How many domains do you own?

“I buy domains the way other women buy shoes.” A friend of mine wrote this in a private Facebook group recently. It was a comment on a thread about… I forget. Honestly, once this comment was made, the thread became about our approaches to buying domains. There were quite a few of us who admitted to a tendency to buy domains… casually. Or rather, we all admitted to buying domains that were sitting in wait for the right project.

I bought my first domain nearly 15 years ago. I registered my name. (That is one of the few times I acted early enough to obtain my full name for an online ID of any kind.) Of course, I got the .com .org and .net. I have never done anything with those addresses, other than renew them every year.

Looking back, I know what the pattern of purchase became. I would think of a great web project (a content website, a future community, a magazine concept) and the first thing I’d do, in real-time, was go see if the name was available. And I’d go ahead and grab it. After all, it was just $10… okay, $30 since I would get the .net and .org too (even knowing I would never use them). And some of those purchases were more about making sure no one else could get that address.

Fast forward ten years, and a few “brilliant” ideas, and you can guess that the purchases have added up. I kept renewing them because the projects will get done at some point in the future. Or because the names are good and I can sell them later. Or because I know that there’s going to be a perfect site for it next year because of the way the market is going. Or because I just haven’t finished with the concept.

I looked up, counted out, and realized that if I renewed one domain a week, I’d barely get all of them done in one year. I took a deep breath and promised to stop buying them.

I lied.

I now own… well, more than 50 but not quite 100. I’ve been really good about actually converting some of them into real projects (not all, but some). I even sold a few (as I knew I would).

I have stopped. Really, I did.

How many domains do you own?

Photo by Ken Banks at http://www.flickr.com/photos/47778386@N00/323189970/.