The Oakland A’s famously competed on one of baseball’s smallest payrolls by using statistics to find players the market undervalued. Domain investing rewards the same discipline, and this is how we apply it.
- A Moneyball name is cheap to acquire, overlooked by the crowd, and backed by evidence of demand.
- Evidence beats gut feel: search trends, comparable sales, and taken extensions all count.
- Renewal fees are your payroll. Names that don’t earn a roster spot get cut.
The market prices the obvious
Short one-word .coms, three-letter names, and trendy keywords are the superstars of domaining. Everyone knows they’re valuable, so they rarely come cheap. Competing for them means paying full price in bidding wars against well-funded buyers.
The edge is elsewhere. It’s in names most investors skip because they don’t fit a familiar pattern, even though the data says a real business will want them.
The three tests
1. Cheap to acquire
Hand registration at the standard fee, a closeout, or a quiet expired auction. If you’re paying a retail price, you’re not getting a Moneyball deal. The lower your cost basis, the more mistakes your portfolio can absorb.
2. Overlooked by the crowd
The name doesn’t match the patterns investors chase, so nobody bids it up. Common examples are two-word names in a growing niche, invented words that are easy to say, and exact-match phrases for specific business services.
3. Backed by evidence
This is what separates scouting from guessing. Useful evidence includes:
- Taken extensions. If the .net, .co, and .io are registered by working businesses, those businesses are possible buyers for the .com.
- Search and ad demand. A rising trend or expensive ad clicks for the keyword point to commercial value.
- Comparable sales. Similar names that sold at meaningful prices, which you can research in sales databases like NameBio.
- Active businesses using the phrase in their company name, product name, or social handles.
The stats we scout
Every name we cover gets a NAR score, short for Name Above Replacement, on a 0 to 100 scale. It combines length, word quality, pronounceability, extension strength, commercial intent, and brandability, then adds a plain-English scouting note. You can run any name through it on the tools page.
The score is a starting point for judgment, not a replacement for it. A long exact-match name can score modestly and still be perfect for the one business that needs that phrase.
Where the approach goes wrong
Most cheap names are cheap for a reason. A few ways Moneyball investing fails:
- Chasing fads. Hype cycles leave behind thousands of names nobody wants once the trend fades.
- Ignoring holding costs. A $10 name held for eight years has cost you $80 before it sells, if it ever does.
- Trademark trouble. A name that’s “undervalued” because it’s close to a famous brand isn’t a bargain. It’s a legal risk. Read our trademark safety guide.
- Buying for yourself instead of a buyer. The question is never “do I like it?” It’s “who would pay for this, and why?”
Running your roster
A good general manager reviews the roster before every season. For a domain investor, that means reviewing names before renewal: which ones still have evidence behind them, which need a price change or outbound push, and which should be dropped. Our renew-or-drop guide and the Portfolio GM tool walk through it.
Want to see the approach in practice? Browse the names we own on the Farm Team, or get weekly picks in the Scouting Report newsletter.