I’ve been a domain investor for about a year (when I started buying heavily), but really it’s been about 8 months.

In that time, I’ve accumulated a good number of domains - over 200. About 80 before I knew what domain investing was and then the next ~120 with the intent of buying names to sell.

I thought It would be worth going over my performance for the year (as I’m not likely to get another sale and am playing around with my portfolio this weekend), both for transparency and for my own benefit.

The names

Excluding any purchases, i’ll have 208 domains going into 2025 (down from 220 - more on this later)

• 162 .com

• 15 .co

• 4 .org, .net, and .ai

• 3 .me and .io

• 2 .online and .info

• 1 .xyz, .us, .work, .chat, .agency, .biz, .es, blog, and .food (9 “other”)

~80% .com and ~20% everything else “feels” like a pretty good spot. If I’m honest I’ll likely be trying to get closer to 90 or 95% .com which won’t be hard if just add mostly them.

All of these names (but 2) were acquired through expiry listings or hand reg, so I estimate my cost basis per name to be right around $20. I’m too lazy to do the real math right now but I promise it’s close. I loved the $5 closeout names ($16 all-in) and most of them are hand regs anyway…

So my all-in on the portfolio of ~200 names is probably close to $4000 for the year

The Sales

I had 3 sales in 2024.

My first sale was an expired pickup in the crypto space - ______wallet .com. I picked it up because the prefix word felt like a good descriptor in the space, and it tuned out it was!

My second sale was a true ‘flip’. I paid too much, and ultimately was glad to be “rid” of it. I think it was a fantastic name and priced to sell. Leaving dates off.

My third sale was published recently (on twitter) - useagentai .com sold for $488 on afternic. A hand registration earlier this year (part of a batch of similar names), in hindsight I think this name may have been the best. of the lot.

All-in-all a pretty good year. Just over $10,000 in net proceeds with $4000 in cost puts me up $6000 in my domaining journey and I’ll be looking to upgrade into a few higher quality names with that over 2025. I’ll be opportunistic and patient, focusing on domains in areas I am more familar with.

So what did I learn?

Names names names

First let’s start with the portfolio. Names are everything (duh). I bought a lot of bad domains. Domains for me. Beginner mistakes.

I have some good domains too. Maybe a few 5-figure-sale-worthy names.

Alternate TLDs are great, but I think .coms Is where I want to put my primary focus still. I think the registration fees on some of them are too high for my current portfolio size (looking at you .co and .ai), while others are cheap (.xyz is great!).

Dropping fomo is real

Upkeep is starting to kick in - I started having to pay renewal fees on the portfolio. It’s going to keep adding up. This is exactly why I started StakeWeb - so that I would be able to offset these renewal costs for my own names, even if they’re not the most valuable. I’m excited about the progress there and looking forward to continuing to dogfood my own product in my portfolio.

But at the end of the day bad names are bad names and I’ve dropped a number and will be dropping about 20 more from the current portfolio as renewals come up. Mostly alternate extensions (13) and 7 really bad .coms that I never should have hand registered.

I like building

With the advent of AI it’s easier than ever to build out domains. I ended up launching half a dozen failed projects before StakeWeb, and a few since that have had some early success. This year I built buyadsonline.com to test the waters on selling direct banner ads on hosted StakeWeb sites. I also built wastedtraffic.com to help domain owners find out if their websites could generate passive income (it’s free!).

I also put together some fun projects like biospage.com (use a computer) for fun.

I think there’s the spirit of a builder in most of the best domain investors i’ve had the pleasure of engaging with so far in my first year, and I’m going to continue to build both in the space and elsewhere.

The Fees!!!!

So far I’ve made sales through direct outbounding (2) - 1 with escrow and 1 with a popular landing page provider / brokerage service for domainers. Compared to the % I gave up on my third sale via afternic, those fees were nothing!

It’s a surreal experience - talking about 30% fees in the abstract vs watching your 46x return drop to 33x (“oh no, poor thing!”) instantly. I suppose that’s the price I pay for “inbound distribution”.

I suppose I’ll wrap up this late Thanksgiving weekend with a story that relates to the last point…

Earlier this year I met with a fund manager and we talked about domains. He “got it”, but was still a little astounded to hear that domains could achieve a 40%+ return on capital annually. I come from the crypto world, where these returns feel more normal, but as I write this I realize that paying 30% to make 3000% is a deal I’d take all day and twice on Sundays. (Didn’t think I’d end up thankful for afternic but here we are).

Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving and please like, follow, subscribe, and hit the notification bell.

-Harrison