When I looked at domain name sales dollar volume, at least as reported in NameBio, for the first six months of 2024, compared to the same period of the previous year, there was a 29.6% increase. See Domain Name Sales First Six Months of 2024.
While I presented how the numbers came out, I was troubled from the time I wrote the article that the result seemed in conflict with what some sellers were reporting. For example, Andrew Allemann wrote the article My No Good First Half of 2024. He still had a very respectable sell-through rate (STR) of 1.36% during the first half of 2024, but that was down from 1.96% in the previous year.
Sten Lillieström published this analysis on LinkedIn. Sten has for some time been the top seller on Atom (SquadHelp), and is one of the most successful domain name sellers. In the article, while he still reports many sales, he noted that the first part of 2024 was down 27% compared to 2023, and that in turn had been down compared to 2022.
Now it is true that others see the market as strong and perhaps even improving. As my earlier article pointed out, the trends were different in different extensions, and that factor may be part of the explanation.
But I wondered if the apparent increase in the first half of 2024 was being driven by changes in what sales are included in NameBio, and gave a false impression of the relative health of the domain name market. You have to be careful making temporal conclusions from NameBio data because there are changes in what gets reported from year to year.
In this article I dig deeper into the numbers, and also refresh to sales through Sept 4, 2024. I also look at a longer time sequence, back to 2016.
All Venues $1000+ Sales
I was mainly interested in sales to end users, so applied in all of the analyses below a $1000 minimum price. Now that does not exclude all domain investor acquisitions, nor does it include all sales to end users, but it seemed an appropriate cutoff to use.
Because I was sampling after day 247 of 2024, I had to extrapolate year-to-date data to a full year when reporting 2024. Of course the assumption that the average rate in the rest of the year will continue the same is not necessarily true.
The total dollar volume is a better indicator than number of sales. When I plot that for different years, all extensions included, I see the following.
We see that 2021 was clearly the best year. It looks like 2024 is on track to be modestly up from 2023, although not quite to 2022 levels.
It should be pointed out that these are expressed in simple dollars, and the ‘worth’ of a dollar in 2016 is different from a 2024 dollar. This calculator suggests that $1.00 in 2016 is about the same as $1.31 now. If you applied a correction like that to the early dollar volumes, they are pretty similar over the entire period.
But there are changes in what gets reported to NameBio over the years. In particular, NameBio began to pick up sales data not directly reported on their form, or available in a marketplace feed, so one would expect that the sales numbers would be up due to that. So I decided to look at the sales volume only from certain venues.
Sedo Only
Sedo sales have been present in NameBio for many years. There is a Sedo feed that provides this data, and it includes sales $2000 and more, along with all auction data. However, there is a process that buyers (or sellers) can pay an optional fee to keep the sale from being listed in the feed, and therefore not appear on NameBio.
When I look only at Sedo sales, but for the same $1000+ although for non-auction sales it is really $2000+, I see the following.
Sedo sales volume also peaked in 2021, and has been in decline each year since then. It looks like 2024 will only be slightly down from 2023 as projected now.
The overall pattern I see in the data from 2016 through 2024 at Sedo is the market has been remarkably stable, other than the 2021 bounce back as businesses adapted to new digital modes.
But Sedo data alone does not specify the overall market, and it might be true that one or more of the other marketplaces was taking more of the total domain name sales pie. Unfortunately, none of Afternic, Atom (SquadHelp), BrandBucket, or Dan report total sales, or we could see if that was happening.
BuyDomains Only
After Sedo and private sellers, the most important source of retail sales data on NameBio is BuyDomains, who report many, but not all sales it seems. BuyDomains report sales on a feed on their homepage, and NameBio collects sales from that feed. I show the data below.
We see again that 2021 was the best year, with decline since then. BuyDomains is on track for 2024 to be pretty similar to 2023. There is an obvious jump in the data in 2020, and I am not sure if that is due to an increase in their portfolio size, or an increase in sales activity, or both.
It is interesting to compare BuyDomains and Sedo, since BuyDomains has a stronger concentration in .com, and probably a more American clientele than Sedo.
Private Sales Only
You can also choose Private as the venue on NameBio, so I looked at that data.
We see that the private data was really hit hard by the start of the pandemic, with 2020 by far the worst year. There was a strong bounce back, although interestingly 2019 was even better than 2021. Keep in mind that a few million dollar sales can have a big impact, though. The wider net that NameBio now use might have been expected to show more private sales volume in 2023 and 2024, but we don’t see that.
So Is It Up Or Down?
Looking at this data, I don’t think there is an absolutely clear picture whether the domain market is up or down. I think at least some sectors of the name market are likely down.
Another source of data is the Escrow.com quarterly report. You can read about the first quarter of 2024 here, and that showed a modest uptick during the first quarter of 2024.
For those willing, I would be interested in hearing in the comment section below how your 2024 is comparing to previous years.
Why Brandable Sales Might Be Down
I wish we had full data from Atom, BrandBucket and BrandPa, but I suspect that the market for ‘brandable’ type names may be down, and I have a theory on why that is. Keep in mind that this section of the article is simply a conjecture.
If we go back prior to widespread availability of generative AI products, while there were domain name generators, for the most part they were fairly limited in scope to using combinations of terms that had been shown to be desired in naming.
Now when a startup developer seeks a name, one option they may consider is a name suggested by a generative AI name generator, either a stand alone product or one offered by a registrar, such as GoDaddy Airo name search.
Even if we wish we could, we can’t make generative AI naming products go away, and they will probably become better, and more widely used. So how should domain investors respond? I think we need to make sure that the names we hold are better than those typically generated by AI. We also need to fight for our names to be effectively seen, and to do our part in helping businesses to fully understand the value brought by a name.
Much gratitude is expressed to NameBio that make it so easy to access sales aggregate data for certain venues and years.[/URL]
While I presented how the numbers came out, I was troubled from the time I wrote the article that the result seemed in conflict with what some sellers were reporting. For example, Andrew Allemann wrote the article My No Good First Half of 2024. He still had a very respectable sell-through rate (STR) of 1.36% during the first half of 2024, but that was down from 1.96% in the previous year.
Sten Lillieström published this analysis on LinkedIn. Sten has for some time been the top seller on Atom (SquadHelp), and is one of the most successful domain name sellers. In the article, while he still reports many sales, he noted that the first part of 2024 was down 27% compared to 2023, and that in turn had been down compared to 2022.
Now it is true that others see the market as strong and perhaps even improving. As my earlier article pointed out, the trends were different in different extensions, and that factor may be part of the explanation.
But I wondered if the apparent increase in the first half of 2024 was being driven by changes in what sales are included in NameBio, and gave a false impression of the relative health of the domain name market. You have to be careful making temporal conclusions from NameBio data because there are changes in what gets reported from year to year.
In this article I dig deeper into the numbers, and also refresh to sales through Sept 4, 2024. I also look at a longer time sequence, back to 2016.
All Venues $1000+ Sales
I was mainly interested in sales to end users, so applied in all of the analyses below a $1000 minimum price. Now that does not exclude all domain investor acquisitions, nor does it include all sales to end users, but it seemed an appropriate cutoff to use.
Because I was sampling after day 247 of 2024, I had to extrapolate year-to-date data to a full year when reporting 2024. Of course the assumption that the average rate in the rest of the year will continue the same is not necessarily true.
The total dollar volume is a better indicator than number of sales. When I plot that for different years, all extensions included, I see the following.
We see that 2021 was clearly the best year. It looks like 2024 is on track to be modestly up from 2023, although not quite to 2022 levels.
It should be pointed out that these are expressed in simple dollars, and the ‘worth’ of a dollar in 2016 is different from a 2024 dollar. This calculator suggests that $1.00 in 2016 is about the same as $1.31 now. If you applied a correction like that to the early dollar volumes, they are pretty similar over the entire period.
But there are changes in what gets reported to NameBio over the years. In particular, NameBio began to pick up sales data not directly reported on their form, or available in a marketplace feed, so one would expect that the sales numbers would be up due to that. So I decided to look at the sales volume only from certain venues.
Sedo Only
Sedo sales have been present in NameBio for many years. There is a Sedo feed that provides this data, and it includes sales $2000 and more, along with all auction data. However, there is a process that buyers (or sellers) can pay an optional fee to keep the sale from being listed in the feed, and therefore not appear on NameBio.
When I look only at Sedo sales, but for the same $1000+ although for non-auction sales it is really $2000+, I see the following.
Sedo sales volume also peaked in 2021, and has been in decline each year since then. It looks like 2024 will only be slightly down from 2023 as projected now.
The overall pattern I see in the data from 2016 through 2024 at Sedo is the market has been remarkably stable, other than the 2021 bounce back as businesses adapted to new digital modes.
But Sedo data alone does not specify the overall market, and it might be true that one or more of the other marketplaces was taking more of the total domain name sales pie. Unfortunately, none of Afternic, Atom (SquadHelp), BrandBucket, or Dan report total sales, or we could see if that was happening.
BuyDomains Only
After Sedo and private sellers, the most important source of retail sales data on NameBio is BuyDomains, who report many, but not all sales it seems. BuyDomains report sales on a feed on their homepage, and NameBio collects sales from that feed. I show the data below.
We see again that 2021 was the best year, with decline since then. BuyDomains is on track for 2024 to be pretty similar to 2023. There is an obvious jump in the data in 2020, and I am not sure if that is due to an increase in their portfolio size, or an increase in sales activity, or both.
It is interesting to compare BuyDomains and Sedo, since BuyDomains has a stronger concentration in .com, and probably a more American clientele than Sedo.
Private Sales Only
You can also choose Private as the venue on NameBio, so I looked at that data.
We see that the private data was really hit hard by the start of the pandemic, with 2020 by far the worst year. There was a strong bounce back, although interestingly 2019 was even better than 2021. Keep in mind that a few million dollar sales can have a big impact, though. The wider net that NameBio now use might have been expected to show more private sales volume in 2023 and 2024, but we don’t see that.
So Is It Up Or Down?
Looking at this data, I don’t think there is an absolutely clear picture whether the domain market is up or down. I think at least some sectors of the name market are likely down.
Another source of data is the Escrow.com quarterly report. You can read about the first quarter of 2024 here, and that showed a modest uptick during the first quarter of 2024.
For those willing, I would be interested in hearing in the comment section below how your 2024 is comparing to previous years.
Why Brandable Sales Might Be Down
I wish we had full data from Atom, BrandBucket and BrandPa, but I suspect that the market for ‘brandable’ type names may be down, and I have a theory on why that is. Keep in mind that this section of the article is simply a conjecture.
If we go back prior to widespread availability of generative AI products, while there were domain name generators, for the most part they were fairly limited in scope to using combinations of terms that had been shown to be desired in naming.
Now when a startup developer seeks a name, one option they may consider is a name suggested by a generative AI name generator, either a stand alone product or one offered by a registrar, such as GoDaddy Airo name search.
Even if we wish we could, we can’t make generative AI naming products go away, and they will probably become better, and more widely used. So how should domain investors respond? I think we need to make sure that the names we hold are better than those typically generated by AI. We also need to fight for our names to be effectively seen, and to do our part in helping businesses to fully understand the value brought by a name.
Much gratitude is expressed to NameBio that make it so easy to access sales aggregate data for certain venues and years.[/URL]
Last edited:
/6 months/ 
