Excited to share my first public interview in over 20 years in the domain industry! 🙏 Huge thanks to Bob Hawks (@AGreatDomain) for the detailed article about my journey and the story behind dotDB. If you're curious, feel free to read and share! namepros.com/blog/interview-…

Finally, Karts.com is live! 🏎️ I still can’t quite believe I built a 3D kart racing game. Come give it a try! 😄 I created the characters with Nano Banana and ChatGPT, turned them into 3D models with Tripo3D, built the tracks with Claude Opus 5.5 and Blender, and brought it all together in Three.js. Thirteen of the 20 cities are places I’ve visited. I poured my memories of them into the tracks, and I hope you’ll enjoy the scenery as much as the racing. #GameDev #ThreeJS

In one day, I used Opus 5.5 and Three.js to build racing scenes set in 20 major cities around the world for my kart racing game. I also finished the start screen, end-of-race rankings, leaderboard, sound effects, and music. It’s already playable. I still need to fine-tune collisions and acceleration, then add coins and power-ups before launch. I can’t believe how quickly this came together! #GameDev #Opus

Five months ago, I started building a 3D kart racing game, but eventually put it on hold. Back then, I had to generate images with Nano Banana, send them to a SaaS tool to turn them into 3D models, then assemble the resulting assets into the game scene. The hardest part was getting the details right. Even something as simple as which object should appear in front of another was difficult to explain through prompts. I kept going in circles trying to fix those issues, and eventually stopped working on the game. Tonight, I saw that Opus 5.5 had just been released and reopened my long-neglected kart racing game project. I asked it to build a Taipei race track. It operated Blender on its own and created the scene in under an hour, complete with Taipei 101, other iconic landmarks, and detailed city streets. No manual modeling. No low-poly assets. No image-to-3D pipeline. Just a few prompts, and the project is moving again.

Acquired Jooz․com! This is probably my favorite domain purchase of the year. 😙🧃

After about two weeks, these 30 travel sites built on pure geo .com domains have generated seven bookings across four sites. Four came from an exact-match island .com in Southeast Asia, mostly for ferries, cruises, and kayaking. The others included an amusement park ticket in a Brazilian resort city, a truffle-hunting experience in Croatia, and a helicopter tour in Oceania. The helicopter tour alone could earn nearly $100 in commission. Receiving a “New Booking” email now feels almost as exciting as receiving an Afternic domain sale notification! If all seven bookings go through, the total commission will be close to $200. It’s still early, but the model already looks scalable. So I launched another 30 sites this week, with a stronger focus on destinations in Africa, to see whether Africa-focused geo .com domains can also gain traction. These include AbuSimbel.com (Egypt), AitBenhaddou.com (Morocco), DanakilDepression.com (Ethiopia), SidiBouSaid.com (Tunisia), and TheGambia.com. I still have several hundred tourist-destination .com domains waiting to be developed. Hopefully, I can launch them all before the end of this year. If your domains have a clear path to monetization, it might be time to stop parking them and start building.

I'll piggy-bag on Ken's post, since I've literally gone into the same niche as an experiment, driven by one of the domains I bought last week. CursiveGenerator.com I had the exact same thought process as @KenLin1985 High search volume 90k / month - Interestingly enough Cursive Generator actually has a really high US search volume. Turns out that's because US states have been making Cursive writing mandatory in schools again. Cursive is also popular choice for weddings and tattoos. All of this helps to be little bit more to niche down. The site can also focus on worksheets for teachers, inspiration for wedding cards and tattoo artists (and drive returning visits). In less than a week I'm now seeing traffic (and about 30% of that comes from ChatGPT) All of this was created in a span of 24 hrs or so - from buying the domain on Saturday, to launching the site on Sunday. My quickest domain to a launched project so far.

One of dotDB’s most underrated features is Keyword Insights. 🔍 It gives you a detailed breakdown of monthly search volume by country, revealing where people are actually searching for a particular keyword. Take “Southeast Asia” as an example. Google Trends offers a similar geographic breakdown, but there’s an important difference: its rankings are based on relative search interest, not absolute search volume. Google Trends ranks Brunei #1 for “Southeast Asia”. Does that mean Brunei generates the most searches for this term? Not at all. With a population of just around 470,000, Brunei ranks first because searches for “Southeast Asia” account for a relatively high proportion of its total searches. Now look at the same keyword through dotDB Keyword Insights: 🌎 Worldwide: 301,000 monthly searches 🇺🇸 United States: 74,000 🇵🇭 Philippines: 49,500 🇮🇳 India: 22,200 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: 18,100 🇦🇺 Australia: 14,800 Suddenly, you get a very different picture of where the actual search demand comes from. Google Trends is useful for understanding relative interest, but when you're deciding which markets to target, where to build your next website, or which domains might have commercial potential, actual search volume tells a different story. Sometimes, the most valuable insights are hiding in features you haven't explored yet. 👀 👉 dotdb.com/insights

Just picked up Southeast․Asia 🌏 Believe it or not, this is actually the first .asia domain I've ever owned, almost 18 years after .asia officially opened for general registration in March 2008, even though I've been based in Asia my whole life. To be fair, there have really only been two .asia domains that I've always wanted: Southeast․Asia and Fant․asia. I love how both make perfect use of the extension as part of the name itself. So I'm pretty happy to finally own one of them. 🙂 And I found something pretty interesting after buying it. Back in 2008, Southeast․Asia was auctioned for $20,500 during the original .asia Sunrise/Landrush auction period. The record is still sitting on @DomainNameWire today, alongside names like Discover․Asia ($112,111), Buy․Asia ($73,000), Pharmacy․Asia ($29,855), Resorts․Asia ($22,501), and Vacation․Asia ($20,000). 👉 domainnamewire.com/2008/08/2… Looking back at those prices 18 years later is kind of fascinating. This was a very different era of the domain industry. The massive ICANN new gTLD expansion hadn't happened yet. Before that expansion, there were only 22 gTLDs in the root. .Asia also came from an era when high-demand names could be allocated through launch auctions rather than the premium renewal pricing model we see so often with newer extensions today. Of course, the arrival of hundreds of new extensions probably diluted some of the scarcity and value that people originally expected from .asia. $20,500 for Southeast․Asia certainly feels surprisingly high when viewed from 2026. But that's also why I'm pretty happy to own it today at standard renewal pricing. If a keyword/TLD combination like Southeast․Asia were launched under many of today's new-gTLD pricing models, I wouldn't be surprised to see it classified as a premium domain carrying hundreds or even thousands of dollars in annual renewal fees. Instead, I get to keep this one for basically the regular renewal fee. 🙂 And beyond the domain history, Southeast Asia itself is an incredible region with its own cultures, landscapes, food, and some of the world's best travel destinations. So far I've only visited Singapore, Malaysia, and Bali, Indonesia. Still a lot of Southeast Asia left for me to explore. 🌏 Are you from Southeast Asia? If so, say hi in the comments and let me know where you're from! 👋

Had a chill Saturday night dinner with Dynadot founder Todd @dynatodd. Great food and even better conversation! 😊

It took me about five years to surpass $500,000 in sales through Afternic alone. That’s not the full picture, though, as I’ve also completed sales through Escrow․com, Sedo, Dynadot, GoDaddy DBS, direct wire transfers, and other channels. Over the past few years, my average sale price has consistently remained around $10,000. Hopefully, it won’t take too long to reach $1 million in total sales on Afternic!

My Gomoku.com, officially surpassed 5 million games played yesterday, about 14 months after its launch! 🎉 The site still has very little monetization, as making money is not my main priority at this stage. The funny thing is that I originally built Gomoku.com with the Japanese market in mind, since the word “Gomoku” comes from Japanese. Yet it eventually became far more popular outside Japan. The same unexpected pattern is now emerging with my recent project, RiichiMahjong.com. I assumed most players would come from Japan, since “Riichi Mahjong” is the name commonly used for Japanese mahjong. But so far, very few visitors have come from Japan. Instead, the United States has become our largest source of players. I honestly had no idea Japanese mahjong was this popular among American players. That is one of the most fascinating things about building websites for a global audience: you can never predict who will ultimately fall in love with your product. Even with dotDB, our largest user base by traffic actually comes from Africa. The internet never stops surprising me. #GameDev

I’ve known about MediaOptions since around 2010, and I’ve watched its founder, Andrew Rosener, go from “the seafood guy” to the world’s #1 domain broker by Escrow․com sales volume, year after year. Over the years, I occasionally received domain inquiries from MediaOptions, but we had never managed to close a deal. That finally changed today. I’ve now completed my first domain sale through MediaOptions, and it is also my largest domain sale of the year so far. For various reasons, I don’t plan to disclose the domain or the sale price. All I can share is that it is a single-word .com with around 40 EMDs taken, according to dotDB. I also agree with their point that scarcity is one of the most important factors in determining a premium domain’s value, especially when it comes to meaningful single-word domains. Immediately after selling this domain, I acquired Easeful․com and Webified․com. I’m still looking for more short, meaningful, commercially viable single-word .com domains, preferably with at least 20 EMDs taken on dotDB. My budget ranges from the low 4 figures to the low 5 figures, depending on quality. If you own something that fits these criteria and are genuinely willing to sell within that range, feel free to let me know. Apologies in advance, but I may not be able to reply to every submission, especially if it doesn’t meet the criteria or isn’t a name I’m interested in.

Sold this 20-letter .com domain for $3,000. When I bought it, I thought it sounded like the name of a game and might be something I could develop one day. The offer wasn’t quite in the range I had hoped for, but I decided to let it go because I can reinvest the proceeds in an even better .com. That’s how I’ve built my domain portfolio over nearly three decades: selling, reinvesting, and gradually turning it into a bigger and bigger snowball. @NameBio @afternic

Bought my first .si domain, but no, I’m not betting on “superintelligence”. It’s a domain hack: Rever.si. Reversi is a classic board game and was even included with the very first version of Microsoft Windows. Before Minesweeper, Solitaire, Pinball, or Hearts, there was Reversi. I plan to develop it into a Reversi website and continue expanding my board game universe. I bought the domain directly through Dynadot. I love how a newly purchased domain instantly appears in your account, ready to configure within seconds. Have you ever played Reversi? Let me know what you think!

I’m currently in Xiamen, China, the closest major city to my hometown. It must also be one of the very few major cities in the world whose name begins with the letter X. @domainname recently mentioned that Fujian is China’s biggest hub for domain investors, and I can certainly confirm that. Xiamen is one of Fujian’s major cities, and even 20 years ago, it already had a remarkably active domain investment community. Back in my student days, I often took the ferry to Xiamen to meet up with local domain investors. I even visited eName’s original office before it grew into one of China’s largest domain registrars. Around that time, I met a domain investor named WZY. We were both in our early twenties, but he already owned premium numeric domains such as 520․com, which means “I love you” in Chinese. I even sold him a domain back then, although it was only for a few hundred dollars. He later founded Meitu, one of the world’s largest photo-editing and beauty app companies, and went on to become a billionaire. Every time I return to Xiamen, all these memories come flooding back.

Sold CineArt․com for $4,166 net to me. The buyer must have paid more, as GoDaddy still charges a commission. The funny thing is that I had completely forgotten to list the domain on Afternic and had left it on a blank GoDaddy parked page. The buyer came through GoDaddy Broker Service, and after several rounds of negotiation, I accepted the offer even though the price wasn’t great. A name like this is completely beyond my ability to develop, so I decided to let it go for cheap. My guess is that the buyer is a company involved in AI filmmaking. Somehow, I always end up closing a few deals like this through GoDaddy’s Domain Broker Service every year. 🤔