Canceling Domain Names – Thinning The Herd With Domain Drops

As with many people over the past few years I have managed to acquire a collection of domain names that includes some that I plan on doing business development with, some domain names I plan to sell but many others that at the end of the day may have value but the return on my time invested to sell may not be worth the effort. Based on this, over the last year or so I have been thinning the domain herd that I have. Many of these domains have been acquired either through a transaction where I acquired several domains at once and they came as part of the package or were pickups I made myself through other means as individual domain names.

But, although they may be of some level of quality from an operational perspective they still can be a distraction and I would prefer to focus on a core set of domain and development investments to allow me to get the most bang for my buck/time. To give you an idea over the past year I have went from 1,300 names to somewhere around 650. Guess what, that is still too many. Over the next few months I am going to be moving to decrease the number of names even further. I preach against being a domain collector and for the most part I feel I have decreased the number of domain names that I had a few years back that I had continued to hold just based on emotional attachment (i.e. I bought it so it must be good....).

One thing that may surprise people though is I do not necessarily wait for the domain to expire. I prefer to simply cancel the name at whatever registrar it is held at and let it drop. Why not let it sit? Well as it sits it can end up being a distraction or for some reason I may decide that maybe I should keep just that one, well maybe two. I would prefer to limit the distractions and focus on the names that I feel can be developed or sold into something more profitable.

I recently sat down and did a bit of an informal review of what I had bought over the last several months compared to the few years before. Although I had managed to get some good pickups a few years back the better quality (as a percentage of names bought) really has come in the past year or so as the domain collecting stopped and domain investing and domain business development began. Sometimes you know what is right, you know the names are really worthless or not worth the effort required to sell it (50 dollar names), but it takes sometime to pull the trigger to get rid of them. What it takes is sitting down and determining what your real goals or, is it to be a profitable business or is it like baseball cards where you may have 10s of thousands that you collect but the real investment maybe in core few. Domain investing can be much like that if that is how you choose to do it, and to be honest that is ok if that is what you want. Personally I would like to focus on the profitable domains only.

Give me your thoughts, does it make sense to drop a distraction or just let them ride?