Why I Did Not Buy 50,000 .XYZ Domain Names

Yesterday I wrote about how I considered buying 50,000 .XYZ domain names for $500 due to the $.01/name offering from Uniregistry. I laid out the pros and cons about registering this huge swath of names, and lots of people shared their valuable and interesting insight.

Shortly after publishing the article, I did a bit of  testing to see if it would even be feasible to do this. I started with the Social Security Administration’s website to get a list of the 1,000 most popular boy and girl baby names for 2015. I created a list of the 2,000 or so names (I am sure there were some duplicates) and appended .XYZ to all of these. When I searched Uniregistry, I encountered a roadblock:

Screen Shot 2016-06-01 at 9.57.21 AM

At this point, I probably could have contacted Uniregistry and asked for help, but I was in a hurry to get the search done and I also didn’t think it would be nice to use their resources since they wouldn’t be making any money (I would insist on turning off auto-renew upon registration). Instead, I used another bulk search tool to look for available names. Out of the 2,000 +/- names on the list, I only found 11 that were available to hand register. There were some additional premiums, but I was only interested in the names I could buy for $.01.

This is where I stopped. If I could only find 11 names out of this list of 2k prospective names, it would have been very time consuming to keep running keyword lists (500 at a time) to build a list of 50,000 available domain names that could be hand registered for $.01.

I briefly discussed what I was doing with .XYZ, and they sent me a list of available name .XYZ names (there were somewhere around 1,200 on the list). Some of those had already been registered by the time I looked and many weren’t names I would consider buying.

Ultimately, I decided against doing this due to the time constraints in actually finding a huge swath of names I felt could potentially have value as well as the potential for legal risk should I wing it and just buy haphazardly. I still think it may have been possible to sell enough names at $500 to at least break even, but taking the time to find all of those available names turned out to be the main reason I didn’t roll the dice and take this gamble.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn
  1. All uniregistry ever talks about is their bulk tools, and how easy it is to register, move, and edit thousands of domains with a single click.

    I encounter very slow load times at uniregistry, alot of the thinking icon just spinning around. It is not completely there yet.

    Most end users want the domain back at Godaddy, and godaddy and afternic are clicking for me, much better than uniregistry, and uniregistry market.

    We probably will be moving back to godaddy, just easier will auto transfers on bins. They have that generic traffic, I see them advertising on tv all the time. Uniregistry is a household name with domainers, and they don’t pay end user pricing for domains.

  2. I like to check names in bulk and every registrar makes it easy except Uniregistry. You can’t even find the link to do it. I’m sure it’s there somewhere but I shouldn’t have to go on a hunt to find it.

  3. Now I see it. You can bulk check right through the main search bar or separate names by a comma. Personally I think it should have a clearly marked button that says Bulk Check.

  4. Appreciate the comments. The main search box will support bulk searches. We will change the text to be more evocative about that.

    The site actually works quite well when not under the attack of adding 1.5 million names in 24 hours .. For Ron’s benefit I managed to update 10,000 names and use the market today (managing 330,000 names in the account), all while hundreds of registrants pounded us adding 37 names a second.

    That’s impressive and Godaddy does NOT have those tools (or anything close). If they could I would be using them and would not have built Uniregistry in the first place to manage my names.

    Uniregistry is a kickass piece of software and will continue to grow, evolve and improve.

    Thanks to all.

  5. All right you lovely blogging guys, I was the one who posted the other day that it wasn’t worth the time and the time involved made it just as much gambling as if they were $10 a piece, so kindly give credit where credit is due. That means both you and Andrew who posted another thread about this. 😉

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