My first impressions of Park.io

When it comes to investing, I still invest most of my money in domain names, they have always provided the best return and I don’t see stocks, bonds, or real estate beating them anytime soon, at least for me. This may have to do with the fact that I’ve spent the last seven years investing in domains, or it could be that I’m just too disconnected from the stock market or real estate market to figure-out how to get the same kind of returns. Still my accountant tells me I’ve got something special here so I’m sticking with domains as the main way that I grow my money the fastest.

My biggest return on investment has always come from expired domains. Before I go any further I want to be clear though, these are not domains that people forgot to renew and then realize after the fact that some annoying squatter picked-up from them. Instead these are domains that people have decided they are not going to use and have decided to drop. If I get an email from someone who did own the domain prior to me buying it I always give it back to them immediately, but so far this has only happened once in the last seven years.

Currently the vast majority of my investments are in .COM, .CO, and .ME however lately I’ve decided to add .IO to the mix given how popular it has been getting. I recently heard about Park.io and decided to take it for a spin.

park-io

Since it’s my first time using the service I thought I’d share my experience. First, I’ll start with the UX – I’m impressed. It’s simple, not cluttered and my favorite part, there aren’t a million ads popping up left and right.

Of course good UX only goes so far, at the end of the day my goal is to find quality domains and quickly since I spend about 10-15 minutes a week looking at expired domains so I need results, and fast. When it comes to .IO domains I have pretty simple criteria, I’m only looking for one-word names and specifically looking at very common words. It was incredibly easy to spent 2-3 minutes on the site and before I knew it I had placed 6 backorders.

To be perfectly honest I’m not sure if Park.io is filtering for quality or if it just so happens that a lot of one-word .IO names are dropping but I did find it very easy to quickly spot names I wanted to buy, not for thousands of dollars, but for $99.

park-io-browse-domains

I started using Park.io yesterday and caught my first name today, for $99, and it was honestly a name I would have gone up to about $500 for in auction so I’m very happy with the results, so happy that I’m writing this review. So if you’re open to looking beyond .COM (which does mean taking bigger risks) and .IO is on your radar I can tell you that I highly recommend Park.io, just don’t bid against me please 🙂

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton