Why I Renewed 1,000 Domain Names In July And Dropped 130

Like every month I go through my domains to see what to renew and what not to. This month I renewed almost 1,000 domains and dropped 130 of them. So I dropped about 11.5% of the total 1,126 domains that I had expiring in July.

In June I dropped 193 out of 807 domains or 23.9%. Click here to see what domains I dropped and why.

These are the domains I renewed in June for a total of 996:

.com	289
.net	8
.org	65
.info	171
.biz	5
.us	458

Here are the domains I dropped in July by extension for a total of 130:

.com	8
.net	2
.org	4
.info	20
.biz	7
.us	89

And here are the percentage of total domains that I dropped by extension:

.com	2.7%
.net	20%
.org	5.8%
.info	10.5%
.biz	58.3%
.us	16.3%

.Net and .biz have a small sample but I never was a big fan of .net and July is not a “.biz” month. I have very few .net domains.

These monthly numbers are not always representative of my portfolio. It happens that a lot of .us and .info domains expire or drop in July. Most .us were caught over the years as most .us expire in April each year and drop a couple of months later. .Info is popular in July because of the Landrush 2 that was back in July 2002 when a lot of reserved generics were released by Afilias. I have more .com, .org and .info, then .biz and .us and then all the others including New gTLDs.

I estimate that I saved about $1,170 in July from renewals. That is money I can spend to buy a couple of quality .com domains such as: InternationalHosting.com or AntiqueInteriors.com. And a few New gTLDs if I can find any lately such as Reverse.Engineering.

What did I renew? Here is a small sample:

• .com: UniversityTravel.com
• .net: SaintKittsAndNevis.net
• .org: murder.org, interface.org
• .info: trademarks.info, engineering.info, sound.info, saintlouis.info, buy.info, roma.info
• .us: postal.us, desktop.us, children.us, dyslexia.us

Why? Because I liked these domains above…

So what did I drop? I dropped:

• weak 2 word .biz and .us domains: topsecret.biz, onlinesecurity.us, movieticket.us, opticalillusions.us, sexschool.us
• average or bad letter 3-letter .us or .biz or .info domains: epq.biz, iqg.info
• domains for which I own the .com version: digitalsearch.biz, digitalsearch.info as I own DigitalSearch.com, dnshost.org after I got dnshost.com
• unsellable domains with no traffic: domainappraisal.biz (worthless as a term 🙂 )
• domains with suffixes: egate.info as I have gate.info, mytax.info

I am dropping most of my defensive registrations (to my .com) as they don’t make much sense now with all these New gTLDs coming out.

Some of these 130 domains may have some value of maybe $50 but I can’t spend my time on these. It will cost me more to sell them than drop them.

So why am I dropping all these domains?
First of all I have been dropping about 5% of my portfolio for years now. Sometimes I find that I registered an alternative spelling or a UK spelling with a .us that doesn’t make sense. In most of the months I am at about 10%. July was at 11.5% while June was at a remarkable 23.9%. I always reevaluate, keeping the best domains and dropping the worst. I am really proud that I was able to let go more than 300 domains in the past 2 months.

Now with the New gTLDs I expect that the value of 3 letter domains, especially bad letter combinations, will drop to reg fee. FMA dropped about 7,500 of .info and .biz domains in the past few months. Some of these .biz are now free. I dropped about 80 bad 3-letter .us domains last month and a few this month too.

Also I think that the value of the New gTLDs is in 1-word.newgtld domains that make sense as a combination. So I am applying this to the old gTLDs as well. I dropped about 60 2-word .us domains.

In terms of sales, .com and .org have produced solid 5-figure sales in 2013 and are still going strong in 2014.