I have divided the sellers I see in the domain sales market into categories according to my own perspective. This is entirely personal and subjective, based only on my own observations, and it does not claim to be accurate. Here are, in my view, the types of people who deal with buying and selling domains:
Enthusiasts Usually they are people who just started buying domains. They heard here and there that this business brings money and said, “Let me try too.” Most of the time they trade domains without much awareness, and they end up stuck with domains they cannot sell. After struggling for a while and losing money, they quit. New enthusiasts constantly enter the market, but those who cannot satisfy their excitement leave quickly. One person drops a domain, another buys it.
Hobbyists For these people, the purpose is not so much buying and selling itself, but the process of trading. They see domain trading as a hobby and enjoy it. Mostly they buy domains from discount campaigns and aim to sell them for twice the registration price. Small profit makes them happy. But usually, after a few years they realize they lost money overall and stop. A small minority continues with little profits. Recently, the number of hobbyists seems to have decreased.
Become a Medium member
Dreamers Even though many valuable domains were registered in the early 2000s, they still believe they can find a nice domain, register it, and sell it. They sit at the keyboard, open a registration site, and start combining words to create names. They end up with dozens of names, thinking they discovered something valuable, and register them. For example, they register something like “get-hosting-from-here.com” and imagine investors will pay big money. They advertise their domains, but usually no sale happens within a year, and the domains expire. Some dreamers believe so strongly in their names that they register them for 2–3 years or longer. In the end, they try to sell them in bulk, lowering the price to registration fee or below, saying “At least let me recover part of my money.” But most names do not sell; if a few are bought, they are lucky. Finally, their dreams end with a big loss.
Cunning This group aims to deceive others. In some ways they resemble dreamers, but the difference is they do not really believe their names are valuable. They wonder if anyone will buy them. When they realize they cannot sell, they gradually lower the price. Still, most of their domains do not sell and expire. They started with the dream of getting rich quickly, but end up losing money.
Professionals They hold portfolios of hundreds of domains and sell at least 1% of their portfolio each year. They make profit from domain trading. They actively spend time researching, buying, listing, and selling domains. Besides sales, they also earn advertising revenue through parking. This is a general description; exceptions exist. Especially those with super premium domains may own fewer names, but their prices are very high. A professional domainer always makes sales and usually profits in the long run. I think most professional domainers in Turkey have portfolios mainly of foreign names, and sales are mostly through domains with foreign names.
Veterans Their number is very small, and they started domain trading in the early 2000s or late 1990s. At that time many domains were still unregistered, so they secured many valuable ones and built today’s portfolios. Their domains are usually old, single-word, keyword names with search volume. Therefore, their sales prices are very high, but the high prices slow down the sales speed.
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