My million dollar domain hobby | Hacker News Reader

My million dollar domain hobby

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54 pointskens51 comments

No mention of the ethics of this, except in a single dismissive comment?

He is deliberately land-grabbing domain names in the hope that he gets in the way of legitimate users enough that they pay him off? Scummy.

People try to distinguish between domain squatting and "domaining" by saying that the former is "bad faith" but the latter is not, but I don't really see any difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting

https://www.godaddy.com/garage/what-is-domain-squatting-and-...

I hope that ICANN release enough new TLDs that this problem just goes away by dilution and the "domainers" lose all the money they "invested" in this scummy practice.

I don't know the guy, but we have plenty of high profile individuals in tech (not all of whom started FB), who have a very different or diminished sense of ethics. I guess it's just shocking to see someone stand up and proudly display their activities.

Some people think that if something isn't illegal then it must be morally good.

I am not sure if that coping mechanism or limited perspective on how life works.

Amazon et al. don't steel money, they legally offshores them to tax havens. Illegal? no. Immoral, yeah I'd say so. But at least they don't publicly gloat about it.

I think one factor is that the guy is an 'honest' trader, and doesn't squat on a domain to fill it with scummy links, bitcoin miners, malware, porn, scams, or impersonating other websites. More a straight 'this domain is for sale'. Morally bad has varying degrees as well, and if this guy didn't scalp the domains, someone else would have.

Not saying the guy is a good guy, but there's worse ones out there.

Sure there are degrees of badness. Doing something less bad than you could have done doesn't make your action laudable.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

"Lawful evil"

Microsoft was someone infamous in the past for taking other peoples' technology and using it without paying for it, and later settling in court for small money.

Amazon very certainly has bad behaviors with respect to allowing counterfeit items and possibly treating labor unfairly.

Google seems to have its share of bad behaviors as well.

Don't forget banking and finance, politicians, and other groups.

But let's face it: the Mother Teresa's of the world don't gain the financial riches or obvious power that narcissistic and sociopathic leaders do.

And at least in finance, not so unrealistically portrayed in The Wolf of Wall Street, some takers will privately mock their marks and fools. Incidentally, that movie missed telling the story of the real wolves. I'm still waiting for the Goldman Sachs/Fed/Government story. Point is, this behavior is OK for some.

I think you could just as easily devise a moral framework where paying more tax than you are absolutely required to is immoral, given the actives that your taxes support (e.g. war).

Ethics are complicated. System has to be ethical first, then individual actors. You cannot have an unethical system then expect actors to be ethical.

Yup, and capitalism isn't particularly ethical. It's amoral at best.

Agreed. There are much worse things happening right now.

Mostly as a result of capitalism, yes.

No "system" is somehow a separate thing from its "actors". A void wouldn't exist with nothing to put in it. People like this author are the unethical individual actors making the entire system unethical.

When I said system I used as a meaning of ruleset. There are 2 set of actors in this case, one is making unethical rules, another is abusing this unethical rules basically.

I think the argument here is essentially that of the prisoner's dilemma. A system or game can put two rational (or we can say ethical for the purposes of this argument) actors in a position where the most rational/ethical decision isn't the most ideal for all parties.

You can argue that the individual acting in a self-interested way is the problem, or you can argue that the system itself is the problem.

I'd have to agree with the parent comment - it's complicated.

I think by definition acting in a self-interested way is going to benefit you the most, otherwise it wouldn't be called self-interested. The problem is that often, acting in a self-interested way harms others, either directly or indirectly, hence being unethical. That's not the fault of the system, no system can prevent dogged self-interest being the most beneficial for yourself.

I don't think what the person in the article is doing is cybersquatting.

If I bought, say, Microsoft.ai and the tried to extort Microsoft to buy it, that's cybersquatting.

If looked at the list of available domains, saw one called "cooldomain.ai" and bought it, and then after that someone starts a company called CoolDomain and wants to buy the domain, then that is fair enough.

Is he providing value or simply extracting value?

A fair point, but I would imagine there are a lot of businesses you could say this about.

> Buyers love to concoct complicated schemes.

> ...

> They want to discuss the ethics of domaining.

You mean call you out as a scumbag scalper? Because that's what you are. All you do is drive up the price for the actual users. People like you are literally why we can't have nice things. Get a new hobby.

This hurts potentially legitimate users for the benefit of one person. Of course it's nothing new, as there have been people doing this with domains and practically every other resource humans have ever needed.

You could say, "Well if I didn't do it, someone else would." Indeed that's probably true, but it doesn't make this any less bad for collective humanity.

There are also fascinating stories of the past of how spammers (legally and sometimes illegally) got around rules and blockers and made bank.

You say "This hurts potentially legitimate users", someone else can say "this is stealing from registrars". There is no single answer to this. Actually this is the definition of trade ( mostly stock markets work in this way too )

I can understand why this is an amusing hobby. However, let's be honest: This kind of activity is mafia-style, protection money for blocking the system. I can understand why domain registrars have fees, because they run infrastructure. But people like this guy speculate. Speculation on land is one thing, but speculation on internet assets just render big parts of the domain system useless.

Well, it is a free and largely unregulated market, so speculators can speculate as much as they want. When Google launched the dev tld they discouraged this by making special domains premium, i.e. much more costly to acquire. Ideas like that could change the market, but who know's if that's ever going to happen (for tlds such as .com).

If you need a domain, you can buy it from him. It's better than all unused domains that are being squatted on for decades.

Edit: is there a .socialism TLD already, that is unsquattable, and you only get access if you are deemed worthy by the committee? Seriously, lighten up, people. And if you don't like the system, create a better one.

what’s the difference between him and the squatters? nice ui and a friendly attitude?

Pretty much. At least the squatted pages aren't the internet equivalent of floating plastic in the sea.

Yup, taking the friction out of the process. You can also see at a glance what interesting domains are available.

Edit: another benefit is that you can sell your domain to him, if you have uselessly squatted on it for years.

> I like to keep my hobbies cheap and cheerful [...] Just a CSV file, ssh whois, and my old friend sleep() to honor the rate limits.

'Honor' is a funny word for your treatment of the rate limits you wrote a distributed crawler to circumvent.

I also doubt people searching for an available domain name for their new business would find his hobby "cheerful".

Or that spending thousands on domains is 'cheap'.

> I cautiously created an account with Anguilla, nervously wired them a token amount of money, and started experimenting with EPP.

> Most of the the action took place in the first 45 seconds. Total cost: $2,000.

Using the .app TLD sales for valuation is smart, but the majority of the scheme boils down to 1) have money, 2) buy limited supply property, 3) sell at inflated prices once the supply is limited enough.

It always shocks me how brilliant rich people think they are when they corner the supply on something while the only thing stopping normal people is a lack of money.

Not that much money, and you can also borrow money if you are not rich. It always shocks me how ready poor people are with their excuses.

If you think it is so simple to make money, prove it by doing it.

You claim you know of a guaranteed way to make money, you only need some starting money. If you are so sure, and your idea is so good, you should be able to convince somebody to lend you the money to do it.

Incidentally, do you know any "limited supply properties" somebody with money should buy at this very moment, to get even richer?

> You claim you know of a guaranteed way to make money, you only need some starting money. If you are so sure, and your idea is so good, you should be able to convince somebody to lend you the money to do it.

I didn't say I know of a guaranteed way to make money. I was saying that domain squatting isn't novel or difficult or some kind of genius idea. The primary driver of success in the domainer market is having a big pool of capital and the rest is easy enough that if someone has the capital for it they're not going to cut someone else in. They might hire a domainer as an employee, but they're not going to be looking for partners.

> It always shocks me how ready poor people are with their excuses.

The person that wrote this article is holding ~200 .ai domains at a cost of ~$70/year at Namecheap. That's $14k per year. The federal minimum wage in the USA is ~$15k per year ($7.25/hour).

Why don't you lay out a financial plan for me where a person making $15k per year can hold a $14k per year .ai portfolio?

As I said, take out a business loan. You claim with enough money, it is easy to make money with domains. So do the calculation and go to your bank. How much money will you need, and how much can you make?

Or work your way up. You don't have to stay on minimum wage forever. In fact, if you are on minimum wage, you should probably think about ways to improve your income. Most people in minimum wage are probably not there forever - they may be pupils or students, or pensioners making extra money, and so on.

Also the cost per year is less relevant, if you earn more from selling domains every year. Only the difference is relevant (costs vs income).

It sounds like you have easy access to money and have never been broke. Banks don't give "business loans" to poor people. The first question they ask is what kind of security or personal guarantee you can give and when the answer is "nothing", their answer is "no."

If you do manage to borrow money and things don't work out, you have to pay it back and that takes a long time when you're going back to the crappy income level you were trying to escape. It's not like Silicon Valley venture capital where you say sorry and get another bag of cash to try again.

> Also the cost per year is less relevant, if you earn more from selling domains every year. Only the difference is relevant (costs vs income).

Yeah, but the person with the money to start has 200+ domains and a (supposed) $1 million portfolio. The person who bought 1 domain using the same strategy might have a portfolio worth a few thousand dollars. They're not going to be writing a blog bragging about their portfolio or landing business deals because of the million dollar business they built.

The point I was trying to make is that if you take a rich person and a poor person with the exact same skill set and idea, the rich person will be viewed as being super successful (making a million dollars) while the poor person, although personally happy with the outcome, would be viewed as a loser if they make $10k and "waste" it on something like a reliable vehicle.

It's also a bit amusing to me that if a poor person wanted to start flipping domains using a 5 letter .com, like the person in the article, they'd have to buy the domain from a squatter.

Then lend the money to yourself, if you are so convinced.

Please become specific: how much money do you reckon would you need to do what that person did?

If you are so convinced it is easy money, and there is absolutely nobody who would borrow you money, set your goals to saving that much money and do it yourself.

If you have the skills that guy has, I don't believe you are stuck in a minimum wage job, either. And those skills are free to acquire on the internet if you can read and write, so please don't argue that education is not affordable for poor people.

You don't have to get a one million $ portfolio right away, btw, you can also start with a smaller portfolio. He is making money by having domains people want to buy, not by having many domains. You could start with one domain, costing you only 70$.

I also don't understand your point about having to buy from a squatter. He describes how he got hold of interesting domains at a fair price, that is the entire trick.

This reminds me of my own million dollar hobby where I sell a portfolio of old dishrags which are, by my own estimation, worth a couple millions altogether. No, I haven’t sold any yet, why do you ask?

I wonder what it's like to be able to casually throw around "a few thousand dollars" for your new domain-squatting hobby despite being between jobs.

Save some money to find out?

This is an interesting topic for me because I hold a handful of domain names (10-20) that I'm not using and have often had this internal debate.

I have them because they're ideal names for a few side projects I've been considering building now or in the future, and I hold on to them because I want to make sure I have them if inspiration hits for any of the given projects.

I'm sure many of you own some "aspirational" domain names like this, and while I realize it's a much different scale, why is it functionally different than the OP? Is there a reasonable quantity of unused domain names for an individual to own before it becomes unethical?

I wouldn't want to hold a domain from someone else who wanted it in good faith and was going to use it (like I hope to, eventually), but if I want a good domain name for a product I'm building in the future, I have to play the game a bit ahead of time.

> I'm sure many of you own some "aspirational" domain names like this, and while I realize it's a much different scale, why is it functionally different than the OP?

It's squatters that have created the situation where people feel the need to hold on to domains they might use because the second you let them drop they'll be snapped up by a squatter if they're even half decent.

> Complexity kills transactions.

This is so true! I wish I learned this earlier in life.

.app names list by some other seller - https://offbyonenames.com/

Since when are .io and .ai domains considered premium? Users are still used to only typing .com, .net or .org (or their local country TLD).

Haha! I actually wanted starboard.io for a project a little while back and ended up perusing through your domains. Frustrating when they're taken but I appreciated, then and now, how open you are with your portfolio.

Guck this guy!

Why all the negative comments? Kudos to the owner of the domains and seeing the opportunity. He learned by doing. This could have been a complete bust for him. Great write up. Thanks for sharing. I learned something new today.

> I learned something new today.

What, that rent-seeking is profitable? That's hardly something to celebrate.

I was intrigued by the technical aspects of the enterprise he engaged in, but I do appreciate your perspective.

This somewhat mirrors my own experience starting domaining about 15 years ago. I've always stuck with dot coms and just picked interesting suffixes - domains ending with cloud were very hot for a while. I do disagree about sites like Sedo not being a good place to sell - when people search for domains in their registrar, the similar results from sedo and others will appear in the list as available (at a higher price of course). Just having a landing page will simply list the domain as taken, so your potential buyers have to really want the name to contact you.

Basically, don't rely on type in traffic alone - list buy it now prices on sedo and you'll move domains with ease

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