Darryl E. S. Lopes formerly worked for Uniregistry as a broker and he posted a story on LinkedIn and Namepros about registering 20,000 .xyz names at .01 each. Darryl reported that he did not make one sale in the year he held them. Had to be a lot of work to register 20,000 names. He talks about the worry of potential UDRP’s when regging so many names. It was certainly an interesting read.
I thought I was smart, it was like an aha moment, like when that guy bought 12,150 cups of chocolate pudding and earned 1.25 Million Air Miles. This was back in June 2016 and .xyz domain name extension was having a sale at Uniregistry and every .xyz domain name that was available to register would cost $0.01, one penny. I spent the next two nights scanning and compiling lists of domain names that I could add to my cart, at that time, the site could roughly only handle about roughly 500 registration per session, so on it went adding domain names 500 at a time to my account. Most of the domain names I registered, I would say 80% of them were just purely number combinations, during that time such as 0000011.xyz and 0000012.xyz, also I registered thousands of high-value keywords in the car, insurance, legal, addiction, mortgage and real estate industries. The Chinese domain market was hot for number domain names and 4-letter .com domain names at that time. I also thought it was pretty cool to see in the next couple days that I had over 20,000 domain names in my account. With great power comes great responsibility, I must have quoted those lines quite a few times to myself, I mean in general, when you have that many names, surely some sort of traffic would come along, via type-ins or bots, there was one way to test it out. I asked my friend Andre who had a blog and small online store selling art, pictures of guitars as clocks if I could test and send traffic to him as he had Google analytics. The next day he told me to stop redirecting my names because his service provider was going to charge him more for the influx of traffic. So it is true, it works. With great power comes great responsibility.
I set the names back to their default name servers and did a bulk edit where I priced every name for sale at $300 USD each. I was going to be rich! I got maybe two enquiries in the coming months and put it at the back of my mind and carried on the day to day work. The one enquiry was someone confused and the other one was a real person, they wanted a domain name I had registered for $0.01. The name was somnambulist.xyz, I don’t even remember the name or registering it. Turns out the definition of somnambulant. 1 : walking or having the habit of walking while asleep. You learn something or about something every day when you are in the domain industry. Anyways an email went out to the potential buyer quoting them $2,000 USD minimum and the came back and laughed on email. I sent an email saying that was sent in error and the price was actually $300, they could not see the value and suggested the name might be worth $3 bucks if being generous. I held firm on my $300 USD asking price, I mean I did pay around $200 for all 20,000 domain names so I really just wanted to sell one and make a profit. That never happened, almost a year went by and I had to make sure all the .xyz were on auto renew off as the renewal price for around $12.88 USD each, I knew this going into this and a few clicks and sorting out bulk domain edits I was going to let them all lapse. If you really wanted to renew 20,000 .xyz names it would of the cost you in the region of $250,000 USD!
One thing I will strongly suggest is not to register domain names blindly or in bulk like I did, unless you curate every single name you register, you can get into trouble with the law in the form of a URS (Uniform Rapid Suspension System) and or UDRP (Uniform Domain Name Resolution Policy) and they will be a headache, cost you money and damage your reputation forever online. I did not get into any trouble registering all the .xyz names, but I could of and that would have been a stupid mistake to make in hindsight. .xyz is still one of my favorite extensions, they have good marketing and brand awareness. I just won’t be registering 20,000 names anytime soon.
There are 65 replies on Namepros
You can listed to Darryl discuss it on SoundCloud.
All new tds is scam
Is this really surprising to anyone? The general public doesn’t recognize the “new” gTLDs and get confused if you tell then your website is example.website – they’ll end up typing examplewebsite.com or example.website.com.
A lot of the “new” gTLDs are also too scammy and spammy to be taken seriously, thanks to their initial low prices (e.g. the $0.01 mentioned above). We block many of the new gTLDs in their entirety on our website comments and block all emails from them. A number of Reddit subs blanket ban .xyz and other commonly abused domains.
Even looking at spam data: https://spamhaus.org/statistics/tlds/
The top 10 most abused are all new gTLDs, except for .cf which is a free ccTLD so of course it’s going to be abused. There’s also this report: https://csoonline.com/article/3041346/security/maintainers-of-new-generic-top-level-domains-have-a-hard-time-keeping-abuse-in-check.html which states nearly 80% of all new gTLDs are being abused.
Why would a legitimate company or person want to be associated with these scammy TLDs?
I said it was a waste of time buying .xyz domains, but no one listened.
Owell, I was buying up .Com domains while 99% of the domain community drank the .xyz kool-aid.
Thanks again.
If you had past financial success then it is a play, maybe it works, maybe not. When it is your only option it is desperation, a kind of attempt at domaining short cut, I liken this to a get rich quick scheme. Shocked when it doesn’t pan out I am not.
Could have used that money to buy and flip an acronym, then another and another but that involves hard work.
There is no short cut folks.
Not surprised at all.
Using TMCH to filter out bulk lists might be a good way to avoid hitting trademarks.
Why dd he leave Uniregistry, even better why did most of Uniregistry staff leave?
most? really? please share more details.
GOOGLE “https://onlinedomain.com/2017/09/15/domain-name-news/trouble-paradise-uniregistry-staff-departures-continue” and thensome
Domain Name Price Date Venue
galaxy.xyz 2800 2018-03-08 Sedo
host.xyz 3999 2018-01-28 Sedo
Jungle.xyz 7000 2017-11-26 Afternic
Paper.xyz 1000 2017-11-12 Private
Civic.xyz 1000 2017-11-12 Private
ripple.xyz 2500 2017-11-05 Private
Pistala.xyz 100 2017-11-04 GoDaddy
rudy.xyz 350 2017-11-02 Undeveloped
orlando.xyz 995 2017-11-02 Afternic
treehouse.xyz 599 2017-11-02 Afternic
circumcision.xyz 499 2017-11-02 Afternic
keto.xyz 499 2017-11-02 Afternic
preorders.xyz 700 2017-11-02 Undeveloped
Web.xyz 1550 2017-10-22 Flippa
stanley.xyz 1500 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
spectre.xyz 1008 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.xyz 995 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
kraken.xyz 995 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
reyes.xyz 700 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
pictet.xyz 299 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
treva.xyz 299 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
icarus.xyz 199 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
crownconstruction.xyz 100 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
ethereum.xyz 4000 2017-09-19 Uniregistry
Delaware.xyz 999 2017-09-16 Private
918 search results (only the first 25 results are displayed)
With 80% of his 20K registrations being numeric domains, that end users are not that surprising.
I have personally registered over 10,000 domains start April 18, and have already sold 10 to end users over the past month, passively (averaging +120/year). The math makes sense as long as you are targeting the right type/cateogry of brandcentric domains.
This post reminds me the same FAILURE CASE of Massive regging Mega Crappy Domains from another domainer whos name I already forgot, because its not worth to even remember his name! LOL The only think I remember is that he got pissed off with my post on this blog too… He regged like 20K Mega Crappy Domains of another promotion and he did NOT sale anything! Hahahahahaha!! Ohh yea I just remember his username: Sandybot or something like that… Whatever, he even Quit domaining due to his lack of Sales!! then he started brokering names but as well did not get any Sales for his imaginary fake clients! LOL Long story short, he Quit the domain industry for obvious reasons! hehehehe! 😀
Great story, but probably not so unusual. What if he had sold 1 lucky domain for $10k early on? I suspect that little outlier experience could have pushed him towards the 50 or 100k registered domains range….
He worked at Uniregistry during the Chinese hype era, so he saw all those million dollar .link deals, which I am very curious how it is doing, aka defaulted ? The odd other sale, to spend $200 to register 20,000 domains, and list them all for $299, seems like a fun experiment for sure, he was just to late, after the fact, and crypto changed the game, as all that money left for the new thing.
I bought a little bit over 10k of .xyz back in the 0.01 deal, here’s the results:
Chalked.xyz EURO$ 110 ( bought for 0.01, sold via undeveloped buynow )
pistola.xyz usd$104 ( bought for 0.01, uniregistry buynow )
Melter.xyz usd$50 ( bought for 0.01, uniregistry buynow)
Groselha.xyz usd$50 ( bought for 0.01, unireigstry buynow )
lozenge.xyz usd$50 ( bought for 0.01, uniregistry buynow )
They all moved within 12 months except for 2.
Which brought the total sales to: usd380 minus cost, comes to a profit of USD 347 which is not
bad for $33 costs. Which is much higher than 100% profit. I dropped all the others.
The registrations took about 2-3 hours, via script and the only research was to convert
dictionaries in text files as an input to the bot as I picked from dictionaries, filtered length, randomly chose M, L and C for English and registered when available (also via script ), Chose P, I and couple more letters for couple of other languages ( it, pt ).
Sorry for the “cheap” approach, but the profit was used to renew my real domains. 🙂
This year I’m trying .online and idns.
thanks for sharing all that.
As I said many times, xyz are pigeon shits and bills. That’s all. Those few sales are at very low price (high priced ones are masked marketing stunts), and fool money.
Good luck! 🙂 lol
It took me 6 hours and a php script ( + node.js’s chromium headless browser ) to register
20k names in Uniregistry back in 2014 when they had the .xyz .01 cent promo.
The return was close to 3k … every single sale reported.
But I agree, unless you are technical, there are no tools that can handle that.
The only ( not so new ) gtlds that gave me good return so far since 2014 were:
-.digital ( 4 sales )
-.online ( 5 sales )
-.xyz ( as per above )
-.news ( 1 sale )
-.top ( 6 sales )
-.club ( 1 sale )
-.science (1 sale )
For ngtlds, one should develop and sell it in website markets rather than domain markets.
The best ccTlds that I’ve had return:
-.me
-.co
-.ca
The best .tld, if you have the means to grab, is of course the dot com.