
And little known, we have $5.50.com transfers really $5.50 off every transfer
and you can transfer in up to $11,000 in discounts using that promo no promo code required so yeah
check that out and without further ado we can get into it. Guys, I'm going to send the link to the chat. If you guys can reshare, that would be great. And then Adam, once you're ready, I would love to hear a bit about your background, how you got into domaining and some more about your hustle here.
And some more about your hustle here.
Sure.
So I kind of got back, got into domaining, I'd say, early 2000s, but not heavily.
It wasn't my focus.
Back then, I started to run a bunch of websites, Melissa Bum, funny pictures, jokes, gaming websites.
Back then, the internet was a very different place,
and there wasn't as much stuff to occupy you there. I don't know if anyone remembers a website
called Hamster Dance. It was just a page full of animated GIF hamsters with a tune playing in the
background, and that was like the biggest thing on the internet. Everybody forwarded that to
everybody, and so you could run a site that just had funny pictures and jokes.
People were actually entertained by them back then.
And so it was a lot easier to get traffic.
It was a lot easier to get ranked in a search engine.
So, you know, at first I'm like, okay, let me, I'm going to start a site like this
because I saw some other people running them.
So I was looking for domain names.
And even back then it was kind of hard to find some decent names. You know, obviously,
you try all the big ones first, and they're gone. And you're like, wow, you know, there's not a lot
out there. But if I can go back in time, I'd be registering a lot of stuff that'd be worth a lot
of money. But you don't have that, you know, foresight back then. So anyway, so I started
to develop a lot of websites. And I'm thinking, you know, foresight back then. So anyway, so I started to develop a lot of websites and I'm thinking, you know, it'd
be really cool to have some great names for websites that I wanted to build.
And so I started looking at some one word domain names and usually it's stuff that was
in the kind of like entertainment comedy niche.
And I would start emailing people you know and say hey
is this domain for sale kind of like what people do in mass today but you know back then I'm just
you know sending I was thinking of names and then typing it in and sending it out to people
and every once in a while I'll get a reply and somebody says yeah I'll sell it and then you ask
how much and maybe just a couple thousand dollars for you know a one word name or whatever
if you get lucky so i bought i bought a couple names like that like uh that go along with this
niche whoops.com you know because i was thinking of kind of like a funny uh blooper type website
uh i sold are you in the entertainment industry is that why you registered those kinds of names? Not really. I just,
it just went along with the whole gaming funny pictures thing.
I did work for a company that provided information to the commercial industry,
TV commercials online. So we would,
we had a whole database of everything about every commercial you could think
of. And we categorized it we we
provided information on it so i guess in that respect i was in the entertainment industry but
but other than that you know i'd go and i'd find names and then i started to do the
auctions which were pretty cool but they were always like a side thing for me then i got into
affiliate marketing and i started to buy names for my affiliate marketing landing pages that had to do
with the stuff I was promoting with affiliate marketing you don't
necessarily have to have a great domain name because you're just using it as a
landing page but you know I tried to get names that had to do with the subject
matter because your goal is to get a higher click-through rate on your ads
and it's still confidence on your landing page. So if
you have something like buy-me-speakers.net, you're going to think twice about buying something from
there. But if you had buyspeakers.com, you're going to get more clicks on your ads and you're
probably going to get more sales. So I started to buy names specifically for affiliate marketing.
But the whole time, it was more of a side thing.
I never actively tried to sell my domain names.
I just would park them all.
And then every once in a while, somebody would contact me about a name.
And I would usually quote some crazy price.
And most of the time, they wouldn't take it.
But every once in a while, you know, I'd sell some names.
And it was never a big thing for me.
I saw them as investments that I wanted to hold on to for a long time.
And eventually they would mature into valuable assets.
So it wasn't until right after COVID that I decided I would actively start listing my
names for sale.
Part of that was because parking
wasn't really doing well anymore. So I started to list on Dan and I first I just had all of them
make offer and it didn't really do much and I started to go through my journey of learning
how to price domain names which is very hard to do and I did a full round of pricing my names.
It took a while. I did a lot of research and then i
think just recently again i went through and repriced them again and i realized that i did
not price a lot of them very good some of them were too cheap some of them were way too expensive
for names that nobody would want now that were great back in the day because you know the whole
type of names that people want are very different. Exact Match was huge 15 years ago.
And it's still good now.
But you don't get a lot of people bought Exact Match products because they wanted to rank for those products in Google.
So you get the exactmatch.com and you are shoo-in for getting a really high ranking, usually on the first page.
But you can't do that anymore.
So they're not as valuable, but I do have a lot of names like that, that just nobody
is going to really want anymore.
So, uh, so I had to price those a bit down.
Well, luckily, uh, relisting and repricing helps, uh, jiggle the listing to get them,
you know, noticed more as we talked about the other day.
So not the worst thing in the world to have to come
in back and reprice them right right right and it's good because you know you learn a lot
and the whole industry changes and even in niches change you know like ai stuff if you were trying
to sell that 10 years ago you know you would probably wouldn't listen if you're near as high
as you would now now you know if you had any of that stuff still on the old prices, it would have been gobbled up before you had a chance to check it probably.
Yeah. And you see this very strongly with the, um, you know, the Estabot price estimation tools
and whatnot, like those guys, they have a very different keyword set that they're indexing to
try to figure out the price, uh price and trends. They move so fast that
any of these tools just become completely outdated in a number of years and they're not, you know,
with the latest trends and whatnot. But yeah, so tell me more about this affiliate marketing
side of things. It's something I don't understand a ton about, but it seems like that
could be the new parking, right? And how does AI and being able to generate, you know, programmatically
enormous SEO pages just full of content and then sourcing all the affiliate links to drive traffic there and earn a buck.
How has that evolved over time and where do you see that going in the future?
Affiliate marketing has always been around for people who've used that as an alternative to parking,
but it's a lot more difficult to do.
It's a lot more hands-on because you have to find the exact offer for the
traffic that you're getting a lot of offers won't let you direct link to
them which means you're sending it directly to their offer you have to
actually build the site even if it's just a gateway page where it just you
know has something and describes the product and then they click in click
through it to go to the actual offer affiliate link but um it's hard i mean i've i've
done that with some of my names i've tried to and some of them they were actually working and then
the merchant company said we don't allow direct links and then they stopped me from doing it
another one i have an almost exact match to the company that runs an affiliate program.
And they didn't like that.
So even though we were both making some good money, they had the singular version and I had the portal version.
And after like two years in their affiliate program, they suddenly said, oh, due to the terms, you're not allowed to, you know, use a domain name.
It has to do with our name.
And I told them, I said, look, I said, i've owned this thing longer than you guys have been in business
and i said we're both making money i said if if you don't allow me to do this i'm just going to
switch it to another a competitor you know or both can lose out but they didn't reply so i just ended
up just parking it you know i'm not making much, but I'm actually still getting sales through that. It must have been like old people, old clicks from a long time ago that
people were still buying from. So I'm still making money from that affiliate program. So in that
case, it worked. But as far as affiliate marketing, what I did, it was totally just pure affiliate
marketing. I was looking for products to sell or get leads from, and they
pay you for each one. And I would do that, and it was working great. I mean, I did that
for probably like 15 years. And the whole landscape changed on how you can buy traffic
with Google and Bing. And they became very strict strict and it became very hard to get
traffic through them using through a lot of niches and even the regular niches
it's just I don't know they added this quality score metric which made it almost
impossible to rank well so you know I just got tired of it I had done well and
I knew a lot of other affiliates I would go to a conference called affiliate
summit every year and you know we'd all discuss this stuff and we were all having the same problems. keeping you banned you can't like log on from any device that has to do with the device you got
banned from or the account like and then if you if you do anything it just instantly triggers
a ban again or something so you had some salacious affiliate links then if you were getting banned
huh well you know what it was and i didn't even know why i got banned it ended up being
some random offer that i ran for like a day or two which was that's i didn't even know why I got banned it ended up being some random offer that
I ran for like a day or two which that's I don't even remember it had something to do with making
money but I guess it was proactively something they didn't like so it was like like a year or
two later after I ran that offer for like two days that they said, oh, you know, we're banning it, basically.
It was really, really stupid.
But I was running a lot of PC optimization software offers, and those can be very tricky.
And there's a lot of stuff in the download space,
software download space, that got just abused,
like people offering toolbars,
and they basically had not spyware,
but I guess kind of like scamware or cookie-stealingware,
you know, things like that.
But there was a lot of stuff,
there was a lot of claims that these companies made
that weren't exactly true. And they were trying to cut down on that. So it became a lot
harder to promote even the legitimate products. But it was good. It got me more domain names.
You know, I bought a whole niche, whole ton of software type names. And I sell some every now and then because I'm not really prepared.
And I'm sure it helps the resale value of having that search authority associated with
those names too.
So even once they sunset and they're no longer useful for you, you built some equity in that
domain.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sometimes it works out that way.
Sometimes you just lose it all, you know, like, like we were talking about, um, using affiliate offers on names. After I was done running these campaigns, I actually had a lot of these landing pages, uh, ranked in the search engines.
which was interesting, is they were ranked because I ran ads.
So they were ranking the actual ad links.
So those got indexed.
So I had thousands of pages indexed purely because their spider was indexing their ads.
And then those were getting put into the search engine.
It was kind of crazy.
So eventually those, you know, die out over time.
But I would just run offers. I would run the same offer or a similar offer on those pages. And they would do well. And I even, some of the companies that, one of the companies that I promoted their offers basically shut down and their domains expired and I caught those domain names from expired auctions.
So as soon as I got those, I just put up my landing page that I used to promote those
products in the first place, just switched to a similar product.
And I started getting sales and, you know, any sales were $30, $40 each, you know, I
was getting, you know, each name was doing like, you know, a few sales a week, you know,
so that's an extra, you know, 500 bucks a week just from, you know a few sales a week you know so that's an extra you know 500 bucks a week
just from you know using affiliate offers on domains that have built-in traffic and and so
currently like what what kind of setup is fruitful for trying to spin up an affiliate
marketing site on it do you need like a really precise keyword domain do you need
connections uh to marketplaces or e-commerce sites like what what are the preconditions that
you know someone should be looking for to pursue this well i do think you really need to have a
domain that already has traffic to it otherwise you're just building a site from scratch and then it doesn't really matter kind of what domain you have so you need well with traffic and then you
got to find out what kind of traffic it is and then you got to find offers for that traffic and
there's a lot of sites out there that are databases of affiliate offers and they'll tell you what
networks that they're on so you can then sign up with the network and get approved on the network. I mean, it's not too hard. You can just sign up.
It's like Commission Junction. Right. Commission Junction is one of them. I don't particularly
like Commission Junction because I've been screwed by them in the past. But they're more
merchant friendly than affiliate friendly. Like if anything goes wrong, if the merchant
says something, they just immediately sign with the merchant. So even if it's not true.
What's involved about affiliate marketing since probably when you were doing it is most of the traffic now comes from social media.
A lot of people are driving traffic from Facebook, YouTube, X or whatever, where there's a lot of traffic.
And then they drive into this landers and, you, and that's when the conversion happens.
Obviously, paid ads are somewhat effective, but the cost of advertising is going up for a lot of keywords.
But a lot of that traffic comes from social media, which leads to a point.
Social media, I'm assuming back then, wasn't really a factor.
i'm assuming back then wasn't really a factor what do you think social media has improved
affiliate marketing or sort of like watered it down oh i think it's improved a lot of different
ways to market i mean there was facebook back then facebook ads was one of the platforms you
could use that came out and it was very effective for a lot of different products because you can really fine tune
on exactly who you want to target.
But for me it wasn't good for my kind of products that I was doing.
I did run some stuff on Facebook ads and it did okay.
But I knew people who ran stuff that were making tons of money.
The problem with Facebook ads is that you end up basically showing your ads to the same people over and over again.
There's not a lot of new faces once you've already hit that whole demographic.
So you had to keep switching your ads.
And it was a lot of work.
It wasn't something that you could just set and forget.
You had to change your ads all the time.
Now with social marketing, what's around now, I mean, there are people who just make their livings off of this, you know, the people with
all the different social marketing accounts,
TikTok accounts and Instagram, you know,
they're Instagram famous and they just run an ad
for some kind of product and just one ad makes them
a ton of cash, but you can do that only if you have a
big audience but that's that's only one way you can do it you can still target
large amounts of people through the ad systems I know X has ads you can promote
with and I think all the other ones do too so it's it's a and there's a lot of
great offers for that stuff and you don't even need a domain name for that unless you are targeting them to your website.
Right.
And how do you see, you mentioned that putting up these sites is fairly labor intensive.
How do you see AI being able to automate a lot of that I remember meeting someone at ICA in Vegas in January who was trying to do exactly
this they had like built out I don't know a visit Puerto Rico site or
something like that and you know had generative content about all the best
restaurants and which tourist attractions to see and everything and then you know drop the links for various you know touring companies and whatnot with their affiliates you know codes attached to them.
So you know is it is there an API for these affiliate sites like can you just like spin up spin up an agent to mass manufacture these sites at this point?
I mean, a lot of the affiliate companies for agents used to provide landing pages that you can use of their own if you wanted to.
I'm not sure how effective that is because if a lot of people are using the same landing page, it's probably not going to rank very well.
the same landing page it's probably not going to rank very well but but now that with ai
you can just go into bolt or grok or anywhere and just you know say create me a website you know
that has this and this and this and you know it doesn't need to be anything crazy it could uh it
could make a nice site and then you could add your affiliate links.
And that's just getting better and better.
I don't know if they have an API.
I'm sure they do have APIs you could do site creation with.
That'll work for this stuff.
I don't think the affiliate companies themselves offer that.
But you don't need them to because you can just do it on your own.
It's not something that I've tried yet.
I've only dabbled in sites with AI,
but I've seen what other people have done,
and it's really cool.
I still like buying completed scripts for now just because they've already been tested.
What do you mean by completed scripts?
So for instance, let's say you wanted to sell stuff on eBay and Amazon.
You can buy complete scripts that lets you set up a website.
And it will display items from eBay and Amazon that you get to choose the categories on your website.
And it automatically generates all the pages for it.
So everything's already done. It's got the database, it's got whatever.
So you just basically, and they have a basic design and you can change the design how you
want it to. So you can, I used to run sites like this, like one of the names I sold recently,
NES games.com. I used to sell Nintendo games on it through
eBay.
So you go to the site and it was running an eBay script and it would basically list all
the different categories of games, the consoles, and it would get search engine traffic and
people would go and they would click on it and it would take them to eBay.
If they go Nintendo 64 games, then it'll pull up all the Nintendo 64
games on eBay and if they buy through one of those links I get money based on
how much they paid for those games and back then eBay offered $25 for every new
member that you get signed up through your link and there weren't a lot of
people on eBay back then it was still kind of new so it was it was a pretty
good program.
But that's an example of a script. You know, the script basically handled all of that.
All I had to do was input the categories, you know, add my little design, my header, the colors, things like that.
And then it was up and running.
Yeah.
So bring us back to your domain, like how this ties into your domain hustle.
Like how would you describe your domain strategy as this evolved over the years
from this affiliate marketing focus to now, you know, being an opportunist?
Right. You know, I would go in and out with domain names every once in a while.
Back in the day I'd be like, okay, let's,
I feel like working on domain names again.
So I'd start buying names, I started doing the auctions
and then it would fall off
because I'd be focusing on affiliate marketing again.
So I would kind of put domains on the side,
wouldn't really worry about them.
And then I'd come back to them later.
And then I think I got to them seriously in like 2020, right after COVID started.
I started to say, okay, I'm going to really focus on domain names now because I'm not doing affiliate marketing anymore.
And I got to do something with my time.
So, you know, why not domain names?
So I started to go through the auctions, you know, really heavily.
I even did Mike Seiger's Domain Academy course.
I felt like I knew a lot of stuff about domain names already, but when I took the course,
I'm like, oh yeah, I didn't really know much about this. He has a whole thing on valuating
domain names, how to value it, which is what I really wanted it for.
So I practiced that a lot.
What was your biggest takeaways from that module?
It was learning how to look at all the aspects of a domain name for pricing.
It was kind of what types of names are the names you should go for, you know, and even
then it's still a continual learning experience because, you know, I've learned a lot since doing
that. And it's just really from experience, just diving into the domain industry and constantly looking at names and trying to value them.
A good practice is when you're looking to buy domain names, just start pricing them.
Look at the different metrics of them.
How many TLDs are registered for that domain name?
How many companies are using that name or have it in their name?
How many searches are using that name or have it in their name? How many searches are people doing?
And that's just a partial way to price it.
You could look at other sales of similar names and see how much those went for.
And it's not even all that because I've used all those metrics and I priced the name thinking well you know this would actually be the highest
name sold if it's sold you know with these words in it and you know this but then you realize it's
you're not looking at the whole picture it's like sure you know this keyword is only sold for this
much and this keyword is only sold for this much I put those two keywords together it actually
makes it a lot more valuable rather than looking at the individual keywords and seeing how much each one has sold for in the past. So,
you know, and trends have changed too. So the trends are a lot higher now for those
keywords than they were five years ago. Yeah. Yeah. It's nonlinear. It's not just a,
you know, simple math. You have to have some taste to be able to assess it.
Have you used this agent.ai domain valuation tool?
Yeah, I've dabbled with it.
I tried a couple of my names.
It's fairly robust, at least.
It has a lot of inputs that it thinks about.
And if anything, it's just a nice rubric that you can use for yourself,
even if the values that it submits for each of those criterion aren't, you know, perfectly calibrated to what a good domainer might answer for each of them.
But it has a lot of things that you were just talking about.
So obviously, like search volume, although zero, I think is.
Although, zero I think is, see again, here we have topologicalchips.com and this refers
to Microsoft's topological quantum chip that came out a few months ago.
And so zero, that's probably spiked up pretty recently.
I wonder if we can do Google Trends to take a look.
But you also have .db stats of how many extensions it's in, and yeah, if anything it's just a
good way to cover all your bases so you're thinking about everything that you need to think about as it pertains to a particular domain.
Yeah, it's pretty cool that there's so many of these new tools that are coming out.
You know, they're not the only ones.
They're probably one of the best ones right now,
but there's a lot of other tools that people are trying.
I don't think they'll ever peg it exactly,
but it's a good guide you could use for just getting an idea.
You might not even realize that a certain keyword
or a combination of keywords means anything,
and then when you run it on that,
it starts giving a high valuation.
You're like, why is it doing that?
And it gets you to look into it a bit further and go,
oh, I didn't realize.
Like that domain, I didn't know about the topological.
You know, that didn't occur to me at all
just because I'm not following that space as closely.
But, you know, somebody who is would know that.
But I guess in this case it doesn't qualify
because it didn't really show up on that tool either.
But for a lot of words, it will do that.
And, you know, it's just another thing you can have in your toolbox to help you
you know evaluation yeah and there's probably a sweet spot where you want to hit you i mean you
want to be early right like you don't want to buy i mean maybe you do want if you're playing it safe
and just uh want to buy some some premium names that you can be very certain are going to sell later on, then
you're fine with buying a name that has 100 other TLDs registered for that keyword.
But if you're trying to dominate a vertical and you feel like you're early and you have
substantial edge, then what you actually want to be buying is a keyword where there's only a handful
of TLDs registered, but you have it on good authority that, you know, that particular industry
is going to pop like topological chips, let's say. Do you think that, is that hubris or do you think people should just stick to, you know, buying something premium that you know is going to flip?
Yeah, I mean, that's definitely a strategy going out and trying to pick up the trends before they become big trends.
I know people who do that.
Some of them are very successful.
Some of them, you can see them on name pros all the
time where they list their domain names you know like something pops up and then there's like
someone red goes out and registers 50 of them and you're like look at those names like these are
never going to sell who's ever going to buy these names so but you know if if you're good at it and
you're you know like i have a friend who's reading up on this stuff
like years before they become big and he registers registers them back then he was uh big in nfts
before nfts were big he did stuff like 4k tv he you know he's ai he had a bunch of ai names before
uh and you know he sells them for good money.
All his names are hand registration.
He sold names for like $70,000 just from a hand reg from a few years ago.
So if you do your research, you know where to look.
It's very successful.
The coveted hand reg flip that so few domainers actually actually get to experience most of them are just garbage
um so what sets that guy apart is he a technologist is he a hacker like is he just on the cutting edge
of this stuff or is it the information diet like what's his edge yeah he's he's into the information
he's he's following the people uh x that are space, you know, and talk about the stuff before it becomes big.
He's always doing a lot of research on whatever, you know, he's interested in.
You know, he's always looking for the new big thing, you know, that comes out based on the sources that, new sources that he's reading and the people that he's following.
I think it's more about, because if it's in the news, it's probably already too late.
That's the thing.
It's about before it gets in the news, it's probably already too late. That's the thing. It's about before it gets in the news.
You got to, I guess, be listening to the people who are cutting edge in various spaces.
Like if you're doing technology, the technological space.
And when they start talking about something that they're working on or may be big in a few years, that's when you start working on it.
Because then when it becomes big, people have already gotten most of the domain names for that yeah yeah well good i can feel better about wasting many hours
of my life going down twitter rabbit holes because i can just chalk that up as research
yes staying on the cutting edge uh but i gotta get into deeper and deeper rabbit holes to to
actually find that edge um yeah, so that's interesting. I
mean, on the topic of like feeling late, you mentioned on the in your opening spiel, that
you thought you were late to domains in what 2008 or whenever you started getting into it.
And of course, hindsight is 2020. And it turns out you were still extremely early.
Do you think we're still early now?
Or do you think the market's too efficient and this is really just the end of days?
I mean, it's okay to tell people that are starting out in domaining that you shouldn't get started out in domaining.
You know, that would be potentially the most valuable advice that they should hear.
So don't be afraid to tell them what you really think.
Right.
You know, there's always opportunities and the opportunities that were available back
in the day aren't available now, you know, like registering great dot coms with ease.
You could still register handregister dot com that are end up being big but but once
again that takes a lot of research instead of just going oh you know i just want to register uh shoes
dot com you know because you know it's 1996 and no one's gotten it yet you know and i have foresight
but it's there i mean you have all the other tlds right now and you know people would say oh you know
these tlds are worth this dot com is king
and sure you know dot com is king and that's always the top extension that you're going to
want it doesn't mean that you people aren't going to want the other extensions or not going to buy
them and you see this in the market people are buying all these different extensions i mean
think of dot ai you know it was it's around forever, and it had an expensive renewal cost. But if you thought about it and you felt that it was going to be a valuable extension in the future, you could be very well off with them nowadays so think of
all the other potential extensions out there right now that could turn into something big
you know most of them probably won't you know if you had io you had co you had x, you know, there's a lot of these extensions that became big after the fact.
And it's possible that some of these other extensions that are out right now, the same thing is going to happen to them.
So, you know, VC is another one that, you know, people, and I'm not saying these are huge, you know, it's just they do get sales and you know who and the only reason they're
getting sales is because they were adopted to a certain uh niche like you know dot vc is venture
capitalist um dot io is i think stands for input output which is used by a lot of technological
companies dot ai obviously is artificial intelligence dotco got advertised as an alternative to .com,
and they were successful in that.
And XYZ became adopted to Web3 crypto.
So .gg for games.
So some of these are really successful.
Some of them aren't as successful,
but they still get a lot.
They still get sales, and they're known of these are really successful. Some of them aren't as successful, but they still get a lot, you know, they still get sales.
And they're known for what niche they represent.
So who knows if any of the other extensions it's going to happen with. You know, people are trying to force the narrative on these.
Like I see people with .ML, it's like, oh, machine learning, you know, or .SI, super intelligence.
But I just don't see those picking up
because they're not a main term that people use.
You have .AI, and that kind of encompasses all those,
you know, machine learning, superintelligence.
It's just part of the regular vocabulary,
and people don't use those other terms.
So I don't really see that happening.
But there will be other extensions that people will pick up on
and so your opportunity is there
if you can find out which ones
are going to be the ones that are going to be
seen as valuable in the future
you know
welcome back
here is a great graphic
we have a wifi outage
yeah no worries you're a little glitchy there but uh
glad to have you back adam here's a a tweet that i saw uh this was braden pollock had a little thread
on this uh basically talking about you need to balance and pair the SLD with the TLD. And just like with VC, it's very
niche, you know, you're not going to get like, shoes.vc is probably I mean, maybe, maybe interesting,
but probably not the greatest match, you want something like technologically oriented,
to align with the utility of a .vc domain. And in that thread, Namegroove here shared a fascinating
piece of data from Atom that showed the number of TLDs taken versus each TLD that was sold
on their marketplace. And you can tell that dot coms that get sold on their
marketplace, on average, don't have very or don't need very many other TLDs registered.
But by contrast, more esoteric TLDs like .vc, .in, .ly, .gg, these keywords need a ton of tlds to be taken in order for them to be attractive enough
to actually be registered so it's a beautiful it's just this beautiful like trade-off that
you're seeing between the quality of the tld and the quality of the sld that's just like
beautifully linear in this chart and it speaks to
exactly what you're talking about
right I remember seeing that
a long time ago and I loved that chart
that actually made me
think a lot more about my purchases
when I saw that
and you know of course there's always
outliers like I've sold some
other extensions that didn't have a lot
of Tlds
uh you know slds taken but um but for the most part you know i do i do look at that
when i'm buying new names in other tlds which are your favorite tlds if you don't mind us asking
favorite as in most successful favorite alternatives i mean obviously the ones that
sell the best i like but i mean i have i have a special place for dot gg just because i love
gaming you know i've been in gaming my whole life um i don't think gg sells is great and it's kind
of expensive but i've been focusing i mean i probably have like 30 or 40 .ggs.
And I, I try to go for like game related terms or really strong keywords. So, but I haven't sold
a .gg in years. So, but, but I price the good ones pretty high and, you know, and I'll just sit on
them. But you can't do that with too many of them because it does get expensive vc i usually sell you know one or two a year and i usually sell
them for five figures so those do pretty well i have a lot of good dot co's i like co a lot
they haven't been selling as well lately as like dot io even though .io has gone down a lot because of AI.
But .co has had its day and I think it's kind of a standard
out there, an alternative for .com.
So I like that.
And I do
dabble in .app here and there.
I've sold a few small sales with that.
And org I've been picking up
recently. I think org is
making a nice comeback
so uh right so yeah and you know an io like you get some and you see like dot so's getting
some traction is you're breaking up really bad
really can't really can't hear you.
Yeah.
Sorry, man.
You might need to find a better place to call in from.
Yeah, .so, I've heard about that.
I think it stands for social.
I think that's what they're trying to repurpose it as. Really? Okay. I think it stands for social I think that's they're trying to
repurpose it as really okay I think interesting because like cursor the the
IDE the AI powered text editor that was cursor dot so to begin with right but
there's no real social aspect to that app so yeah yeah it just had it has a
night it sounds nice it's it's simple um but one of those ones that it seems very it's very questionable when
you see it um but who knows all it takes is like just some trend you know some tech guys decide
all have a showing point on a single tld and then overnight it could turn into something something big so right you just need one big website remember dot fund that's oh yeah got shot exactly
because that's an excellent example and now you see just a ton of crypto
startups using the dot fund anything in the meme space we we've seen a ton of
adoption for we actually had an initiative where we were trying
to, maybe I shouldn't drop this alpha live on the stream, but we were looking at new meme coins that
were being minted on Solana or wherever. And then we were minting the ticker dot fun and then listing
on the marketplace to try to drive them to our marketplace to come buy it.
So in the same way that people scour like Crunchbase and look for new VC funding,
you know, there's thousands of meme coins launched every day that you can be selling dot funds to. So go out there and register some dot funds.
We also have I think we're doing like $1.funds now at Unstoppable.
So it's worth a little gamble on them for sure.
Yeah.
Do you have any thoughts on, you know, if you were running a registry,
which TLDs would you apply for in next year's application round?
Do you have any like pet TLDs that you think would would take
over if they were, you know, enshrined in ICANN? Oh, I mean, I'd be going for the big like dot
crypto dot wallet. You know, I would want those, of course. Wow, you have excellent taste, Adam.
Where did you come up with those TLDs? Well, I wonder. But yeah, I think a lot of extensions, most of them are kind of failures.
If you think about it, of all the applied extensions from the last round, how many of them are big now?
It's XYZ and App.
Are there any others that even do like OK?
There's really not a lot out there.
That's basically it.
Yeah.
I mean, some of them do make sales and stuff, but they're not big.
Unless they match very well with the SLT.
It doesn't matter what it is.
Like .horse.
Everybody jokes around .horse.
But if you have race.horse, it's pretty good.
People would pay money for that
you know or maybe the breeds of horses you know but but there's probably very very few uh combinations
that are gonna be worthwhile and you could find that with any any uh tld so in those cases they
those are the valuable names but other than that i I don't think people are using them for too much.
So, you know, I wouldn't be somebody
who would be applying for any new extensions
right now. I would
rather go for a company
code, a company, you know, I mean
a company, SLD, TLD
that exists
like they did with .co
you know, and basically run an advertising campaign,
repurpose it, make a deal with the country,
say, I want to do this.
Because I think two-letter TLDs
are still really good.
Three-letter, I think, is pretty much as high as you want to go.
Anything after three letters
is going to be really tough to get popular. I don't think it's really happened yet. So, you know, I think that wallet would,
I think that crypto would, I think those would be very successful. And those are more than
three letters, but those are extreme circumstances, you know, and I don't even know if those are,
I mean, are you applying for those? We can't say, um, but we will be at the next application round,
certainly.
So yeah,
I think there's a lot of buzz around AI names too.
I think .agent will probably get some attention.
I think several people have come out for .anime
going after that one.
I feel like there's
some gene editing ones or biosciences.
I mean, .bio is a nice TLD that we don't see too much of, and maybe that has a resurgence
in the future as CRISPR matures and we see more gene editing come to the fore.
more gene editing come to the fore. Nanotechnology, we're still quite a ways away from that.
Quantum computing, again very speculative.
But all these extensions though, there's not a lot of end users for them. You have to have
a site that's specifically about that topic and
you can kind of use any extension for that you know it needs to be something really broad like
a whole category of like you know like you have technology for dot io and crypto for xyz and that
just encompasses a whole field so yeah of stuff that can be anything because you can it's not just you know
crypto is is everything it's it's not just coins it's you know the technology it's the blockchain
you know something like nano would just have to do very esoteric yeah yeah yeah i mean it really
makes you appreciate how just how generic and beautiful dot xyz is. It's so final. It rolls off the tongue.
It's just very aesthetic. .abc doesn't have the same quality to it.
But yeah.
That would be interesting if there was an abc. I think...
Is there a .web web? That web feels nice. There's a whole thing about dot web. Um, there was a,
they were trying to,
there's a story between multiple companies trying to get dot web and,
uh, something kind of shady happened behind the scenes.
It's like, I can, and it got blocked. And now,
and now I don't know if it's going to come up again i mean at this
point i think web's kind of a downgraded keyword term it's you know you used to be able to see a
lot of websites that had web in the name you know like techweb.com or you know um fix web or whatever
or whatever just anything they would just tap web on but web seems like an old way to call the
just anything they would just tap web on but web seems like an old way to call the internet now
internet now so yeah i think as an extension but it's kind of retro like dot net you know it has
this uh this vibe to it yeah yeah it's funny dot net and not net is it seems like a great tld you
know it used to be the main one i remember i used to use an internet company called gate.net and there was
another one mindspring.net i think they were on a net too or something similar to that and uh yeah
net everybody thought net was going to be the big tld back then but dot com just took over and pushed
net aside and then you know orgs organizations and i still have people to this day
who think you have to be a legitimate organization to own a.org my wife thought that until just
recently and other people that i've talked to recently also thought that you had to uh you had
to have an organization it was like a.gov or a.edu right i mean did did it have that distinction for
a while is that why people got
i don't think it did i don't think there was any limitations on it still would be just weird to run
a porn site on dot org you know like yeah it feels like you're masquerading as something you're not
i know people are doing it yeah yeah but they often reserve the dot orgs for the non-profit foundations that are behind a lot of the open
source protocols.
And so there is some semblance of neutrality and not-for-profit aim that is encapsulated
in those use cases.
So it is curious.
But it does have a very formal you know humanitarian ring to it um and i think
i think people will some people will be discerning people would be offended if you were you know
hijacking that for for your own purposes for whatever application yeah um yeah i think yeah
i mean you bring up the most critical point in all of this, which is that the real winner of that GTLD round was Verisign with .com and just their continued dominance.
So it's still quite a lot of money to be made with new TLDs, but hard to beat the king and the network effects there.
So GoDID Go has a question.
Do you outbound your domains?
That's a big theme on our channel
with Ish doing his outbounding.
So yeah, tell us, do you have any experience there?
No, I mean, I've never,
because I have such a laid back view
of selling my domain names
because I see them as long-term investments.
It's not my main source.
You weren't even trying to sell them initially.
Yeah.
You of all people have the most laissez-faire attitude.
Right.
I just sit back and if they sell, they sell.
If they don't, they don't.
And I know a lot of people can't do that.
So I think outbounding is great.
Ish has shown.
He's done very well with outbounding.
And I know Bruce, who you just had on recently last week.
Bruce is a master at that.
And it's a great way to sell names.
It's not for everybody.
For me, my personality, I don't think I'd be very good at it.
Too lazy? You like me?
Well, I am lazy. But that's not the reason why.
It's just, I'm just probably not, I'm such, I guess I'm more of an introvert.
So I, I love, you know, just sitting in my computer, don't have to deal with anybody,
just chill out, you know, maybe over email is fine.
Uh, but I don't want to make phone calls all day, you know, and I know you can do it through
text too but i think i've tried to outbound a name a couple names in my last 20 years just a couple
of them i don't think they panned out but you know obviously need to do a lot more than just
send a couple of emails but it's a great way to sell names and it works for a lot of
good names i think it's the best for small price names,
maybe getting onto the medium
because you want to target like geo companies.
Those are some of the best ones you can target.
Big names, if you have really good names,
you probably want to get a broker for that
because they know what they're doing
and they have all the connects.
They know who to talk to.
But I mean, that's really all I know.
I don't know too much else about outbounding.
So the total opposite of outbounding.
Let me answer some other questions here.
Adrian asks if we're going to put more focus on auctions at Unstoppable.
It's certainly on the roadmap.
We want to get to that next quarter.
I know this is a big vector that domainers use to both acquire and liquidate domains.
So we know it's a big deal. We're looking at integrating some auctions APIs, both expireds
and regular auctions, just to people more more choice and more exposure
when they're both buying and selling on Unstoppable. Let's see
otherwise so Adam I mean can you tell us a bit about like your current domain hustle?
Like how, or even walk us through a case study.
I saw you had a sale that had a four month hold time.
Was it earlier this month?
Maybe you could walk us through that if you don't mind.
Let me try to find the tweet. February 25th?
I feel like we're in a deposition right now.
Did you or did you not tweet on February 25th,
2025 that you sold spend.co for $12,995? Did you, sir? Yes, yes. That's an interesting one because
I still haven't gotten paid for that yet. So this actually goes along with uh something that i'm doing now with
landing pages uh because that name was under a 60-day lock so i i bought that name whenever and
then i uh transferred it i held on to it for a little bit thinking you know spend.com just sold
so maybe there'll be some interest in a .co.
So I waited a bit.
I didn't have anybody interested.
So I'm like, okay, let me just transfer it because I can sold it all my names.
So I transferred it.
And of course, a couple of weeks after I transferred it, somebody buys it.
And because unlike Dan, who they just push it to account on whatever registrar it is to the new owner,
Afternic doesn't do that.
So Afternic took like a week, week and a half the information from them,
and they said the buyer is going to wait until the lock is off, and then they'll buy it, which is going to happen in a few days.
So we'll see if that actually happens in a few days,
if the sale goes through or not.
Right.
So help explain this, the DAN process,
because so that they have an escrow account at DAN
for each of these partner registrars
on the afternoon network.
Well, they have an account they
have just uh yeah yeah i guess you call it escrow account yeah they they register an account for
every registrar and that way if somebody wherever the domain is at if it can't be transferred or if
they opt they'd rather have a push to their account uh a lot of people do because you know it saves
time um they just push it in.
But Afronik doesn't do that.
Even though they bought Dan, that was one of Dan's best features.
And they always say that.
But so the buyers at Namecheap or wherever else, and then they're notified that, like, hey, the domain is waiting for you at Dan.
And then, like, how does that work? Because name,
name cheap obviously would want to, they want the domain to come back to name cheap. So I don't know
how name cheap would be fine with sending their customer to Dan or whether they just tell the
customer, Hey, it's going to be waiting for the next two months and tough shit. And then we'll,
we'll bring it to you
once that ends like how did that work on the buyer side well dan itself wasn't a registrar
they didn't they didn't have any names on their platform they just listed names so so for instance
if i have a domain name and it's at um name sheet and it sells.
The buyer on Dan has the option of
having a domain name transferred to whatever
registrar they want.
Or you can just push the name
on Namecheap.
Dan will do that. Dan has an account on Namecheap.
So I push my name into
Dan's account on Namecheap
and they push it into
the buyer's account.
Now, that obviously works if there's a 60-day lock.
So if I'm on Namecheap, the domain name, and there's a 60-day lock, then the buyer can only get it on Namecheap unless they wait 60 days.
So Dan will tell them, you know, if you don't have an account, make an account on Namecheap, and then we will push a domain to you on Namecheap, and you'll get it.
So that gets around a 60-day log.
And that was standard for Dan.
Dan would do that all the time.
Afternake doesn't do that.
So if you sell a name, that has a log.
And this is why.
It's because they're a registrar, and they want the domain to come back to them.
Right.
So, yeah, that's what I was missing.
Yeah, but they're losing a lot of sales that way because there are a lot of people who don't want to wait and just say, okay, I don't want to do the sale anymore.
So what I've been doing now, and it doesn't happen very often.
I think this is probably the first time that I've sold a name after a transfer lock.
But I figure, you know, i don't want to risk it so i just started to uh
point any of my names that have a transfer lock to a separate landing page like i'm using domain easy
but you could use anything you want to do uh unstoppable works also and there's adam and
there's name pros they have all these different ones and i think all of those do push
so i think basically after next one of the ones it doesn't do the push transfer and then if it sells
you have no problems if it doesn't sell once the lock's gone then you can switch it back to your
after neck landing page you know or whatever else you had it before um yeah and it's fine i don't think you
need to worry about it if it's on godaddy though because like you said that's their registrar so
if you win it like if you win a name and godaddy options and it has a 60-day transfer lock uh but
it's at godaddy then you don't have to worry about that because if it does sell within the 60 days
they will just push it to their account on GoDaddy because to buy
a name, you actually have to have a GoDaddy account.
So there's no problems there.
How was your experience self-brokering on any platform?
You mentioned you're an introvert.
Did you find yourself making missteps early on handling those conversations?
Would you prefer to leave it to the pros for the most part?
What's your stance there?
I didn't mind.
I mean that's easy stuff, brokering.
When I say I'm an introvert, I'm like – I just like my peace and quiet.
I love people and everything like that but but I like my quiet time
and I just I would rather you know not have to deal with you know constantly you know talking
to people throughout the whole day to get things done when I could just you know do my own thing
but it's exhausting trying to trying to coax someone else into doing something all day long. Yes. You sell a little bit of your soul when you sell something.
But with Dan, I mean, I did all that myself, you know, because it was basically a sell
for a great platform.
So I'd have people contact me about names and we'd go back and forth on the price and
I would sell it that way.
I would sell it that way. And that was fine. I had no, you know, issues with that and it worked out well.
And that was fine.
I had no, you know, issues with that and it worked out well.
And I don't know how much better or worse I do compared to maybe, you know, a GoDaddy broker or, you know, what you get on Afterdink.
So, you know, there's been a lot of complaints about how the brokers are lately on there.
And it's probably because they're overwhelmed because when they switched over and they closed down Dan
and they switched over
without self-brokering as an option,
there probably were so many more requests coming in
that they kind of had to, you know,
quickly deal with them
as opposed to focusing more of their attention on those.
So they do have the self-brokering platform now.
And, you know, it's not a thing that I've messed with.
I'm probably not going to because most of my names now are just by now.
I don't really have many make-offer names.
The only ones that I do, I put on another platform because they're my higher, potentially higher selling names.
And if people want those names, they're not going to find them through the search
path they're going to actually go to the names and you know see about them so there's really
no reason to to give a large portion of commission up for sales that really aren't benefiting at all
from you know anything that after nick offers except for their uh their name their brand because
the brand is very important you know know, people know GoDaddy.
So they're going to feel a lot more comfortable buying a name from GoDaddy
than from some, you know, random sales site.
So you do get that benefit as well.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's see.
Circling back, we had some questions about
EMDs from your affiliate stuff.
Michael Oliver asks, what about renting out redirects of EMDs to companies that focus on branding irrelevant words?
Branding irrelevant words.
I know they have zero click, which is where you can just buy traffic.
And there were platforms, and I think there still are, that you can choose the domain
names on the platform that you want to buy traffic from.
So you can find names that are similar to the niche that you want.
And then you just buy the traffic, you're basically paying for impressions.
So they do have
that there's always risks involved with leasing out your traffic because you
don't know who's buying it on the other end a lot of the time or what they're
gonna do with it and they could ruin your domain reputation so right
He also says he thinks Shopify, eBay guys completely miss the benefit of EMDs, especially
as we decentralize away from these platforms. Anyways, yeah, so cat.crypto asks, tell us more about your current domain hustle, Adam,
you know, as much as you're willing to share, of course, you know, can you tell us about certain
verticals that you're looking at? And are you just scouring expireds? Are you hanging out in like premium.cos like we saw with spend?
You know, what's your strategy nowadays at a high level?
Basically, I search through the expired lists every few days.
You know, I use expireddomains.net, which is the best resource out there.
And I have my pre-made lists that I go through.
I have a list for .coms.
I have a list for .orgs, CEOs, IOs.
And I just go through those lists.
And I don't really have any kind of niche that I go for.
There are ones that I know more of.
So if I spot a word in something that I know,
I might notice it what other people might
not but i'm not looking for any specific niche i just go through and i look at the names and
see which ones look like you know they're going to be valuable and you know i mark them for when
the auctions go on and then put them on my watch list and when the options happen i usually just get outbid because the prices are crazy these
days but uh but i've been i found myself because of that i've been buying a lot more uh non.com
names so i've increased the dot co's a lot i've been i never had a lot of dot ios um because of
their costs but i did i have been buying some lately and I've been buying some other alternate TLDs.
And then I realized that I'm probably buying more than I should.
I should go back to dot-coms, you know,
and maybe pay a little extra
because, you know, paying a little extra now
is going to benefit me in a few years
when the price is just going to keep going up.
So the last several options that I won, most of them were dot-coms.
So I felt good about that.
And I even got offers on one or two of them within a week of buying them.
So that was good.
I knew I was on the right track.
But yeah, I mean, I'll just do that every few days.
But yeah, I'll just do that every few days.
I'll look at the list, put all the names I'm interested in my watch list, monitor the auctions every day.
You know, there's also some that I don't notice that there's a lot of interest in.
I'm like, why is there interest in this domain name?
You know, a lot of times it's just a traffic domain name, which means it had a lot of backlinks.
People are buying it for SEO purposes.
But sometimes it's some kind of keyword
that I didn't realize.
And I'm like, oh, I'll research it more.
And if I find it interesting,
I might try to jump in on the auction or not.
I'll spend a bit more on names.
There's a lot of people who buy
a lot of the names without competition.
And people resell them for like 2k each or whatever you
know i tried that for a bit i just didn't have the patience for it i just i i kind of see domain
investing as collecting as well i'm a i'm a big collector i don't know if you see behind me i have
a bunch of old steins they're like 100 years old each and i collect you sound like an nft bag holder
right now careful yes i I am a huge.
I got caught holding bags.
Don't become a community member.
Yes.
See, that's my problem.
That's why I'm not good with certain things like NFTs because, you know, I don't know when to sell them.
I just like holding on to them.
But domain names are great for it because as long as you hold on to them, they seem to be the better they do.
That's brilliant.
I love owning certain names.
I mentioned this before, I think, on Ish's session.
It's like when you own a .com of a word, it's like you own that word.
That's your word.
The whole world, you own that word.
It's neat.
It's like a flex, a street cred.
When you own certain words, you go, oh, yeah, I own so-and-so.com.
Or imagine AI.com.
Yeah, I own AI.com.
That's like a huge flex.
So it's kind of fun to own them as well.
So in that way, I feel like I don't mind if they don't sell because I still get to enjoy owning the names.
And I know that they're still a great investment and they're worth money.
You know, of course, I said that about NFTs and look what happened there.
So, but I think domain names, I think we all could agree that domain names, at least for the, for as long as we could imagine it, you know, maybe another 10, 20 years.
I don't see anything changing with domain names.
So, yeah. You don't see any threats from from ai from generative engine optimization on the horizon for domains um i don't know i i just think we still use phone numbers
we've been using phone numbers for you know know, 100 years. And, you know, nothing's changed other than how the phone numbers are structured
and how we access the phone numbers, like, you know, different phone systems,
like cellular and satellite phone and landline.
Landline is getting phased out.
Everything is cellular now.
So, but you still need those phone numbers.
And then they added their new TLDs.
You know, you have the 1-800 numbers.
That's .com. need those phone numbers and then they added their new tlds you know you have the 1-800 numbers that's dot com and then you have 888 and you know a26 or whatever those are the other extensions
but and so 800 is king but you still have all the other extensions that people want or people need
and that whole system still exists so i think with the internet as far as i could see i don't see
domain names going away i could see the emphasis on getting to the website through a different method, you know, like going
through AI. Search engines have kind of hijacked how you find a website. It used to be you just
type it in the bar. Now they're trying to make it so you type it into their search bar, and then it gives you results, and it usually gives that domain name as the first result after the ads.
So they get to show their ads at the results.
And then sometimes when you type in a domain name in the bar, it'll try to suggest another one.
Like I mentioned nesgames.com.
I was curious if they had done anything with it yet.
It's too soon but when I type in nesgames.com
in my browser bar
and hit enter
it says
I don't think you want to go to that site
are you looking for this site instead
and it was another site that had a different
three letters like nsomethings.com
games.com
that I guess was a popular site
so it was already trying to redirect me from going to NES games to some other site.
So the way to get to your domain, to your website, is different, the path that you take there.
But you still need that endpoint.
And it's still going to be branding i think you know the mem how more memorable and uh
the confidence that it gives the visitor who visits the site is still extremely important
you know when people are creating uh venture capital companies uh they're looking for
good brands and a lot of things that these companies will do is to buy the dot com right before requesting funding from VCs because they need that confidence to exude so that the VCs will look at it and say, oh, yeah, this is a legit company.
They made business as opposed to it just being on some random TLD.
They may not invest in it because they think, well, they don't even have a good domain name.
Why am I going to invest in this because they think, well, they don't even have a good domain name. You know, why am I going to invest in this company?
Yeah.
There's two sides to this argument, and I keep flip-flopping back and forth between them.
You know, the nihilistic everything goes to zero argument is, okay, we're already seeing,
you know, websites and Google traffic go down precipitously, like Stack Overflow,
for example, saw visits plummet because everyone's using ChatGPT to code for them now, which
looks up all these answers or just already has it embedded in the model to spit out whatever
answer you need. So, and just like perplexity or ChachiBT
like indexes all these websites
and then formats the response
in exactly the form you want it.
It's like the internet is liquefying.
It's like this clay that AI is like molding
directly into the shape that you need
for your particular question,
for your particular problem
and so this old paradigm of like static not even static but even like dynamic web pages
where you have to navigate around and you have to sift through all this content to find that one
little tidbit that you need is really archaic in that in this new world that we're living in and so you know if if all that
matters is the interface the ai interface and the data and then everything else in between gets
liquefied and turned into clay then do you really need domains and then you know one other thing to
add on to that is like when you when have agents, like are agents going to be registering
domains? Are agents legally allowed to register domains? Those are enormous question marks.
One beautiful thing about crypto and terrifying thing about crypto is that we've created this
unstoppable money that now AI can use for whatever its intents are. You can't censor it from the
blockchain, you can't prevent it, you can't KYC it necessarily, because it can do all
these things permissionlessly by tapping into these open networks. And so you can expect the same evolution in domains, right?
It's like, why would we have this gate kept process
where every TLD is like enshrined in the set
and you have to KYC and you have to pay registration fees.
An AI agent is gonna lean towards an open system
where they can move at the speed of code and not be bogged down by 60-day transfer locks and all this other human
friction in the way. So those are two points on the everything goes to zero
camp and then the other side of it is exactly what you're saying which is okay
so what the internet gets liquefied the the reason one of the main reasons
domains have value today is because it's
just a shelling point like we could all decide tomorrow collectively dot coms no
longer have value and dot gg is now the canonical thing but it's really hard
it's a really hard coordination problem to move everyone over to that new
paradigm and instead the safe bet is to say okay well comma is king and therefore if you paid
a lot for the domain then it's a trust it's trustworthy content and so it's this feedback
loop of like google upranking expensive domains because there's a vested interest in not having
scammy content on that domain and it just feeds back on itself and pushes the prices ever higher.
It's just the shelling point that everyone coalesces to.
And you would expect a perplexity to do the same thing, to uprank their search results
coming from expensive domains.
Whether it's SEO or whether it's GEO, you have the same utility of a domain providing
skin in the game and authenticity and a brand upon which the value of the content can be
proxied.
So, yeah, I flip back and forth.
I have no clue.
But the world is changing rapidly so uh best not
strong opinions weekly held yes yeah things are changing so fast that who knows what's going to
happen it's just you know all you can do is not put all your bags in one basket and uh you know
keep your mind open for all the new stuff that's coming out. Exactly.
Well, Adam, we've been at this for almost an hour and a half now.
So let me take one last question here in the chat.
Jakic asks, do we have Ledger hard wallet integration with Unstoppable?
Yes, we do. You can use it through MetaMask or any of your other third-party wallets.
But I would suggest actually using our built-in Lite wallet, which allows you to, you know,
not have to sign each individual transaction and also gives you recovery options. So overall,
it's just a much smoother experience to use our marketplace with our built-in wallet,
which is why we built it in the first place. know uh you know joe schmo without any crypto experience can use unstoppable
and not need to bat an eye adam have you have you used unstoppable yet uh not yet now it's
interesting um i always had a little beef with unstoppable let me explain this this is back in
the day this is bad juicy see well it all had to
do with this is an intervention actually out of my so i'm bringing in the rest of my team right now
it actually has to do with handshake so i remember the battle between handshake and uh unstoppable
and i remember unstoppable had a lawsuit against some people for the different domain extensions.
So I'm like, how could they do that?
How could they, you know, because this is Web3.
And so because I was into Handshake names at the time.
And once again, I've held on to a lot of those and probably shouldn't have.
But that's my collector instinct.
Anyway, so, you know, I was like, always like, well, you know, I don't feel like you could corner the market on a Web3 name.
So, you know, I was obviously on the side of Handshake there.
So I wasn't really looking at Unstoppable for anything.
But you guys have pivoted a lot since then.
I mean, you dropped that lawsuit.
You've totally pivoted in a different direction.
I love the direction you guys have pivoted.
Well, we did win the Dot Wallet lawsuit.
Yeah.
Yeah, I haven't even heard about that.
Yeah, we've tried not to make a lot of noise about it.
Yeah.
But yeah, we did win that one.
But yeah, we have come a long way.
Right. And and it's I love I love the pivot now to focusing on, you know, the web web to domain names, but implementing them with blockchain technology and, you know, doing basically making themfts so that they could be transferred instantaneously
you know wherever they are and i think that is the future and it also resonated with me when you
were talking about the wallet like you don't need to know your light wallet you don't even need to
know about crypto to use it i think that is really a key entry point into getting you know mass
adoption for stuff like this because a lot of people don't
want to deal with how to do crypto or you know or just figuring all of it out they just want to go
on buy something and have everything done behind the scenes you know people people don't need to
know about blockchain and crypto you just need to be able to buy transfer sell and it worked
and you know the more seamless it is, the better it is.
And I think you're one of the few companies
that are actually doing this and implementing it.
And it's just a matter of time until this becomes standard.
And when we have a marketplace that's widely used,
where people could buy and sell names like nfts you know domain names is nfts
that's going to totally change you know the marketplace for everything for domain names
it's going to be so easy because everyone knows crypto money is crazy money and they just want
to spend they'll they'll buy anything so you know a domain name listed on a platform for like
So a domain name listed on a platform for like 10 ETH, that seems like nothing.
10 ETH, what's 10 ETH to these people?
But if you look at it in money, when you say $40,000 or $50,000, you have to think twice
because that's real cash.
So just having it in terms of crypto instead of money, I think, will get a lot of people
to buy. lot of it
feels like play money you know it does yeah doesn't hurt as bad when it leaves
your wallet play money is all imaginary yes yeah I mean I think domainers have
this Stockholm syndrome where they don't realize just how bad the experience is in domain name trading, like these 60 day transfer
locks and clawbacks on stale listings and domains that shouldn't have been listed but
oh they were actually listed incorrectly or you know just lack of instant settlement.
I think there's just a ton of low hanging fruit that we're trying to tackle to give people a better experience. And it's very exciting. It feels like a matter of
time now, like you said, rather than a speculative thing that's a pie in the sky. So yeah, we're glad
to hear. We'd love to have you try us out too. And while we're at it guys, just about 12 hours left on $5 Fridays for .com, so go over
and grab yourself a couple.
Also got $5.50 transfers in.
And we're also doing a referral program,, if you introduce me to some whales,
then we can get both you and the whale up to 100 free transfers in. So reach out to me about that
and introduce some people and we can get you some free transfer issued to you. But anyways, Adam,
it was great to chat. Love to get a different perspective from an affiliate marketing standpoint.
Haven't learned much about that so that was really fun
looks like everyone got a lot of value out of this so really appreciate you
coming on today yeah thanks for having me it was a lot of
fun too bad uh ish couldn't make it but uh you know
yeah some new wi-fi it sounds like need some new wi-fi
indeed well that's all right we held down the port
yeah anyway thanks again who did. Who did the dish?
Yeah, who needs that guy?
Come on.
We're good enough.
We are enough.
Yeah.
All right, guys.
Thanks for tuning in.
We will see you next week.
Ciao.
