Also called domain name investing
Domain investing, explained
Names come from three places: hand registration of unclaimed names at the standard fee, expired names won at expiry auctions or caught when they drop, and private purchases from current owners. Every name then costs a renewal fee each year it is held. Sales come from marketplace listings with a Buy It Now price, for-sale landers, inbound inquiries, outbound outreach and brokers, and close through escrow followed by a push or a registrar transfer. The pool is crowded: 401.6 million names were registered across all extensions at the end of Q2 2026, 166.6 million of them .com, so most strong short and one-word .com names are bought from other owners.
The economics work at the portfolio level. A few sales at end-user prices have to pay for every renewal on names that never sell, so acquisition cost, holding cost and sell-through rate matter more than any single appraisal. Typical sales are modest: the Global Domain Report 2026 put Sedo's 2025 average sale at $2,753 and its median at $818, while headline deals such as AI.com, reported in February 2026 at $70 million, are outliers, not benchmarks. Domain investing is speculative, and nothing here is financial advice.
Investing is not cybersquatting. Buying generic words, brandable names and short names is lawful; registering names built on someone else's trademark invites a UDRP complaint or a lawsuit. The common beginner mistake is buying what appeals to other investors, or hand-registering hundreds of weak names, instead of asking who would build a business on each name and what that buyer could pay.
AI is now a central naming theme: .ai passed one million registrations in January 2026, and AI.com is the largest publicly reported domain sale. AI tools speed up the work, generating candidates, screening drop lists, drafting outreach and summarizing comparable sales. They cannot tell you whether a real buyer exists, and their appraisals are estimates, so trademark checks, reported sales and judgment still decide what to buy.
Example. A domain investor might hand-register a few brandable names, buy one strong two-word .com in the low four figures, and hold them for years until the right end user makes an inquiry.
Go deeper How to Start Domain Investing: A Beginner's Guide
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Education, not financial, legal or tax advice. Domain investing is speculative and most domain names never sell. Read the disclaimer.
