Why sales like RiseUp.org for $75k are awesome…but not reflective of the market

One of the ways that many people get drawn into the domain industry is by stumbling on a domain sale, or a list of sales and thinking, “hey, I could register names like these.” Fast-forward to 2AM and they are sitting in front of their computer hand-registering names that to them look just like that domain name they saw sell for $10,000.

Then reality hits them hard when a year later renewals are coming up and they realize they haven’t sold a single one of those incredible, magical, amazing domain names that they bought that night. This is the point that most people throw in the towel and say, “domain names suck, everyone that made money bought domains in the 90s”

First off, this story above was almost me, except I’m one of those incredibly persistent people that takes every failure as a lesson, and one of my first lessons in the Domaining world was to be careful not to take individual sales as signs of a trend or to predict future value of another name.

Today is a great example, news broke that famous domain investor Mike Mann sold RiseUp.org for $75,000.

riseup-sold-for-75k
Quick note: Now before I go any further let me just make it clear that I’m not trying to slam Mike Mann or TNTNames. I’ve known Mike for years he’s an awesome guy and I always love reading about sales like this. TNTNames is another awesome blog about domains and if he didn’t get to it first I might have written a similar story…or one somewhat similar to this.

Okay, now back to my post.

A sale like this is exciting, buying anything for $350 and then selling it for $75,000 is, pardon my french, fucking fantastic. That being said, don’t mistake this for a trend and go out and buy 100 two-word .ORG names for $350 a pop thinking you’re on your way to becoming a millionaire.

What’s important to remember is that people like Mike have a lot of domains and a broad range of names. Mike didn’t make his millions on two-word .ORG names and you likely won’t either. So celebrate sales like these but be very careful how much you extrapolate from them.

Being a domain investor is a lot like being a detective, you really have to dig deep, do your research, and make sure that you can tell the different between a one-off sale, and a real trend. Congrats to Mike on the sale, that’s a great one and I think we’d all be very happy to ring the register there!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton