Domain Name investment: My personal experiences with investing in Domain Names

A few weeks ago, I was able to get my 100th domain name. But it wasn’t long ago before I started investing in domain names, I was simply getting more and more of it as I was having more and more website ideas (web 2.0) that I wanted to implement. So here’s my personal experiences in the domaining business…

– I initially invested in brandable domain names… –

I started out investing in domain names that was related to the ideas that I had, so the first domain name investments that I had was the Top Level (brandable) domain names (A.K.A TLD). I invested in names like TechFilipino, JoinMinds, LetsTell etc, however, like other brands I was scared that someone was to take away other extensions from me. So I registered almost all the extensions including the .ORG, it was expensive as I registered singular / plural, reverse words (TechFilipino / FilipinoTech), Extensions. I literally had around 30+ domain names but is only equivalent to around 8 brandable domain names.

– Officially a “domainer” –

I soon realized that developing these brandable was going to take me months, if not years, to fully develop. I came across numerous articles on domaining, and I got to know more and more about it. It then opened my eyes to the opportunities in ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain Names), which really made me “officially” a domainer, as opposed to just being a developer. It’s an addictive and fun business, I never realized how words suddenly become so expensive.

– ccTLD’s are not that popular to normal internet users yet –

At first, I was very hesitant in investing in ccTLDs. The costs were way higher ($7.49 / year vs $35 / year), and there might be language barriers. So I decided to invest in our own country’s domain names “.PH”. It costed me around $3,000 to register quite a lot of the premium and generic domain names. As I got to understand more, I also tried investing in .BZ (Fare.BZ, Lots.BZ and Hospital.BZ; by the way, it’s still for sale).

– Domain Name Pricing / valuation, it’s tough to measure –

I was quite optimistic at first that someone would just come along and offer a good price for it, but I was wrong, not a lot gave any attention to them. I soon realized that just like in real business, we must raise awareness of our own industry to raise our values and potentially sell our domain names at multiple times of how much I got it. This is why I started TechFilipino, to raise awareness with domain names (especially in the Philippines). I’ll be writing later, about my experiences in developing these domain names.