Recently, I was browsing Reddit’s r/Domains and reading the umpteenth post asking how much everyone thought a particular .com domain was worth. The owner had bought it for $20. The first syllable was spelled differently than the common spelling, and the second syllable reminded me of a product that had its heyday in the 1950s. It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting it for more than $20, which is why this person was able to get it in the first place.
Separately, over on YouTube, there were a lot of videos at the end of 2025 talking about how the sneaker resale market is over. For several years prior—particularly during the height of COVID and stimulus checks—people were building “businesses” on buying out new releases at retail and marking them up substantially for resale in their own stores or garages. For a time, the market would bear it, and they’d walk away with a profit. All for the dubiously valuable activity of getting in between sneaker manufacturers and the end customer. For some reason, supply has now exceeded demand, customers aren’t paying over list price anymore, and these shoe hustlers are folding. No one will miss them.
Neither of these are new phenomena, of course. Ticket scalping has been around since at least the 1850s, when speculators bought up tickets to Jenny Lind’s American concert tour and resold them at double the face value. By the 1860s, tickets that cost $5 were going for $50 on the black market. Boston enacted anti-scalping laws as early as 1873, and here we are 150 years later, still dealing with the same behavior—just with better technology behind it.
The Problem with Zero-Value Middlemen
Every dollar that a no-value-add middleman extracts from the market is a detriment to it. The speculator who bought that domain for $20 didn’t improve it. The sneaker reseller didn’t design anything. The ticket scalper didn’t put on the show. They just got in the way of a transaction that would have happened anyway—and took a cut for the privilege.
I understand the counterargument: they’re providing liquidity, matching buyers with sellers, taking on risk. But that’s not what’s happening here. These aren’t market makers facilitating efficient price discovery. They’re opportunists exploiting artificial scarcity or information asymmetry to extract rent from people who actually want to use the thing being sold.
My Advice to Consumers
Just avoid them.
Don’t buy flipped domains. Pick a new one for around $12-15 and bring your own meaning to it over time, like I’m doing with this blog. The days of getting single dictionary words like Voice.com (which sold for $30 million in 2019) or Diamond.com (which went from $150,000 in 1999 to $7.5 million in 2006) are long gone. Those sales happened because those words had inherent value. A misspelled compound word that someone registered on a whim does not.
Don’t buy flipped shoes. If you can’t get the pair you want at list price from a reputable retailer, just live without them. I haven’t seen a shoe yet that I couldn’t live without, and frankly, my Jordan 1s aren’t half as comfortable as any shoe designed this century.
Definitely don’t buy cars that have been artificially marked up above MSRP by the local dealership. It’s OK not to have the new, exclusive thing, especially if it can’t currently be had at a fair price.
My Advice to Speculators
Just stop it.
Then there was another post on r/Domains from someone “new to domaining” asking what matters most when choosing a domain—brandability, length, keywords, trends, or resale potential? They wanted to know what beginner mistakes to avoid.
Here’s my answer: the beginner mistake is thinking this is a viable business activity in the first place.
If you buy a domain speculatively, why would anyone buy it from you? When someone is starting a business or project, why would they pay you for a domain you’re squatting on when they could just call their business something else? This is exactly why we have so many nonsense words as brand names now. Spotify was a misheard word that the founders ran with because it was available. Hulu means “gourd” in Mandarin—they picked it because they could actually register it. Skype was originally “Skyper,” but that domain was taken, so they dropped the ‘r.’
You buying a domain for speculative purposes just takes one option off the board. The founders move on to the next made-up word, and your registration renewal fees keep accruing against an asset that isn’t appreciating.
The Broader Point
I’m not unsympathetic to people trying to make money. But there’s a difference between creating value and extracting it. Building a product, providing a service, solving a problem—that’s creating value. Buying something you have no intention of using, solely to sell it to someone who does, is extraction.
Markets work best when the people participating in them actually want the things being traded. Every flipper, squatter, and scalper makes those markets work a little bit worse.
I say this as someone blogging from a randomly-generated domain name. It cost me $12 to register, and I didn’t have to outbid anyone for it.
If you’re sitting on a portfolio of speculative domains wondering why no one’s buying, this might be why.