This article looks at 2021 high-value NameBio-listed
Many retail sales do not get listed on NameBio. Nevertheless, this should be a sufficiently large number to see the characteristics of
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.
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
In assigning type, I treated a name with an acronym as the acronym part being one word. For example,
The distribution is shown below. Single-word names represent 31.2% of the sample, with 2-word names responsible for another 26.6%.
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.
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.
Current Status
For each of the 369 names sold, I tried to visit the associated website. I divided results into the following categories:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
.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.
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 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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.