Ask HN: Buying domains for side projects

[ramanujam]

I bet many on HN will have the domain buying fetish. i.e) You think of a side project and immediately buy the domain for it. There is also the practice of simply buying a domain just because you thought it was cool. I am one of those people and my reasoning is that if i spend some money and buy the domain, i will have the motivation to get started on the project and it has worked at times.

On the other hand, i have accumulated many domains which seem pretty useless now! I do renew some domains hoping that i will work on it some day. How do you tackle this?

[byoung2]

It's funny I had this exact conversation with a coworker just this morning. The company we work for has a portfolio of nearly 1 million domain names, and most of them point to simple placeholder pages with ads.

I personally own about 50 domain names...most that I bought with the intention of using for a specific project that never materialized. With a handful of them I paid a writer in the Philippines to write a dozen articles for each, and I threw together simple wordpress sites with RSS autoposting and they make about $10/mo each, which pays for the renewal fees for all of the other domains.

I suppose in theory I could register 1000 domain names and repeat the process of paying for content, setting up wordpress RSS autoposting, and possibly make $10,000 a month, but I never seem to get around to it, and there's the possibility that it won't be as profitable as I think.

[bond]

> I suppose in theory I could register 1000 domain names and repeat the process of paying for content, setting up wordpress RSS autoposting, and possibly make $10,000 a month, but I never seem to get around to it, and there's the possibility that it won't be as profitable as I think.

That's what this kid is doing with 500 domains.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/dvkdc/i_pay_for_colleg...

[duck]

Do you mind sharing a link to one of these sites so we can "see" how it works?

[jessejmc]

How did you find your article writer?

[rgrieselhuber]

Interesting - do you mind if I ask you some questions about this? I'm considering a similar project for slightly different purposes and would love to get some feedback on some things. My email is in my profile if you're willing to chat. Thanks!

[albahk]

Serious question: If you are registering and presumably renewing 1 million domains did the company consider becoming a registrar to save money and make it easier to own/manage that many domains?

[Andrew_Quentin]

I must say, when I was doing some domain research, I though to myself more than once : "this is, this is criminal".

These were domains dealings with quite serious subjects and just seeing them sitting there full of ads, making it so very much difficult for me to acquire, absolute gorgeous domain names, just felt not only immoral but purely and simply criminal.

Of course I got over it and moved onto domains which were available and suitable and just as good, but, and this is not to you personally but companies who buy such domains names en mass hopping to profit, simply, find a way to make money which allows you to get sleep at night.

[r0s]

Squatters are pretty vile. I've never had the opportunity, but I've heard such domains can be obtained relatively easily if you have an existing legit company(doing actual business) and can threaten litigation.

That seems extreme, but I think of it like real-estate: If your business buys a warehouse, you may have to hire an exterminator to clean out all the parasites that have set up their nests therein.

[there]

i have a personal domain (jcs.org) and i just create a subdomain for a new project. it lets me put it online quickly and it also means i'm not tied to the name if i want to change it.

sometimes i finish a project and it never moves (http://metra.jcs.org/) because i can't find an appropriate domain name.

though as someone else suggested, try http://hntrades.com/ to buy/sell/trade unused domain names.

[sammcd]

I recently instituted a "no domains after midnight" rule. I've dodged a few bullets with that one.

[bwooceli]

I'm sitting on a 3-month-old gem: theomnomnom.com

Purchased time: 2am.

Hilarious potential: check. Chance that I'll touch it before the renewal reminder email: 20%

[garrettgillas]

Me too. I kind of went through a "buy domains like crazy" phase a couple years ago but have since kicked the habit. Now I won't let myself buy a domain unless I have some other work done for it first. Although it only costs me $7.50 a year, the cost adds up a lot after a while.

[bobbywilson0]

I only register the domain for a year, and if it expires in the year without me doing anything I let it go. I mean, it's been an entire year.

[ramanujam]

Good thought! I did the same thing and let a few domains expire this year. If i have not worked on it for a year, there is a good chance that i will never do it in the future. Better ditch it and focus on other things!

[decadentcactus]

Same. Except now I regret one of them that I need, and has since been taken up by a parker. My fault that I didn't get around to it, but it's annoying.

[profquail]

I think the important thing is to have some measure of self-control; if you buy a domain for a project, promise yourself that you won't buy another until you've either: (a) built the project, or (b) sold/traded the domain or otherwise used it in some gainful way.

Disclaimer: I've got a bunch of domains that I purchased for personal projects and never got around to. But at some point, I realized I was just wasting money and promised myself not to buy any more until I finished at least one of the projects.

[bryanh]

Hmmmm, I have 49 domains. That's costing me $400 a year. I'd say a good two dozen are active(ish). They just seem to accumulate...

[byoung2]

for the 36 that are inactive, put up a quickie site like I did and in theory you could be making $360 a month (assuming $10/month per site). Even at $1/month per site you would make $432, or enough to pay for all of your domains.

[borismus]

I am totally guilty of buying domains for side projects and then not following through.

I own 17 domains, 5 of which are currently actively hosting meaningful content or webapps. I went through a scrub of the ones that are unused, and realized that I need to let some go.

Here's a list of ones I'm letting expire. If you have a meaningful project idea for one of them let me know.

concoctail.com geogames.org gpsrpg.com istherewind.com jamhunt.com runubc.com

[babeKnuth]

how in the world do you come up with those names? what was their appeal to you?

[patrickryan]

I've encountered this same problem multiple times.

The fix: don't buy the domain until you are ready to launch the project. This allows you to build without having to adapt your project to a domain name. It's much easier to find a domain that describes your project after it has been completed. It also saves you money if you never carry out your grand ideas.

[arn]

I'm going to be a little contrary and say you should register as many as you can when u can.

I have over 300 domains, but the value in a good domain is well worth the cost over the years. TouchArcade.com is one I picked up before I had a solid plan for its use. Now it's annual revenue dwarfs the "wasted" money on domains.

[irons]

I don't really consider it a negative for my years-old untapped ideas to cost me a token amount of money per annum. If my unused twitter accounts did the same, I'd probably have a few more active projects, or a few fewer dormant ones.

[kilian]

I recently evaluated all the domains I had accrued, took a critical look at all the apps I wanted to built for them and at what state they were in (if at all) and decided to ditch 50% of them.

It felt ...liberating. :)

[bkorte]

I've stopped myself from buying domains for projects. I also force myself to let a domain expire if I don't use it within a year. It's extra motivation to shit or get off the pot.

[babeKnuth]

hopefully the pot gets pretty dirty. :)

[thibaut_barrere]

I never start by buying the domain. Instead I spend a bit of time to write down the concept, see if it sticks.

It's only later that I look for a name for the project itself, and I buy the domain at the same time (it's a kind of whois brainstorming).

[Isofarro]

I've managed to accumulate about 150 domains, almost all of them were bought with an idea in mind (quite a lot are duplicates/complements/variants to the main idea).

This year I listed all of the ones that didn't have websites yet on sedo, and set all of them to a couple of hundred pounds each buy-it-now. The idea is that either I focus on building an idea quickly, or risk that someone who thinks he has a better idea than me snaps the domain name up in the meantime.

Hasn't worked. But, so far three of those domains have been sold, so that essentially covers all my domain name renewal fees this year.

Perhaps I should drop the prices to increase the pressure on myself.

[cliveholloway]

You post a large update in a place where you value your integrity stating that the goal you were going to achieve will be accomplished by a certain date (that appears reasonable).

In my case, it was to tweet that we'd be selling our latest discs (http://twitter.com/Thisoneisonus/status/27176693962) on a certain date, and then coding through the night a couple of days before because I didn't want to look like an idiot to our 5,000 obsessive Twitter followers :D

[uptown]

I'm just like you. But I've started winding down my portfolio of ones I know I'll never get around to building. The interesting thing for me has been to see some businesses spring up with the same concepts for which my domain names were bought. That's happened with more than a few of my domain names.

I've also been fortunate to have a couple of my domains result in unsolicited bids ... generating enough profit to cover the carrying costs for the 20 still in my portfolio. Just got a completely unexpected offer for one last night.

[jeffwidman]

For every three domains I buy, I probably keep one longer htan a year. And only half of those stay longer than two years (1/6). But those that last longer than two years are generally gonna stay around for a while--I bought them because I like the name, not because of a project sitting in my mind. Eg, AffinityScore.com just has a nice ring to it and would make a nice social ranking product or services business. (If you google "Affinity score" it's most often used by people describing EdgeRank...)

[sriramk]

I'm shaking my head right now. Literally 5 seconds before checking out the HN home page right now, I just finished the checkout process for yet another sideproject domain :)