Jordan Fried Explores the World of Digital Real Estate

On an internet with over 1.1 billion websites, branding has the ability to make or break success, with sites like Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon reaching millions of users daily from memorable domain names alone. As we enter an era dominated by the digital economy, online assets like domain names, non-fungible tokens, and mobile apps are becoming increasingly valuable, with sites like GoDaddy running daily auctions on the hottest public domains.

Likening these assets to digital real estate, internet savants like self-proclaimed blockchain evangelist Jordan Fried have turned domain acquisition into a fully fledged passion project with potentially unlimited returns on investment.

“A dot-com domain name feels like owning a piece of Manhattan,” as he describes it.

“Then, developing a domain and turning it into a business is kind of like developing a condo on top of a really great piece of land. So I’ve actually never sold a domain name. I just buy domain names and then I hold them until I figure out what to do with them. And these things just typically go up in value.”

While the domain name sales industry topped $9.5 billion in the United States in 2023, with 33,000 new domains registered each day, Jordan Fried believes that breaking into the market requires a scientific methodology similar to what has come to define the real estate industry.

Diving Into the Domain: What Is Digital Real Estate?

As a global public network, the internet isn’t owned like traditional real estate, but digital assets like domain names offer a unique opportunity to control and manage a piece of the World Wide Web. There’s a reason why business magnates like Elon Musk have admitted to spending 10 years and $10 million chasing down a domain name. These short and memorable addresses hold the key to search engine optimization, housing a website’s online location and serving as a launching point for businesses and investments.

As the head of GoDaddy corporate domains, Phil Lodico, writes in Forbes, “Domains are often an afterthought in marketing campaigns. However, consider that domains are often how consumers find your product or service, learn about it, contact you about it, and even buy it. Assuming you’re in business to make money, what could be more important than that?”

Choosing a Domain Name

While thousands of domain names are publicly auctioned daily, choosing the perfect one can often take years of foresight. As an avid collector with a multimillion-dollar portfolio, Fried cautions that a brandable domain name won’t come cheap or easy.

Top-level dot-com names have the largest investment potential, especially when they’re short and generic words that can be molded into a range of uses.

Unfortunately, the best domains have typically been registered for years. But like all great investments, remaining patient and diligent on the hunt can lead to major payoff.

“I’m very bullish on really brandable one-word domain names,” Fried explains.

“I think they’re tremendous, especially when they’re generic. They’re kind of blue oceans. You can really do anything with a puertorico.com — you can do a magazine, you can start a tourism business, you can do lead generation. I love blank canvases that have unrestricted opportunities.”

With a generic domain name, Fried finds himself with the ability to reverse-engineer business opportunities, building brands around the desires of the digital age that he can satisfy while bringing attention to his websites.

“This is kind of an investment thesis and a reverse order in that I think that brands have become much more valuable online.”

In the case of puertorico.com, after acquiring the site from the original owner, Fried saw its traffic and search engine optimization rival the country’s official tourism board, and quickly tapped into Google Trends to provide the information that people were looking for that the official government was failing to promote — local answers to tourist questions like things to do, places to stay, and where to eat.

“I think it just really highlights an entrepreneur will always solve the problem where a government just inefficiently spends capital to do it,” Fried proclaims.

As a resident of Puerto Rico, Fried takes great pride in owning the flagship puertorico.com domain name and using it to champion the island as a lush territory ideal for investment and worthy of U.S. statehood.

“Can I do something that’s both good for Puerto Rico but also generate a profit at the same time?” he asks. “Can I promote the island, do the island a service, while also generating a profit? That would be a really great win-win, and I think we’re doing a pretty good job at that so far.”

Jordan Fried: Following the Trends

Google Trends can also be a powerful tool for discerning what domain names will be bankable. In 2020, when cryptocurrency was starting to skyrocket, Fried used this knowledge to purchase nft.com for $2 million. The website would later become the center of the non-fungible token craze that had everyone from TikTok influencers to pop star Justin Bieber shelling out millions for exclusive renderings of what were called “Bored Apes.”

“We’ve created an nft.com marketplace, a profile-based marketplace, where whether you’re a collector of NFTs or whether you’re an NFT creator, you will have a profile, place to sell NFTs if you want to sell them, or a place to just show off to your friends that you bought a $1 million photo of a rock. We hope to be ground zero, the center of the NFT world. And of course, we will be with nft.com,” Fried shared in a 2021 interview with The Pavlovic Today.

While NFT enthusiasm has since died down, Jordan Fried has long-term plans for the site and doesn’t plan on parting with it or any of his domain names anytime soon. As with physical real estate, domain names tend to appreciate over time, making them a worthwhile investment for anyone interested in the digital economy.

“I think they’re great assets, they’re hopefully things I’ll own forever,” Fried says. “For me, these are legacy things, so yeah, I’ve got a pretty exciting domain portfolio.”