Domains Names are the original NFTs (1.Viewing)

You can tell that my looking at just this year's sales of Help.com for $3,000,000 or Room.com for $1,500,000. Even a late comer tld .ai appears to be hitting the charts with multiple high-priced sales including the $700,000 sale of You.ai.

And who doesn't remember the $15,000,000 sale of NFTS.COM, or $10,000,000 sale of Connect.com - both sold in 2022.

Canadian tld .CA showed a lot of promise, but other than a handful of big ticket sales, the overall .CA resale market has been a disaster.

You'd think with time, the value of .CA names would go up, but unlike .COMs, investing in .CA has not resulted in any meaningful returns. In fact, in most cases, it has been a total loss. Same amount of money invested over the years in .COM or brick-and-mortar real estate in Canada would've resulted in much better returns.

Do you agree or disagree? Share your experience.

First question I'd have for you is, do you invest in .com also? Do you have firsthand numbers to compare? That's the only way you'll know because reported numbers are tiny fractions of all sales, even in .com. So if you look at the small fraction of .ca sales actually reported, there's just not enough data to make real decisions like that.

However, there are clear differences between .CA and .COM. .CA (or any other tld) doesn't have the depth that .com has. And a top .ca sale is a small fraction of what the .com would go for. But most of that wholesale vs end-user pricing is relative. The one factor that is_not relative is carrying costs. The price of renewing 1,000 .com isn't that much different than holding 1,000 .ca. So that's the killer. You can't justify holding as many low quality .ca as you can for .com.

You can definitely make a living from .CA domains, but it aint easy. You need a balance of volume, quality, negotiating skill and patience. Some got in early and got'em cheap. Some (like myself) came in later, but bought a lot in the aftermarket - either on individual domains or from guys selling their portfolios because they gave up. Some have patiently invested in expired domains. It is a slow process to grow to that critical mass.

I think most .ca domainers do it as a side business, very few of us make a full time living from it. In fact, even the guys who could make a living soley from .ca domains often have another job anyways. I guess they do simply because they can, as the income from a high quality domain portfolio is fairly passive, obviously not completely, but a pretty minimal amount of work.

And when it comes to the numbers, everyone is different based on the portfolio size and quality of their domains, how stubborn they are in negotiations, recognizing if you have the best buyer for the domain, etc... The more desperate you are for a sale, the more likely you sell something cheap when you could have gotten 10x more for it. So its a delicate balance of making a sale when you need to cover costs, but also knowing how to maximize your sales when you've got the perfect buyer for the right domain.

And I can assure you there are multiple 6 figure .ca sales every year, they're just not reported.

Yes, those mysterious unreported sales. Every year there are multiple millionaires minted in Canada by selling those secrete 6 figure domains. So, someone sold one or two to a US or European company for big bucks - big deal.

Maybe I have to spell it out more for some of the readers out there. I was talking about the promise and potential of .CA and where we are today. To put it more simply, all you have to do is look at how much an LLL.CA go for as oppose to an LLL.COM. If you had bought an LLL.COM in 2003, you'd be making many multiples of that amount today. LLL.CA, in that same time period, has actually lost value. LLL.CA has been a disaster. On top of that, the way the search engines have shifted over the years hasn't helped the matters much. There is also a whole new generation of internet users out there who type domain names in Google search bar.

I get the skill set you need and how it can help to get more for your .ca, but it's not enough. The market is just not there. I think we all know the number of years it took RBC to buy RBC.CA.

If we didn't have ownership restrictions imposed by CIRA, maybe that will help improve the overall market.