This URL still promises where the big money is moving. Keep it. Every year the factory reprints the same list: AI, crypto, green, health, finance, and then hyphenated leftovers in those words. Public registration volume is a different object; Verisign’s Domain Name Industry Brief counts names in the root, not your profit. Record sales on DNJournal are outliers, not a shopping list.
I’m Mostapha. I buy and sell names from Morocco. I have bought “the niche of the year” and renewed silence. Run the Domain Value Checker on the string, not on the blog category. FAQ. What actually determines value is still the letters and demand: five factors. Failed books are full of theme portfolios: why they fail.
A niche is a buyer you can name
Insurance is not a niche if you cannot name a carrier that would print the name. “AI” is not a niche if the string is best-ai-tools-online.com. Intent still has to match what a stranger hears: the metric will not save a mismatch. Generator brandables in this year’s fashion are still generator inventory: an AI brand is not automatically worth buying.
Do not register ten spellings in the same theme. They fight: two names, one business. Do not lease leftovers while you wait for the theme to “heat up”: that is not passive income.
Where money actually showed up
In sales you can read money showed up for names people already wanted to own short, sayable, trusted TLD, not for whoever published “top niches 2026” first. Comps: NameBio. Valuation habit: a range, not a guarantee. New extensions as a personality are a bet: not a replacement for a good name. Local ccTLDs are a market when the buyer is local: .ae when it is the product.
If you are about to bid because a thread said the vertical is hot: checker before you buy. If you already hold a pile of theme leftovers, the honest work is drop or cheap-sell, not another list.
Decision
- Throw away the niche article, including this URL’s old version.
- Score each name as if it had no category tag.
- Keep only strings you would buy with the trend switched off. Build a portfolio from that filter: a list that can grow is not ten AI hyphens.
Keep the Google row. The money did not move to a bullet list. It stayed with names a human already wanted.