Your time is the biggest expense with cheap fresh TLDs

Domains are cheap, but your time probably isn’t.

I registered a handful of .xyz domain names early on. Daniel Negari has built buzz around the domain, and I think some of the domains I bought have value. Enough value that I pay $10 a year to renew domains like Wrestling.xyz, Prescriptions.xyz and Degrees.xyz.

Those were registered well ahead of .xyz slashed pricing and grew its registration base into the millions.

This stretch registrars dropped registration prices to a penny or two — counting ICANN fees! — to celebrate .xyz’s birthday. Uniregistry and NameCheap also offer a number of TLDs for less than a buck.

Ought to you run out and register a bunch of these cheap domains?

I registered 99 .xyz domain names at Uniregistry. The pickings are slim now, but why not?

Do I think it’s likely that domains like Subdivision.xyz, Headstrong.xyz and Hopped.xyz will sell? No, but it was literally the cost of a lotto ticket to register these domain names. If any of them sell over the next year, I’ll make a profit. Who knows…maybe some will even generate parking revenue.

But…

I spent a couple of hours digging through lists and looking for available domains at Uniregistry. The best domains I found had premiums, so it took quite a lot of time to find something possibly worth registering.

How much is your time worth? Say $100 an hour, and all of a sudden my cost to register 99 domains was $200.99, not 99 cents.

The same goes for some of the sub-dollar domains offered by registrars right now. The best domains have premiums, so you’re picking among the leftovers. Do you think you’ll be able to sell any of the domains ahead of the price goes up in a year?

We’ll see.