10-15 years ago, any remotely intelligible expired .com/.net domain would be picked up by bots as soon as it was available and held for years.
They would put them on sale for a much higher price (10x+ the yearly fee, much more if they were good domain names).
That was the last time I cared about domain names, as did many other people it seems. Now it's just whatever. Make up a word that's easy to spell/pronounce/remember, even if it's nonsensical, and build a brand around it.
Outside of that market, the main pervasive idea in the collective conscious is that people need a .com, which also died 10-15 years ago.
Making money on the internet does not require that.
If you need "organic traffic" from a search engine or people typing your domain name in, your idea isn't one of the kind of ideas that make you any convenient amount of money. It just makes some youtube marketing guru some clicks, and some passive income course seller some money, because you'll definitely be coming back to those once whatever outdated SEO becomes clear that its not working.
You can host entire businesses on a github hosting page. yoursubdomain.github.io
You can host entire businesses on a mailchimp mailing list shared around as a direct link
The reality is that your actual users will never be typing your domain name in. They will click and tap on it from social media and chat rooms. Your no name publication with a garbage domain name created yesterday can influence politics, we've seen that clear as day for half of a decade. You can absolutely sell ads on that stuff, or take hundreds of thousands to millions in payments directly from political action committees and NGOs.
So, sure, do all sorts of domain name hacks using obscure TLDs, have fun with the branding, don't worry about the dot com, its just a "nice to have".
I own pandorasbrain.com and want to sell it. Every couple months I get an "offer" for a few thousand dollars, and every time I say yes -- which inevitably leads to the other person replying "actually I don't have the money right now, would you sell it to me for [$100, $200, maybe $400]". ... which I also say yes to! ... and then they disappear and never respond.
I have no idea what this presumed scam is about, but rest assured there are people out here with .coms who want to sell for much less than $10k, but ... nobody's interested!
I respond, eagerly, in the positive. And not one of them has yet responded.
What’s the point? Am I just confirming my identity to a bot? And even so ... to what end?
As someone that owns domains names, I haven't really seen this market but I keep whois privacy on I guess.
It was instantly snagged with a $8500 price tag to get it back. Fortunately I had moved off every meaningful account so all they were left with was a bunch of spam. As much as I liked it, it was nice to make a fresh start with a new domain.
Anecdotally, I've had conversations of the form:
Me: "My website is joe.pizza"
Friend: types in joepizza.com
Good .com's are worth much, much more now (e.g. Voice.com sold for $30 million USD recently).
I think some of the shady behavior from the new extension registries (they seem to hold back every decent name as a "premium") really hurt their adoption.
I blame ICANN. A few years ago Uniregistry changed pricing for a bunch of TLDs including existing registrants and ICANN did nothing.
All of the other registries routinely reclassify domains as premium when they drop and it's really short sighted IMO. Domains would make an incredible, pseudo-anonymous, collision free web identity system, but many of the registries (AFAIK) are owned by private equity and can't see past the next quarterly earnings report.
It's really sad. The new domains could have been an opportunity to expand the market by convincing regular people to buy domains for email, identity, etc., but instead we got a bunch of short sighted price gouging :-(
With dotcomagain you can search through recently dropped .com, .org, .net, .biz, .cc, and .tv domains. I check the .com, .net, .org, .biz domains daily, to make sure they are free. The .tv and .cc are not checked currently, due to technical reasons.
The nice thing about dropped domains is, that many have been bought with a business in mind. So, not only are these domains free for purchase, many are also spellable and "make sense". So, find the domain to your next idea here or just be inspired or amazed by what people previously bought.
If you have questions or feedback, feel free to leave it here or in the feedback box on the website :)
(Just curious! I used to be in the registrar business myself, always interested in what people are building!)
Droplists are from namejet, domain cleaning is done by checking against zone-files from ICANN (that's why I don't currently check .tv and .cc domains as there are no zone-files by ICANN provided for them. As they are country specific, I would have to build custom solutions for them, which I don't want for a proof of concept).
Edit: seems to load if I refresh a few times. Android Chrome. Also, debounce time is a bit short
The industry term for this business is called “drop catching” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching
Domain registries provide registrars with reports of domains which are set to expire, and if you’re not a registrar yourself, you can often purchase these lists on a secondary market or use APIs built upon serving this information.
But even if you don’t have that list, you can do a Whois search for any domain and know its expiration. You could build your own database!
Note that most domains have a grace period (eg, 30 days) where the original owner can renew even after it has expired. So it’s not like you’d be able to steal someone’s domain just because of a clerical error.
Back in the day Microsoft dropped the ball with passport.com, shutting down hotmail over Christmas.
https://m.slashdot.org/story/8999
https://www.doublewide.net/faq.html
You’d think Microsoft would have learnt their lesson but no, 3 years later it was Hotmail.co.uk that dropped off
https://www.theregister.com/2003/11/06/microsoft_forgets_to_...
The latest version of ICANN's registrar accreditation agreement, in 2013, includes grace period provisions. https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/approved-with-specs-20...
Droplists are from namejet, domain cleaning is done by checking against zone-files from ICANN (that's why I don't currently check .tv and .cc domains as there are no zone-files by ICANN provided for them. As they are country specific, I would have to build custom solutions for them, which I don't want for a proof of concept).
* nintendoswitchvr.com
* nintendopocket.com
* nintendomarathon.com
* supernintendoworld.org (there's a new theme park of the same name)
I wouldn't buy any of these domains but I can see the value in being able to quickly find them.
> Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://[...].execute-api.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/[...]. (Reason: CORS header ‘Access-Control-Allow-Origin’ missing).
edit: I also get similar error messages intermittently in Chrome.
bad data. paa.com is not available.
What if I were to make a tool that monitored dropped domains and ran it through the service and then automatically bought domains which had some base value according to the tool?
This is where an endless list does NOT work. I want to know the total # results for my search, so I can better decide judge if I should add more words to the search query.
My workflow would be to compare a bunch of saved choices, would be nice to make it easy to add bunch to a cart/list of some sort then
Yeah, I agree, that sticking a number of results on the list could be beneficial.
About the save list: That is a feature, that I wanted to build, too, but decided to first see what the HN reaction to this project is. So, might come in the future :)
Would be great to have a wildcard such as * as well as basic filters to allow for search by: numbers or letters only, .com only etc. Also found right away a domain that is not available and registered since 1997 so wondering how accurate the list is.
Sorry that you found a registered domain. Because of how everything works, I can only make sure, that most domains are free, but there are some in ther, that might be taken. Also, .cc and .tv are not cleaned at all, currently. So there might be a lot more taken ones of these tlds.
Concerning the filters: You can search for one or multiple tdls and also exclude numbers or dashes, but only on desktop. Wildcards are not yet supported, but might be in the future.
Have you posted on namepros? That’s where all the domainers go to
No, didn't know about that forum, yet. Will post there.
Quite funny to put in some 'naughty' words to see what comes up
Maybe because I have content blockers.
