New Era of Domain Investing

Third Chapter: Whales, Builders, and Flippers.

Photo by Abigail Lynn on Unsplash

Third Chapter: Whales, Builders, and Flippers.

What is the best time to invest in new gTLD domains?

This is, of course, the million-dollar question. Different investors approach this very differently. As per my observation, there are basically 3 main groups of new gTLD domain investors: I will call the first group “Whales” (early investors, usually with a lot of money, usually long term investors), the second group “Flippers”(early or later investors, usually with not much money, short term investors) and a third group “Builders” (early or later investors, with a medium amount of money, by definition long term investors). The following text is only a rough approximation of what is going on, as almost no new gTLD investor belongs purely to one of those groups — some people combine two of those styles, and some try to combine all three. Anyway, here we go:

New gTLD investment style no.1: Whales

People in this group generally have a lot of money to invest. They are either professional domain investors who earned a lot of money in a .com era or simply investors without much of previous experience but with a lot of cash in their hands. Because of a large amount of money they spend, registries, registrars, and other domain investors just love them. Whales are investing usually $50k-100k+, while some of them invested in a range of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

New gTLD investment style no. 2: Flippers

Flippers are people, who buy and then try to sell domain names for a profit within a short period of time, ideally within 1 year, prior their first renewal fees are coming. They can be classified into 2 main groups: experienced flippers and newbie flippers. Here we go:

New gTLD investment style no. 3: Builders

Builders are domain investors whose aim is to build larger new gTLD self-sustainable domain portfolios, which can be carried into the future without additional external money investments. They believe that new gTLD domains will be accepted more and more in the future among end-users and the general public and that their value will rise in years to come. Their investment horizon is long term, 5–20 years. I am not hiding that I am one of them.

So which investment style should I adopt?

I would say that the builder investment style is the hardest of all styles to execute properly. Being a pure flipper, you will never keep in your hands anything really valuable for the future, but you can instantly enjoy money earned from domains, and buy something nice to you, or to your family. Being a clever builder means constantly re-investing the profits of your sales to your portfolio. It requires a lot of discipline, patience, and a lot of work. And strong confidence, that investment asset you invest into, in this case, new gTLD domain names, have a bright future. Being a smart whale can be the most profitable of all styles, while it can also make you a big complainer if you have not managed your renewal fees correctly from the very start, or picked up not so good names.

Good luck 🙂

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