Here’s my (imperfect) process.
One day last week, I sat down with a mission: look through my domains expiring in the next 6-8 months and decide which ones to renew. I ended up spending $8,692.71 renewing 937 domains. I also decided to drop about 70 of the domains expiring during this period.
I’ve walked through my renewal decision process in the past, but I want to give some insight into my thinking this time around. I’d love to hear if others follow a similar process.
First up, why renew domains now that don’t expire for months?
I renew my domains in batches for a few reasons. One is worthy of another blog post, and I’ll publish that soon. But one to reveal here: it’s a lot easier.
Making these decisions every month is a pain. It’s much easier for me to dedicate a few hours in an afternoon a couple of times a year to clear out any renewals.
There is another impetus for renewing domains now. .Com prices are increasing on September 1. I currently pay $8.85 per year for .com domains at GoDaddy. If they raise their prices 7% like Verisign is doing, my renewals would have cost another $500 or so.
Also, I’m not worried if I renew a domain and someone buys it before it would have expired. Sure, I paid an extra nine dollars, but does it matter when you sell a domain for $5,000?
Here is the process I used for this round of renewals:
1. Sort my list by expiration date to see which ones expire soonest.
2. Bulk renew domains I know I want to keep. Most domains are obvious to me. I’d say I chose about 80%-85% of domains to renew in this first pass, leaving about 150-200 to sort through and make decisions about.
3. Take the remaining domains and run them through Estibot. This helps identify outlier domains that might have value I’m not seeing. It also shows which domains are registered in any of the other main top level domains. If I’m going to let a domain expire that’s registered in “inferior” extensions, I want to research this further. I plug those domains into dotDB to see if the domains are actually being used. (Note to dotDB: it would be awesome for paid users to be able to do this in bulk.) For some domains, I’ll check who registered them and how long ago it was. I put less weight on the registration if it was registered years ago and hasn’t been developed yet. I’ll also take a quick look at the GoDaddy appraisal for domains it thinks are worth more than “usual” and investigate why. I decide to renew about 25% of the remaining domains based on this data and related research.
4. Make a final call on what’s remaining. There are a couple of factors that help me eliminate domains. One, if my list price for the domains has been fairly low (about $1,200 or less) and it still hasn’t sold, I might let it go. I’m not going to cry over an occasional missed low-priced sale. Second, I think about if I’ve sold any similar domains. If I’ve owned 25 similarly-themed domains for 5+ years and none of them have sold, that indicates that perhaps my original supposition for registering the domains was wrong. Two, I go with my gut. Is it worth spending another nine bucks to hold this domain for another year?
A few other thoughts about my process:
- I look at my acquisition date, but not in the way you might think. I try to avoid the sunk cost fallacy (as hard as it is). Instead, if I’ve owned a domain for a long time, that’s a bad sign since it hasn’t sold yet. Of course, keep in mind that with a sell-through rate of below 2%, domains can take decades to sell. I use acquisition dates mostly for themes; if I’ve registered a bunch of domains with the same theme and held them for ten years and none of them have sold…that’s not good.
- I have given up on .miami. I registered a bunch of domains in .miami that were snapped up in .nyc for big prices, but none of them have sold. I also haven’t heard of other .miami sales.
- Finally, I know my process is not infallible. I can’t know everything. I can’t get into the minds of every potential buyer. Occasionally, after turning off auto renew on domains, I’ll end up selling one. This means there are others I probably should have held onto, too.
Coming up: a post about a “hidden” benefit of renewing your domains early.
“Making these decisions every month is a pain. It’s much easier for me to dedicate a few hours in an afternoon a couple of times a year to clear out any renewals.”
100% same. I used to do this 1-2x a year. I’m doing it about 3x a year now and need to find time to do it again soon.
I also look at the handful of domains I have with a higher renewal cost and make a gut call on whether I want to renew for an extra year if I think there might be a price increase coming. If I’ve had a recent good sale I might also take the opportunity to renew one of the three premium renewal domains I own.
Since you own a very popular domain blog, you should offer to sell your drops for $100 each here before dumping them.
I actually offered to sell them for $40 each, promoted on Twitter this week. I sold about 10 of 170.
i bought some as i recall.
yes, i just paid a big renewal bill at gd and at 101 domain,
it’s not always easy to cull – 2 domains i had planned to drop last month sold for low xxxx about 2 weeks before expiration to endusers
so much art and luck in domaining… i still prefer domain investing over any other investing
it’s not always easy to cull – 2 domains i had planned to drop last month sold for low xxxx about 2 weeks before expiration to endusers
A-men. Definitely been there!
You didn’t add the $0.18 to the $8.85 to make the renewal $9.03.Is thar waived off by Godaddy?
No, you’re correct. The total cost with the ICANN fee is $9.03.
ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) charges a mandatory annual fee of $0.18 for each year of domain registration, renewal or transfer. For example, the fee for a one-year .com domain registration will be $0.18 while it is $0.36 for a two-year .com domain registration. I don’t think any registrar can’t avoid that, but curious to see what Andrew says.
You seem like a smart guy, but you are going to go broke. Maybe take a look at your
“honest” profit/expenditure data.
How much do you spend total on domains, compared to your revenue from parking
traffic, and domain sales? The industry bigs have gotten so greedy with their massive
registration and renewal fee hikes (which btw are enabled by blog articles like this)
that the entire industry now looks just like the U.S economy — IE a huge financial trap.
Unless your are using Domains for big eye catching propped up domain sales for
**tax write offs** to pad your bottom line, then the domain gig is up.
There is no money to be made in the domain industry ANYMORE. The patient is DEAD.
killed by greed, lies and disinformation. How many “domainers” have to go broke before
people start speaking the truth? Where are the honest sales? Where is the REAL
parking revenue? Where is your traffic revenue? All I hear is alot of “hype” from the
domain blogs run by highly intelligent people who are hired to say things that
reguardless of how much you wanna believe .. just doesnt add up.
Its like listening to a White House press conference on the economy. Its really sad.
but I do still enjoy the blog. Best of luck to everyone 😉
“There is no money to be made in the domain industry ANYMORE. The patient is DEAD.”
LOL!!!
My big takeaway was that you owned some .miami names 😮
Could you please share the breakup of your portfolio between .com / ntlds / cctlds?
18 years in domaining myself and what I go by is inquiries on my make offer domains. If lot’s of inquires I renew, it none I don’. On buy now, I look at my pricing and compare with estibot. You have a good system.
Great advice / process Andrew. Here’s my new approach: Because I’ve recently retired from real estate and don’t need money from domain sales to live; through a combination of letting 300+ drop while offering another 300+ to domainer folks I know for $975 – 1950 (or less for bulk sales) (any of which not sold will also be dropped), I’m in the process of reducing my 800+ .com portfolio down to just the top 100 or so true premiums. These I will hold onto until end-users come calling or I die; after which time they will go to my family. I’ve given them exact written instructions of how to manage and sell any that are left after I’m gone.
“Note to dotDB: it would be awesome for paid users to be able to do this in bulk”
Exactly! Please do it.