We attempted to buy back Rantlister.com from HugeDomains.
It all started back in 2014.
I had given off ownership of the domain Rantlister.com to my good friend DrakeGTA. As Drake was prone to do, he forgot to renew the domain, and it was scooped up by a domain squatter, who wanted over $1,000 for the name. Good luck with that, buddy.
The List started and ended with Drake, so I guess there’s some poetry in that.
Flash forward to today.
The AJnet Organization’s primary goal for 2026 is to expand our operations beyond AJnet Magazine. One of our planned projects is to give the Rantlister Archives their own website. In addition to the articles already on AJnet Magazine, the goal is to create something that memorializes the now-dead 2000’s rant scene, and maybe even gives people a place to submit their own rants for publication (aside from AJnet Magazine, of course).
The best domain to use for this project would be, naturally, Rantlister.com.
The first thing I did was check the availability of the domain. Still owned by squatters. I was able to grab Rantlister.net, but man (or woman, we don’t discriminate here at AJnet), it would be great to have the original domain back for the project.
Since the domain had been sitting there for sale for over 10 years now and was pretty much useless for anything else, I figured the asking price couldn’t be that much, maybe at most a couple hundred dollars. So I looked into who was selling it and how much they wanted. My search led me to a company called HugeDomains.
Imagine my surprise when I discovered that HugeDomains wanted $1,195 for Rantlister.com. El oh el:
Now, I’m no rookie. I’ve heard of HugeDomains before. They’re one of the largest, if not THE largest, domain brokers in the world. They currently hold somewhere in the ballpark of 4 million domain names, and usually charge absurdly high prices for them.
Rantlister.com was no exception, apparently.
There was no way in hell that I’d be dropping that kind of cash on a domain name, especially one that was virtually worthless to anyone else. Realistically, what is anyone else going to do with a name like Rant Lister? After 10 years, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that there was some wiggle room with the price.
Before I made my counteroffer, I did a little research. According to people on Reddit, HugeDomains doesn’t really negotiate, and will give at most 5-10% off, if you’re lucky. Then again, according to people on Reddit, all white people are evil and communism works. We all know how out of touch with reality Redditors can be. So with that in mind, I decided to give it a shot and see how it played out.
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. I live by this mantra, it’s served me quite well over the years.
I like to start with a lowball or two. That way, when I start raising my offer, it looks like I’m making concessions. It’s one of the most basic negotiation tactics. Most seasoned businessmen will know what you’re trying to do, and they’ll usually push back. Depending on the response you get, you know what kind of person you’re dealing with as well as their experience level, and can adjust your tactics accordingly.
I opened up with an offer of $100. I was willing to go as high as $200 (which is still way more than what the domain is actually worth). Maybe even $300 if I thought that was the best they’d do. I didn’t tell them that, obviously:
And so, the game began:
I wasn’t expecting them to drop down from $1,195 to $100. That would be a discount of over 90%. Not even a total amateur would do that.
That said, I was expecting them to do just a little better than $100 off:
“Lowest price we are able to accept”, huh? I’ve heard that one before, and it’s rarely, if ever, true.
But what exactly made Rantlister.com worth over $1,000?
I have a marginal understanding of how domain name values are determined. A .com domain will generally be worth more than another extension (hence why we’re AngryJerk.net and not AngryJerk.com). Then there’s the length of the name and the number of words in the domain to consider. Rant Lister is two words, and relatively short, which also increases the value. Individually, “Rant” and “Lister” are also fairly decent keywords, adding to the value further.
Where this all falls flat on its face is the fact that these two keywords put together are rather useless for any other purpose besides what the original Rantlister was. Nobody is going to be compiling a list of rants in 2026. If you need proof, look no further than the fact that nobody has bought the domain in the 11-12 years that it’s been for sale.
When looking into negotiating with HugeDomains, I noticed that many people were using emotional appeals (“This domain means a lot to me”, “It’s for my grandfather’s business”, etc). Nobody cares about this stuff in the business world. Prices are set by cold hard facts, not emotional begging. So when making my counteroffer to their counteroffer, I kept it from a business perspective, explaining why I felt it made financial sense to sell me the domain for less.
I was also genuinely interested to know how HugeDomains appraises their domains. So I asked them about it, while making my case about why they should lower the price of the domain using basic facts:
Now, on one hand you could argue that, by going through the hassle of explaining why the domain isn’t worth what they’re asking, I’m showing them that it does have value.
The thing is though, I’m almost certainly right when I said that they probably didn’t get any other offers for it. If true, this would reaffirm everything I said in my reply. Ideally, their salesperson would see that I’m right, and come down significantly on their asking price. Still not to $100, obviously. But maybe down to $500-600.
Their reply explained everything:
“Proprietary algorithm”. This translates to “We’re using an AI with skewed metrics to pull these prices out of our ass.”
This makes sense, because there is no way a team of experienced domain salespeople would be coming to such ridiculously high figures. What’s most likely going on here is they have a team of rookies using AI to set prices based on criteria that only takes the basics into account and doesn’t evaluate the bigger picture. Their “internal review team” is probably told not to question the AI’s assessments too much. The AI sees that Rantlister.com has two short keywords, and it values it as a top-level domain.
This is the real problem with using AI to replace human workers. It uses information to come up with content, in this case prices. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t really understand the meaning of that content or the reasoning behind the answers it gives. HugeDomains’s AI algorithm takes the parameters and blindly applies them without understanding why those parameters are important. Hence, you have Rantlister.com valued at over $1,000 because the AI sees two simple keywords, when really it’s barely worth over $20 because combining the two keywords renders them virtually useless. An actual human domain appraiser would have figured this out pretty quickly, and lowered the price significantly from here.
As predicted, their “lowest price” wasn’t really their lowest price. But again, all they did was knock a measley $100 off, bringing my total savings to $200 off of $1,195, or basically jack shit.
At this point, I had come to realize that HugeDomains probably wasn’t going to budge. Doing the project on Rantlister.net would work just as well, so failure to acquire the .com version didn’t really matter all that much. From here, I began to treat it less like a serious negotiation and more like a game. How low could I get them to actually go? How long could I drag this out before they shut negotiations down?
Gmail has an AI autodraft feature. I’d never actually use this when replying to an email, but sometimes I like to see what it comes up with. In this case, it summed up my thoughts exactly:
It’s kind of scary how close this managed to come to capturing the tone that I use when I’m not worried about being professional. No doubt it’s scanned the 15+ years of old emails in my inbox to come up with this snarky reply.
As badly as I wanted to hit Jamilla with a fistful of snark, instead I chose to keep my response professional, while still not missing the opportunity to take subtle potshots at HugeDomains staff and their business practices:
This email was a very polite and professional way of saying “Your employees are idiots if they think that this domain is worth that much, here’s why.” Then, in response to their pitiful “discounts”, I gave an equally pitiful “concession” by upping my asking price by $25. Though technically, increasing my offer by 25% is still better than them decreasing theirs by around 20%.
The game promptly ended here, with Jamilla sending her reply within five minutes:
Oh well, you win some, you lose some.
Like I said, it doesn’t really matter what domain I use. For the purposes of this project, .com vs .net is negligible. Anyone looking for Rantlister will find the archive easily enough at Rantlister.net.
Meanwhile, HugeDomains will continue to sit on Rantlister.com for another ten years, when they’ll either put it up for auction or simply drop it. Then I’ll get it back for cheap.
I’m still skeptical that HugeDomains is making any money though. With these prices, there’s no way they’re selling enough domains to come out ahead. I can’t help but wonder if maybe HugeDomains is actually some kind of money laundering operation.
Perhaps they require further investigation in a future article.
I was originally going to end the article here, but a week after this exchange, HugeDomains sent me another email, with an “extended offer”:
I don’t know whether I should laugh or be insulted.
What kind of company sends an extended offer after repeatedly being told that their asking price was way too high and refusing to come down more than $200?
Seeing as I was no longer concerned about acquiring the domain, I took off the mask of professionalism and went from Adam Baker to Angry_Jerk:
Jamilla, like most women, insisted on having the last word:
Unfortunately for Jamilla, I studied at Compton University under Dr. Andre Young, and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Master’s in Bitchology. Bitches ain’t shit, and ain’t no bitch getting the last word on me, yo:
Seriously, what the hell are they thinking? Did they genuinely think that I was going to acquiesce here and just accept their ludicrously high price for this worthless domain name? Get bent, HugeDomains. Next unsolicited email from your company will net you a $1,000 invoice for wasting my damn time.
Anyway, for those interested, you can track our progress on the Rantlister archival/revival at Rantlister.net. There’s still a lot of work to be done, but we’re hoping to have the site fully ready by the end of March, if not sooner.
More from Angry_Jerk
Don't miss any new posts. Join AJnet Magazine's mailing list and receive updates straight to your inbox once a week!