My obsession with domains eventually settled into a kind of side hustle. I’m down to an hour or so a day, mostly because I taught myself enough python to be able to build scripts that check the drop every day for names I might like. Then I occasionally get lucky enough to not have any competition for that name and win it at DropCatch or SnapNames for around $59. But nowadays, anything worth having generally ends up in auction, and with players who are paying a lot more for names than makes sense to me. So I’ve been having some fun looking for names that help ‘protect’ the names/brands I hope to sell some day. An example might be getting (years later) GrowingTv.com to go with Growing.Tv, or Webtern.com to go with Webterns.com (Isn’t this a great name for an online intern recruiting company?) and selling them as a package.
Is it profitable? I have a small ‘portfolio’, around 600 names, many of which are family-related or saved for my own projects. Some years have been good, with a surprise windfall that puts me deeper into the black. But there have been rotten years where I’ve barely made enough to cover renewals. People who do better at domaining are probably smarter than I am, but they also spend a lot more time at it.
If you’re stumbling on this blog as a young person looking to get into buying and selling domain names, my recommendation would be, don’t! There are better, more profitable ways to spend your time. This a very mature market with most of the juice squeezed out of it years ago.