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analysis A Look At Domain Names Ending In ‘ING’

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Generally when we add a suffix to a term, the value of the domain name goes down - e.g. Example.com would be worth more than Exampled.com or Exampler.com for most terms’. But is that always true?

This article looks in particular at words with the suffix ‘ing’. Do some high-value domain terms end in ‘ing’? The answer is yes.

Sales Dollar Volume Names Ending ING

I first did a simple search, over all time, and all extensions, for names ending in ‘ing’. I was surprised that there were over 32,000 sales on NameBio with a total sales dollar volume of about $60 million.

Now not all of those names have ‘ing’ as a suffix. For example, the $1 million ring.com sale is on the list, as would spring.net that sold last month. But there are many high-value sales of terms that truly end with ‘ing’ as a suffix. You can use the NameBio As A Suffix to remove some of the extraneous ‘ing’ endings.

The Million Dollar Sales

There were 5 sales of genuine ‘ing’ ending names at prices above $1 million. In order of price, they are marketing, gambling, investing, dating, and flying, all in .com.

The top sale was marketing.com, that sold in 2021 for $2.5 million by GetYourDomain.

The $500,000 Plus Sales

Another 6 .com names sold between $500,000 and $999,999. In order of price, nursing, booking, snoring, sleeping, housing and wrestling. Kate Buckley brokered the pair of snoring and sleeping names.

The names cooking, greeting and recycling sold just a bit lower.

Top ‘ING’ + Country Code Sales

There were 6 country code names ending in ‘ing’ listed on NameBio with sale prices of $75,000 plus. In order, they are: webhosting.co.uk, shopping.eu, horseracing.co.uk, gaming.io, bling.io and webhosting.de, bling not truly in the category.

Top New Extension Sales Ending in ‘ING’

There was only one huge new extension sale ending in ‘ing’, betting.online sold for $400,000 in 2023. The next highest was happening.xyz for $40,000 in 2022.

What Is A Gerund?

A word with the structure verb+ing can be either a present participle or a gerund.

Let’s look first at gerunds. Although a gerund is made from a verb, it normally functions as a noun (and often as other things as well). For example, ‘invest’ is a verb while ‘investing’ is a gerund. Investing is used as a noun, for example in the sentence ‘Investing can be difficult.’

So that helps explain why gerunds, that always end in ‘ing’, often have high value, since generally nouns are valued more than adjectives or adverbs and often a bit more than verbs. Although the gerund includes a vowel, it is a noun.

But just because a gerund can be a noun, does not mean that is the only way it can be used. For example, when we say ‘This investing cycle is challenging,’ the word ‘investing’ is acting as an adjective. The word ‘interesting’ is an adjective when used as ‘I thought this was going to be an interesting article.’

If you want to know more about the various ways gerunds are used, I suggest this academic guide from Walden University. It also covers ‘ing’ words that are used as past participles.

Now you might be saying, wait a minute, domain is not a verb, so ‘domaining’ is not a gerund. That is correct, not all words ending in ‘ing’ are gerunds or past participles.

Many words can be both a noun and a verb. Any online dictionary, such as Merriam-Webster will give you the multiple meanings of a word, and whether that meaning has the word as a noun, verb, adjective, etc.

Want to know more on this? I highly recommend the article The many ways ‘-ing’ makes a word..

Relative Use of Gerund and Related Verb in Business Names

This is not a comprehensive study by any means, but I used OpenCorporates to see whether the gerund or the base verb is used more frequently. Here is what I found:
  • The term ‘adapting’ is in 59 listings, while ‘adapt’ in far more, 2,071.
  • The gerund ‘gambling’ appears in 460 active listings, while ‘gamble’ appears in 1894 listings.
  • The gerund ‘investing’ appears in 16,650 active listings, while verb ‘invest’ in 260,286. Both are very popular, but again the base verb is preferred by a wide margin.
  • The word ‘rating’ appears in 864 listings, while ‘rate’ in 4,688.
  • The word ‘sleeping’ is in 1,625 active OpenCorporates listings, while ‘sleep’ in 12,586.
If these few examples are representative, it appears that most of the time the verb form will be used significantly more often than the matching gerund in business names. That would mean that the verb would generally have more value as a domain name, but there are exceptions, and as we saw earlier gerund forms can sell for high prices. Each domain name is unique with many factors playing a role in valuation.

Frequency in Google Search Results

I used Google quotation mark searches, with the Tools button, to look at the number of search results for some pairs:
  • The verb ‘adapt’ search produced 771 million results, while the gerund ‘adapting’ had 426 million.
  • ‘Invest’ has 905 million results, and ‘investing’ 802 million.
  • ‘Rate’ has 3.98 billion results, and ‘rating’ 2.58 billion.
  • ‘Sleep’ has 1.72 billion results, and ‘sleeping’ 894 million.
In these few cases, there were roughly comparable numbers of search results, although usually the verb appears more frequently than the gerund.

There Is A .ing Domain Extension

Late in 2023, Google released the .ing domain extension into general availability. According to nTLDstats there are currently just under 22,000 names in the zonefile. While the cost is only about $11 per year at a number of registrars, the registry made most of the valuable terms fairly steep registry premium renewals. NameBio does not show any sales in the extension at time of writing. Potentially the most valuable names would be for domain hacks where a verb or noun is the base word, and where word+ing is also a word.


Sincere thanks to NameBio, OpenCorporates and nTLDstats.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Thank you for this post Bob!

Not a fan of the ING Gtld. It shouldn't have been released since there was already .ng cctld available.
 
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Thank you for this post Bob!

Not a fan of the ING Gtld. It shouldn't have been released since there was already .ng cctld available.
I disagree.

For example, Market.ing is way better than Marketi.ng
 
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Thank you for this post Bob!

Not a fan of the ING Gtld. It shouldn't have been released since there was already .ng cctld available.
New TLD's are basically a money grab at this point. People are already going to use established TLD's e.g. .com, .net, .org etc... There is absolutely no way that .sucks will ever be able to compete with .org.
 
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Greeting may have sold for $500k - but it is still for sale at $2mm. It is my guess it did not sell for $500k, but rather it was a "fake reported sale" as I can see no reason for an investor to gamble to $500k to try to make $2mm (which he will never get imo). https://venture.com/domains/greeting.com
 
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So they claim... but 6 mos later and whoever paid millions still has a website that doesn't resolve.
This is not uncommon, a company may have saw an opportunity and took it while they had the chance.
 
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Thanks Bob for useful and interesting info.

Could we hear about .com alternatives gTLDs one words (without .ing)?
 
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Great post, as always.

My best ing name is Convening.com
 
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I like .BIZ & .INFO after .NET.
Thanks for suggestions.

I have covered .net a couple of times in the NamePros Blog. This article, although a few years ago, covers the 22 highest sales in the previous 5 years, as well as a number of statistical analyses of the TLD. It may be time for a fresh look at .net, with some lately talking of a .net resurgence, at least at the upper end of the market.

https://www.namepros.com/blog/nine-things-about-net-domain-names.1232992/

-Bob
 
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Thanks for suggestions.

I have covered .net a couple of times in the NamePros Blog. This article, although a few years ago, covers the 22 highest sales in the previous 5 years, as well as a number of statistical analyses of the TLD. It may be time for a fresh look at .net, with some lately talking of a .net resurgence, at least at the upper end of the market.

https://www.namepros.com/blog/nine-things-about-net-domain-names.1232992/

-Bob
What about .INFO & .BIZ?
 
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Screenshot_20241006_124102_Chrome.jpg


Magazine + ing

Does it sounds good for news or media startup?
Journaling.com was sold for $10K
 
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"Endlessly creative" might describe some players in the domain space. I'm a bit saddened by most of their efforts, domains destined for the trash-drop bin. As has been said 100s of times before "better to acquire 1 good domain for potential resale than to acquire 50 nonsense -ing domains in hopes of selling 1 for a hefty profit".

People for whom English is not their native culture would do well to avoid playing in the -ing, -er, -est, etc space. For example, "Journaling" is a thing, a "practice" for which their are monetization possibilities.

Magazining is . . a domain desperately hoping for a raison d'être.

Money wasted, but it's hard to find fault, as many of us buy 1-in-10,000,000 odds lottery tickets at some point, $1 or $2 spent "knowingly in vain", and well within most people's budgets.
 
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when i first started domaining, i saw discounting.com at sedo auctions, i thought it was a great one word domain, paid around 9k for it, still not sure if its a not bad or a very bad buy
 
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Thanks for suggestions.

I have covered .net a couple of times in the NamePros Blog. This article, although a few years ago, covers the 22 highest sales in the previous 5 years, as well as a number of statistical analyses of the TLD. It may be time for a fresh look at .net, with some lately talking of a .net resurgence, at least at the upper end of the market.

https://www.namepros.com/blog/nine-things-about-net-domain-names.1232992/

-Bob

How about .io? It seems to have fallen out of favor recently... wondering if that's true
 
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