Dynadot

analysis The 2021 High-Value .COM Sales

NameSilo
This article looks at 2021 high-value NameBio-listed .com domain name sales. I only included sales with prices of $25,000 or more. There were 369 sales, totalling $62.1 million in total dollar volume.

Many retail sales do not get listed on NameBio. Nevertheless, this should be a sufficiently large number to see the characteristics of .com domain names that sell for high prices. There may be a few additions or deletions since the time I performed this analysis. You can access the current full list of 2021 .com sales of $25,000 or more at this NameBio link.

Price Breakdown

The average sales price of domains in the dataset was $168,200. Keep in mind that only sales of $25,000 plus are in the analysis.

As the full price distribution below indicates, almost half of the sales were below $50,000.
ImagePriceDistribution.png

It was a banner year for high-value sales, with 14 sales of one million dollars or more. These 14 sales accounted for $27.6 million of the $62.1 million total dollar volume.

Type of Names

So what type of .com domain names sell at these high prices? I went through the list by hand, assigning each name into one of the following categories:
  • short – names that were of length 2 or 3 letters and were not a recognized word.
  • 1-word – single-word domains in any language.
  • 2-word
  • 3-word
  • name – a first or last name (but not a place name)
  • place – name of a country, city, region, etc. or name derived from a place name.
  • numeric – only contains numbers.
  • alphanumeric – a mix with both letters and numbers.
  • brandable – while many names can be used for a brand, I reserved this for creative spelling, merged words, made-up words, etc.
In a few cases I probably incorrectly categorized a non-English word that I did not recognize as a brandable.

In assigning type, I treated a name with an acronym as the acronym part being one word. For example, SEOtool was designated a 2-word name.

The distribution is shown below. Single-word names represent 31.2% of the sample, with 2-word names responsible for another 26.6%.
ImageType.png

However, the high-end is even more dominated by single-word domains, accounting for $37.8 million of the $62.1million total.

While there were fewer short names than 2-word, short names had a sales dollar volume of about $9.5 million compared to just over $6.6 million for 2-word domain names.

Domain Length

These high-value sales ranged in length from 2 to 23 characters, with an average length of 7.2 characters. The number of sales with each domain length is shown below.
ImageLengthNumbers.png

As well as the number of sales at a certain length, it is also important to know how the price varies with length. The average price at each length is shown below. Note that the approximately one million dollar average price for 2-letter names is well off the scale of the graph.
ImageLengthAveragePrice.png

Current Status

For each of the 369 names sold, I tried to visit the associated website. I divided results into the following categories:
  • developed – an operational web site. I did not count ‘coming soon’ or single title page sites as developed, but did count sites that were relatively lightly developed.
  • redirected – the domain directs to a developed site on some other domain name.
  • for sale or parked – in some cases it is difficult to determine if sites using monetized parking are for sale, so I combined the two.
  • unused – there is no site, or simply a coming soon page.
ImageUseCOM2021-25k.png

About 41% of the domain names are developed, with another 5% used in redirection.

The proportion of developed sites was higher for the high-value sales, with 12 of the top 20 sales developed or used in redirection.

Several of the redirections were from .io domain names, although more were from other .com names.

It is somewhat surprising to see that more than a quarter of the sites are not in use, but keep in mind I counted coming-soon sites in this category.

Sales Venue

A surprising number of the sites were quickly listed for sale again. These were probably in most cases domain investor acquisitions, although it is possible the buyer had a change of plans.

I decided to take a look at sales venue to try to get a handle on how common this was. I show below a distribution of venues with two or more sales in the dataset. There were many sellers with one listed sale, and these are included in the other category.
ImageVenue.png

Many sales are at auction venues commonly used by domain investors.

Sectors

For each developed site, after visiting the site, I recorded a short term representing the type of site, for example crypto or real estate. I then created a word map of these terms using WordCloud Generator.

ImageWordCLoud.png


Keep in mind this is based only on the currently developed sites, not the entire sales list.

There was a wide range of sectors represented, with crypto, eCommerce, payment systems, travel, real estate and entertainment among the sectors with multiple sales.

Prefixes, Suffixes and Word Forms

I looked at specific prefixes and suffixes. Three of the names began with word the.

The suffix ed was in 3 of the high-value sales, while 10 ended in ing.

There were 32 plural names in the list.

Only two of the sales had hyphens, although one of those had two hyphens.

The word meta was in 4 sales, while the acronym NFT was found in 7 sales.

Registered Extensions

Number of registered extensions is a common filter used by many investors.

I used dotDB to check the number of extensions the exact sale name was registered in for all 369 sales. The range was 1 to 649 registered TLDs. The most-registered term was NFT.

Terms in the highest-value sales tended to be registered in many TLDs, top level domains. Only 2 of the top-25 sales were not registered in at least 100 other extensions, and those two were registered in more than 75 each. The graph below is a plot of selling price versus number of registered TLDs.
ImageScatterPriceTLDs.png

In only one case did a name sell for more than $500,000 without being registered in at least 100 TLDs.

I performed a linear regression, which did support that higher sales prices correlated with more registered extensions, although the R2 value was just 0.389, so not a terribly strong correlation.

There were a handful of sales, mainly below $50,000, that sold despite a small number of other extensions registered. It is likely that some of the other extensions were registered in response to the sale, and the true number at time of sale would be less.

What Month Is Best?

I wondered if high-value sales were clustered in certain months, obtaining the results shown below.
ImageMonthly.png


Sincere thanks to NameBIo, the source of the data analyzed for this report, and to all the investors who report their sales data to NameBio.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Really appreciate ...Meta and NFT still on fire
 
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Such Article's backed by Detailed Stats, give a clear deep insight into Domain Industry business and much needed direction for domain investor's.
Thank You For Another Great Article.
 
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Dan sucks and they don't know why, We tell them what is wrong, what to do, they still resist and ignore. It is like they want external agents visit dan and lowball when there is a serious buyer somewhere. Or make sure people park at Dan and not be able to sell domains, and waste their time and money. What a business model.
 
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What is the difference between Afternic and Godaddy here? Are Godaddy sales expired auctions, meaning they grab expired domains of their users and sell , no money for their owners?
 
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Nice work Bob. Looks like I report more of my sales than any other investor or broker.
 
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Based on your report, does it mean that Sedo is one of the best place to sell our domains, right?
Thanks for this great insight.
 
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@Bob Hawkes you are great, thanks for all the hard work and for sharing with the domaining community.
 
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What is the difference between Afternic and Godaddy here? Are Godaddy sales expired auctions
I wanted to clarify venue and NameBio. No Afternic sales are reported to NameBio by Afternic (currently and for past number of years). When we see a sale marked Afternic, it means the seller (or buyer) reported the sale to NameBio and the name sold at Afternic.

When sales are individually reported to NameBio the reporter can either report the sale as the platform the deal closed at or their own name/site/brand. I think most reporters do the latter.

As far as I know, GoDaddy auctions are reported automatically, but not fixed price sales at GoDaddy. So sales that are called GoDaddy are probably some mix of auctions and some number of private sales that closed at GoDaddy. I did not try to separate the two.

At Dan sales are not automatically reported to NameBio. A few months ago they did make a setting that can be set to report sales pubicly, but the default is to not report. So the few sales reported as Dan were either since that and opted in, or individually reported sales that closed at Dan.

The important thing is the number of sales shown for Afternic and Dan are not the total number at those venues. Those numbers are unknown.
does it mean that Sedo is one of the best place to sell our domains
No. Sedo report all sales over $2000, unless the buyer or seller pay an additional fee for keeping the sale private. As a result the Sedo number is more or less complete in this price category, whereas most sales at Dan and Afternic, and the brandable places, are not reported. One cannot conclude the relative efficiency of venues from NameBio data.

So why did I include it? Since a rather large number of these major sales were listed for sale again, it seems investors are buying at $25,000 plus range. I was interested in how many sales were at sites like GoDaddy auctions, DropCatch and NameJet, and it turns out a lot.

It is also interesting to see how many sales in this price range some of the big name brokers and investors had. Of course some report sales and some don't. For example MediaOptions certainly had many sales, but only one was reported on NameBio for the parameters of this study.

By the way I put together the numbers for the two Booth brothers, even though they were separately reported in NameBio.

Thank you for your questions and comments.

Bob
 
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Looks like I report more of my sales than any other investor or broker.
Thanks for joining discussion Braden, congratulations on your sales, and thank you for reporting many of your sales to NameBio and therefore providing valuable information to help validate the worth of domain names. Also thanks for the many ways you help others in the field.

Best wishes for continuing success in 2022.

Bob
 
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Very immersing fact that around 60% of the domains are not developed.
I believe this rate will be reduced with the time passing but also a 20% is a high % to me.
 
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Extremely informative article. Thanks.
 
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Great post again Bob. As a person who has a few 5Ls and no 4Ls it's nice to see that, in some respects, the former outperforms the latter.
 
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Thank you for the information!
 
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amazing article thanks for sharing :) (y)
 
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What an exceptional job you've done. Sincere thanks for a mini-education. Took over an hour to study in depth, and see how much more there is to learn. Really exceptional. Best of energy to you.
 
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Thank you very much @Bob Hawkes !

Very informative.

I've got a question:

Almost everyone here suggests listing domains on Afternic + Sedo + DAN's landers.

I see that most of the sales come from GoDaddy also and quite a few from NameJet.

If my domains are listed on Afternic they are also available to purchase directly from GoDaddy or should I list them there as well? Thanks!
 
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Thanks for your comments and questions.
I see that most of the sales come from GoDaddy also and quite a few from NameJet.
Remember that NameBio only have reports from certain venues. In general Afternic sales and Dan sale as well as sales from all the brandable marketplaces. So be careful in concluding where names are more likely to sell based on that.
If my domains are listed on Afternic they are also available to purchase directly from GoDaddy or should I list them there as well? Thanks!
It used to be people argued to list separately, but my understanding is that Afternic automatically get listed at GD. I have heard a few people on podcasts say to list separately on both - if I am missing something please chime in someone.

The NS5/6 Afternic lander is now simply brand with GoDaddy (an advantage). It seems the integration is tighter.

Bob
 
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Thanks for your comments and questions.

Remember that NameBio only have reports from certain venues. In general Afternic sales and Dan sale as well as sales from all the brandable marketplaces. So be careful in concluding where names are more likely to sell based on that.

It used to be people argued to list separately, but my understanding is that Afternic automatically get listed at GD. I have heard a few people on podcasts say to list separately on both - if I am missing something please chime in someone.

The NS5/6 Afternic lander is now simply brand with GoDaddy (an advantage). It seems the integration is tighter.

Bob
Thanks again Bob!
 
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