When considering purchasing .info domain names for investment (whether new registrations or purchases made in the secondary market), it’s important to focus on how you’re actually going to make money from your portfolio. In fact this applies to all kinds of domain names, not just the .info extension.
I’ve found that a lot of people look down on the .info extension – without a good reason in most cases. I completely understand for some people investing in .info extension isn’t as worthwhile, usually because they have such big and rich .com portfolios that the smaller returns you get on .info’s just takes too long to add up.
But! For the majority, I’d say it is still worth investing in if you can find the right name to fit the extension. This is very important… you have to be careful which name you pick because unlike with many other extensions the .info’s work well mainly within the “information” niche.
At the time of writing, you can hand-register .info domains at a number of domain name registrars for around $1 each. GoDaddy for example is offering new registrations for $0.99 + icann fees = $1.12 per domain.
These promotions are not new, they’ve been ongoing since the release of the .info extension a few years ago. A lot of domainers and developers say that these promotions have hurt the extension – making it appear as “cheap” and “spammy” (more explained on this later). This may be so, but it still doesn’t take away from that fact that there is money to be made on them.
A few months ago I registered about 50 two word .info domain names – the total cost was about $55 – within a few weeks I sold 5 of these domains for over $30 each. Fair enough, it hasn’t changed my life, but that’s a pretty good return on investment however you look at it. Just from selling 10% of the names I’d made a total of $180. That’s about $174 profit from $6 investments. Not bad eh!
So what about the other 45 names?
Since registering them over 7 months ago, I’ve already sold about 40 of the names. Other than the first 5, the rest of them I sold for $2 – $5 each. A couple went for $10 each. Still I made profits on each and every single one of them so far. And, the best thing about it is that I still have 10 left. Out of these 10, I’ve developed one into an information/review site for domain registrars – and from the other 9 I will keep 6 (the best ones from the 50) and probably drop the other 3.
So based on my own experience, I’d say .info domains are definitely profitable – IF you know what you’re doing.
I think a lot of people have bad experience with .info’s because they registered poor names – names which don’t fit the extension – and in some cases people took a gamble on LLLL.info domains thinking a buyout would occur and they’d make good profits. Wrong.
Brandable domains don’t suit the .info extension and more often than not they don’t make profits… neither do acronyms (with LLL 3 letters being an exception).
If I see a website’s url as — BestLaptops.info (as an example) then automatically I’d assume that site to be some kind of information base, reviews site or price comparison site rather than a site actually selling laptops. I don’t expect it to be a company – I expect it to be either an affiliate site or just a site filled with information about which are the best laptops. Most people view .info’s in this way – and I’m assuming that’s what the intention is behind .info
I see people register domains such as “iComputerShopping.info” – from experience I can safely say these names do not sell well – especially to the reseller market. With names like this you’re trying to brand what is intended to be an information site… not a company or product. It just doesn’t make sense. Below are a few more examples of names that don’t really work…
- TotalBlogger.info – what’s this supposed to do? provide information about someone who’s a total blogger? good brandable name, but wrong extension.
- MissFashion.info – same as above
- 247ShoppingMall.info – could be a site about all the 24 hour shopping malls, but very restricted and again branding rather than keyword based.. wouldn’t get much organic traffic.
- UKLK.info – four letter .info, hard to resell to domainers, possible to sell to end-users who own companies with those letters, but this creates a lot of work trying to find the end-user.
You see, there are a number of reason’s why a numerous types of domains don’t work well with .info – there are a lot of things to take into consideration when buying them.
I only buy names that I can quickly flip to other domainers or at aftermarkets such as sedo / ebay / tdnam etc. I prefer not to chase end-users with .info domains because its hard enough to find buyers for .com’s – it takes a lot of time. And time is money.
I see it like this… the amount of time I’d spend trying to find an end-user for a $500 brandable or acronym .info name – I could flip 100 .info to resellers for $10 or so and make more money with less effort. So I don’t bother going after brandable .info domains – they’re just too much hard work to sell.
Below are some examples of names which make sense with the .info extension –
- VirusInformation.info
- HipHopMusic.info
- DivorceProcedures.info
- FinanceSchools.info
- EnergyProviders.info
- StudentAccounts.info
Ok, most of those names are mine – so it would seem biased. But think about each of them – they fit the extension and would be very easy to develop a site / mini-site on them. The ease of seeing and realizing the names potential – together with the ease of development (basic blog/wordpress / mini-site) helps to sell these names to resellers. Lets take “StudentAccounts.info” for example, it would make a perfect site for students to learn about which accounts /credit cards are best for them as a student. Turn it into a simple blog and allow user reviews / comments – add a forum perhaps? Now, just add a few affiliate links or google adsense – and there you have it – easily developed / easily monetized useful site for a niche.
I’ve had offers above $40 for most of those names – but I’ve declined, mainly because I have development plans for them or because they are parked and getting good traffic. I know that by spending an hour or two on each of the domains – I’ll have them developed to a basic stage – enough to earn me $5-$10 per month in adsense revenue at least. So it’s not worth selling for so low… I’m just not in that much of a rush.
So, to conclude this article – I think .info domains names are definitely worth investing in. If you can find them to hand-register, then its a bonus. But even if you can’t find good suitable names to hand-reg you can still have a look around at the aftermarkets and forums – there are occasionally names being sold for under $30-$40 … which in the right hands could be worth a lot more.
NOTE: as you can probably tell, I’ve written this article in free flow – not a great structure to it, so I do apologise. But I will be doing a full write-up on .info domains within a few weeks so stay tuned. In fact, register for a free account and add yourself to the mailing list – you’ll get a weekly newsletter with all the sites updates and articles… oh and available domain names lists.
Till next time 😉
