The Domain Investor's Glossary: 60 Terms, Explained

Domaining has an unusual amount of jargon for how small the industry is. Some of it is genuinely useful shorthand; some exists mainly to make forum posts unreadable to outsiders. Here is the whole vocabulary, grouped by where you'll run into it.

The basics

Domain name — The address people type. Made of a label and an extension: in SummitNest.com, summitnest is the label and .com is the extension.

TLD (Top-Level Domain) — The extension. .com, .org, .io, .ai.

gTLD (generic TLD) — A TLD not tied to a country: .com, .net, .org, plus the newer wave like .app, .shop, .xyz.

ccTLD (country-code TLD) — Two letters tied to a territory: .uk, .de, .ai (Anguilla), .io (British Indian Ocean Territory). Some have been repurposed as generic-feeling extensions far from their origins.

New gTLD — Extensions released from 2013 onward. Hundreds exist. Very few have meaningful resale markets, which is why they're cheap to register.

SLD (Second-Level Domain) — The label part, before the dot.

Subdomain — Anything before the SLD: blog.example.com. You can't sell these independently; they belong to whoever owns the domain.

Registry — The organization operating a TLD. Verisign runs .com.

Registrar — Where you buy and manage domains. GoDaddy, Namecheap, Porkbun, Dynadot.

Registrant — The legal owner of a domain. You.

WHOIS — The public record of a domain's registration. Largely redacted since GDPR, but still useful for registrar, creation date, and expiry.

Nameservers / DNS — What points a domain at a website or landing page. Changing nameservers is how you point a name at a for-sale page.

Buying and sourcing

Hand registration (hand-reg) — Registering an available name fresh at standard price. Cheapest entry, lowest hit rate.

Aftermarket — Any market for domains that are already registered. Where investors actually operate.

Expired domain — A name whose owner didn't renew. Goes through a defined lifecycle before becoming available again.

Redemption period — A window (typically ~30 days) after expiry when the original owner can recover the name for a fee. It is not yet available to you.

Pending delete — The final ~5 days before an expired domain is released. This is when drop catchers compete for it.

The drop — The moment a domain is released back to general availability.

Drop catching — Using a service that fires thousands of registration attempts the instant a name drops. You almost never win these by hand.

Backorder — Paying a service to attempt to catch a specific dropping name on your behalf.

Closeout — An expired auction that received no bids, then sells at a fixed declining price (often $5–$11). A common source of cheap inventory and cheap mistakes.

Auction — Competitive bidding, usually on expired names with traffic, age, or backlinks.

Private sale — Buying directly from the current owner, usually after you approach them.

Registrar transfer — Moving a domain between registrars. Requires an auth code and usually a 60-day wait after registration or a previous transfer.

Push — Moving a domain between accounts at the same registrar. Instant, free, and the normal way sales complete when both parties use the same registrar.

Auth code / EPP code — The password that authorizes a transfer. Treat it like a key: whoever has it can move the domain.

Valuation and pricing

Comps (comparable sales) — What similar names have actually sold for. The closest thing to hard evidence in valuation.

NameBio — The main public database of reported domain sales. Your primary comps source.

Appraisal — An estimated value. Automated appraisals are algorithmic guesses and should be treated as a rough filter, never a price.

BIN (Buy It Now) — A fixed price a buyer can pay immediately. Converts substantially better than "make offer."

Make offer — No listed price; buyers submit bids. Maximizes ceiling, minimizes volume.

Reserve — The minimum you'll accept in an auction.

Wholesale vs retail — Wholesale is investor-to-investor pricing (fast, low). Retail is end-user pricing (slow, high). The spread is often 3–5×.

End user — A business or person who wants the name to actually use. Pays retail.

Reseller — Another investor. Pays wholesale.

Liquid domain — A name with enough consistent demand to sell quickly at a predictable price. Short .coms, common dictionary words. Most portfolios contain none.

STR (Sell-Through Rate) — Percentage of your portfolio that sells per year. The number that decides whether your portfolio is a business. Typically 1–2%.

ROI — Return on investment, but be specific: on acquisition cost alone, or including all renewals paid while holding? The second is the honest one.

Renewal cost / holding cost — What it costs per year to keep a name. The recurring liability that quietly determines profitability.

Premium domain — Overused. Sometimes means genuinely valuable; sometimes means the registry has set an elevated registration and renewal price. Check which one you're being sold.

Types of names

LLL / LLLL — Three- or four-letter domains. LLL.com are all registered and trade as a liquid asset class.

NNN / NNNN — Numeric domains. Strong demand in some Asian markets.

CVCV — Consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel, e.g. Bavo.com. Pronounceable, brandable, liquid.

Brandable — An invented or evocative name with no literal meaning: Zappos, Kajabi. Sold on sound and feel.

Keyword domain — Contains terms people search: DenverPlumbing.com. Value comes from obvious commercial intent.

Geo domain — Tied to a place: AustinRoofing.com. A reliable niche because the buyer pool is identifiable.

Exact Match Domain (EMD) — Matches a search query precisely. Far less of an SEO advantage than it was pre-2012, but still carries marketing value.

Typo domain — A misspelling of an existing brand. Legally dangerous and a fast route to a dispute.

Aged domain — Registered long ago. Age alone is weakly correlated with value; history and backlinks matter more.

Selling and platforms

Afternic — GoDaddy-owned marketplace with wide distribution across registrar search results. Dan.com merged into it and closed in October 2024.

Sedo — Long-established marketplace and auction platform, strong in Europe.

Atom — Formerly Squadhelp, rebranded in 2024. Curated brandable marketplace with a submission review process.

Landing page / for-sale page — A page on the domain itself saying it's available. Free, and it converts the traffic you already have.

Parking — Pointing a domain at ad-supported pages for revenue. For most portfolios, negligible income.

Lander — Industry shorthand for a landing page.

Escrow — A neutral third party holding funds until the domain transfers. The standard way to complete a sale safely.

Lease to own (LTO) — Buyer pays monthly until the price is met, taking ownership at the end. Closes deals a lump sum can't.

Broker — Someone who sells on your behalf for a commission, typically on higher-value names.

Outbound / outreach — Contacting likely buyers directly rather than waiting. Where most sub-$5k sales originate.

Inbound — An inquiry that arrives without you doing anything.

Tire kicker — An inquirer with no real intent or budget. Common, and manageable with a stated price.

Legal and risk

UDRP — Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. The arbitration process a trademark holder uses to try to take a domain from you. Faster and cheaper than court, and a real risk if you register brand-adjacent names.

Cybersquatting — Registering a domain in bad faith to profit from someone else's trademark. Illegal, and the thing UDRP exists to address.

Reverse domain hijacking (RDNH) — A trademark holder abusing UDRP to grab a domain they have no legitimate claim to. It's a formal finding a panel can make.

Trademark — A protected commercial identifier. Registering domains matching one you don't own invites a dispute.

Registrar lock — A status preventing transfers. Normal and protective; unlock it only when completing a sale.

60-day lock — ICANN's mandatory hold on transfers after registration or a change of registrant. Plan around it — it delays sales.

Industry shorthand

Domainer — Someone who invests in domains.

Portfolio — Everything you own.

Drop list — Names about to become available.

Renewal season — Whenever a large batch of your names comes up, and the moment portfolio economics get decided.

NamePros / DNForum — The main community forums.

DNJournal — Publishes weekly reported sales, the industry's public record of the high end.

Sales report — Published lists of recent sales. Remember they're a biased sample: large sales get reported, small ones and non-sales don't.

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If a term isn't here and you hit it in the wild, it's worth asking rather than guessing — a surprising amount of domaining jargon is used loosely, and "premium" in particular means about four different things depending on who's saying it.