Nigel

No - I don't think you can make a living out of free to reg domains and flipping them. Barry might be the exception - but isn't his average sale price around the £100k level?

As lee said it could be a nice earning hobby. Realistically you could make a few grand a year and perhaps get a nice sale every now and then. But if you reg loads of average free to reg domains you'll be left with an average portfolio that costs a lot to renew, earns nothing on ppc, and all your profit will be gone. So you'd need to know your stuff and carefully reg domains that a niche business sector would want.

We regularly buy free to reg domains each year, but this is to top up our portfolio. If we looked back over the last year or two's purchases of free to reg domains I doubt that there is much profit from them. But there are some nice ones there that will sell one day - but we wouldn't want to be depending on our income from just those domains. It was easier to build portfolios from free to reg and drop catching when nominet were dropping vast numbers of domains some 5-6 years ago. But those days are gone. There is more money to be made from buying already reged domains at reseller prices (i.e. on acorn) and selling for end user prices. But that introduces an element of risk. A higher stake but the potential for higher rewards. But if you buy well then there are good profits to be made. As Barry can tell you

Brassneck

Well thought out summary by Nigel. I think you would need to be flipping drop catches also in order to get close to the £20k target.

Stephen.

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Lucky Luke

If this discussion is restricted to .uk land, then it has to be the unhyphenated .co.uk as the target.

You could try selling hyphenated .co.uk or even unhyphenated .org.uk, but there is a big risk with that. The stock-in-trade has to be unhyphenated .co.uk.

The available, free to reg .co.uk domains with more than 1000 uk exacts are few and far between and often a bit dubious. The cupboard with good domains is now bare.

If you go down to those available co.uk with fewer than 1000 uk exacts, then there are more available but the risk increases. You have to follow Edwin's volume business model then - there may be some end user out there that wants the domain with say 200 uk exacts.

I should add at this point that I believe the quality of Edwin's portfolio is far superior to anything that could be built up today from free to reg unhyphenated .co.uk domains. I also think that Edwin catches plenty of names (or pays others to do so) which affects profit margins.

Barry clearly has a golden touch of thinking like a marketeer to generate domain ideas and then also being able to buy and sell very well indeed.

I'm with Nigel & Stephen on this.

Cheers, Luke

Edwin

Just to make it clear, and as you've already pointed out, my business model isn't built on free-to-reg names. That said, some of the names I have registered from scratch in the last couple of years have sold at similar prices to domains I've owned for 5+ years or that I've drop caught.

There's no guarantee that the strategy I outlined in my earlier post above would work for anyone. But it's the ONLY way that I can see that somebody MIGHT still make a decent amount of money purely out of free-to-reg domains (which was a restriction imposed by the original post).

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