How Many Domains Should You Actually Own?

There's a real disagreement in domaining about portfolio size, and both sides have a point. Working through it properly is more useful than picking a number.

The case for going big

At a 1–2% annual sell-through rate, portfolio size is what converts a low probability into a reliable outcome.

• 50 names at 1.5% is roughly one sale every 16 months. That's not a business, it's a hobby with occasional good news.
• 250 names is about four sales a year. Enough to see a pattern.
• 1,000 names is around fifteen. Now you have something predictable enough to plan around.

The returns are also power-law distributed: most names produce nothing and a small number produce everything. You cannot know in advance which ones. More names means more chances to be holding the one that a funded company suddenly needs.

This is why my own target moved. I started out planning to buy 100 names, got there, and concluded it wasn't enough — you simply don't get enough draws. My revised target is 500 to 1,000 good names.

The case against

Now the arithmetic that cuts the other way.

Every name is $12 a year, forever, whether or not anything happens:

| Portfolio | Annual renewals | Sales needed at $1,500 net | | --- | --- | --- | | 100 | $1,200 | 0.8/yr | | 500 | $6,000 | 4/yr | | 1,000 | $12,000 | 8/yr | | 2,000 | $24,000 | 16/yr |

At 1.5% sell-through, a 1,000-name portfolio produces about 15 sales — comfortably above the 8 needed. If your average net sale is $1,500.

That's the load-bearing assumption, and it's where large portfolios usually fail. Average sale price for undifferentiated hand-registered names is frequently well below $1,500. At a $600 average, that same portfolio needs 20 sales to break even and produces 15. You'd be losing money at scale, efficiently.

Resolving it

The two arguments aren't actually in conflict, because they're about different things.

Size multiplies whatever your name quality already is. A thousand good names is a business. A thousand mediocre names is a $12,000 annual subscription to disappointment. Scaling a portfolio before you know your own numbers just scales the mistake.

The qualifier in my own target matters more than the number: 500 to 1,000 names that I think are good, and that have real utility to an identifiable buyer. Not 1,000 names. That distinction is the whole thing.

A staged approach

Stage 1 — Learning (0–100 names, year 1). Cheap enough that being wrong doesn't hurt. Goal isn't profit, it's finding out whether your eye for names is any good. Expect no sales. Cost: under $1,500.

Stage 2 — Calibrating (100–300 names, years 2–3). Enough draws that sales start happening. This is where you learn your real numbers. Cost: $1,200–$3,600/year.

Stage 3 — Scaling (300–1,000 names, years 3+). Only once stage 2 produced sales at prices that clear renewals. Now size genuinely compounds. Cost: $3,600–$12,000/year.

Stage 4 — Pruning (ongoing). At any size, renewal season should remove names. A portfolio that only grows is a portfolio nobody is evaluating.

Where I actually am

About 250 names, roughly 1.8% sell-through, five sales to date. Renewals run around $3,000 a year.

That's mid-stage-2 heading into stage 3, and being honest about it: my sell-through matches the base rate, but I don't yet have enough sales history to state a confident average net. The three 2026 sales netted $2,434.50, $1,167.30, and a lease paying out over four years. That's encouraging but it's three data points.

So the plan is to keep growing toward 500 while continuing to prune — and to keep checking whether the average holds as the portfolio gets bigger. If it drops, the answer isn't more names.

The number that actually matters

Not portfolio size. This:

average net sale price × sell-through rate > renewal cost per name

At a $12 renewal and 1.5% sell-through, your average net sale has to clear $800. If it does, more names is straightforwardly better. If it doesn't, more names makes the loss bigger — and every additional name is a decision to keep losing at scale.

Work out which side of that line you're on before you decide how big to go. Most people never calculate it, which is why so many large portfolios quietly bleed for years.