I have been buying domains since 2009. Buying a domain is easy. It costs a few dollars and takes a minute. Building a real website that people actually use is the hard part, and most of my domains never got that far. So there is a big gap between the domains I bought and the side projects I really finished. That gap is a big part of my side project story.
I have another page for the projects I built and put online. This post is about the full list. That means all the names too, including the ones I bought and then forgot about.
I sat down and counted them. 78 domains in 18 years. Here is what happened to them.
The numbers
Out of 78 domains:
- 36 never went live
- 21 were built and later taken down
- 13 were sold
- 8 are still online
So almost half of them never turned into anything. Many of the others went live for a while and then died. Only about a quarter of them, the sold and live ones, worked out in the end.
I buy around four or five domains a year, but it is not the same every year. In the early years it was slow, just one a year from 2009 to 2013. After that I started buying a lot more. 2022 was my biggest year with 15 domains. 2024 was close with 12. Those two years alone make up more than a third of everything I have ever bought.
I buy faster than I build
The 36 that never went live are not really failures. They are just names I bought. I would get an idea, like the name, buy it, and then get busy with other things. By the time I had a free weekend, I had already lost interest and moved on to a new idea with a new domain.
That is the real reason most of them died. It was not some big plan or a bad market. I just stopped caring about them. And part of why I stop caring is that I keep buying new ones. Every new domain pushes the old ideas further back.
None of the dead names bother me. I do not sit around thinking about the ones I never used. I got busy, lost interest, and moved on. That is the whole story for most of them.
The list sites are the ones that worked
When I look at the ones that sold or are still online, I see a clear pattern. Almost all of them are simple list or reference sites. One set of data, a clean layout, and a small useful tool on top.
- Flag Palette, flag color codes
- Symbol Hunt, national symbols of the world
- Google Cemetery, dead Google products
- AcquiredBy, a list of tech companies that got bought
- TechRewind, old tech products by year
None of these are hard to build. They are just lists shown in a nice way.
The ones that got stuck or died were usually the bigger, fancier ideas. Live data, user logins, anything that needed a lot of work in the background. Krypto Predict, FAANGWatch, Coinavy, and the bigger app ideas like Airport Hop are all in the dead or never launched pile.
I still get big ideas. I still want to build them. But the list sites win for a simple reason. They are easier and faster to build, so I can actually finish one. A bigger app needs steady work over many weeks, and that is the thing I do not always have time for. So the big ideas stall and the small ones get done.
2024 was a graveyard
One year really stands out, in a bad way. In 2024 I bought 12 domains and 9 of them never got past the idea stage. That is my worst year by far. Most of them were quick buys that I never touched again.
Looking back, 2024 shows my whole habit in one year. Buy fast, build slow, and let most of them go nowhere.
Was it worth it
I know how this looks from the outside. Eighteen years, 78 domains, most of them dead or never used, and a pile of renewal fees for names no one ever saw.
But I do not see it that way. I like building things. I am a maker at heart. Yes, some of these were random buys, and plenty went nowhere. But the ones that worked paid for the ones that did not. And I had fun the whole time.
If I could tell my younger self one thing, it would not be to buy fewer domains. It would probably be to buy more.