IT.COM

analysis The First Six Months Of 2022: A Look At Domain Name Sales Data

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The first six months of 2022 resulted in 76,000 NameBio-listed domain sales of $100 or more, accounting for a dollar volume of just over $84 million.

That is an increase of 0.9% in number of sales compared to the same six months of 2021, and a 4.1% increase in dollar volume.

In this article I look at how different extensions fared. In all cases I compare the first six months of 2022 with the same period for 2021 and earlier years.

COM Continues To Dominate

The dollar volume in .com alone was up slightly, from 63.5 million in 2021 to $66.1 million in 2022.

The number of .com sales was down slightly, but that was more than made up by a 7.3% rise in average price.

The .com extension continues to have the majority of all domain sales. In 2022 .com accounted for 78.5% of all sales by dollar volume, and 83.3% by number of sales.

That has not changed much over the last four years, as the graph below indicates. The huge voice.com sale skewed the data for 2019.
Image-PercentageCOM.png

The .com average sales price edged upward, to $1044 in 2022. The average price is deceptive, since it is a combination of retail sales along with a many more wholesale transactions. Clearly, the retail-only average price would be substantially higher.

NET Dips To Traditional Levels

The first six months of 2021 were great in the extension, but .net sales volume dropped 33% in 2022. As the following graph shows, that decrease moved the extension back to the levels of recent years.
Image-NET-annual.png

The dollar volume drop was due to a significant decrease in average price in the extension, from $1439 during the first half of 2021, to $894 in the same period from 2022.

As for .com, the average price is misleading, as there are many more wholesale than retail transactions.

ORG Keeps Rolling

The modest but steady increase in .org sales sometimes goes unnoticed. As the graph below indicates, the dollar volume in .org has steadily increased in recent years, accounting for $4.2 million in .org sales during the first six months of 2022.

Image-ORG-annual.png

The average sales price in .org, $1118 during the first half of 2022, was higher than .com and significantly higher than .net.

The number of .org domain names sold was up by just under 16% compared to the same months in 2021.

Country Codes Stumble

Country code domain names had a spectacular 2021, but that momentum reversed during the first six months of 2022.

Taken as a whole, country code extensions were just slightly down in number of sales, but down by almost 28% in average price and sales volume.

We should put that in perspective, however, as the sales volume was higher than in the first six months of 2019 or 2020, as indicated in the following graph.

Image-AllCC-annual.png

IO Average Price Down

A big part of the reason that country codes fell in sales volume was a drop in .io. Although the number of .io sales was up about 35%, a 57% drop in average price resulted in a 42% drop in sales volume.

The sales dollar volume in .io dropped from $2.3 million during the first six months of 2021, to about $1.4 million in the first half of 2022. However, the country code sales volume in the first six months of 2022 was still several times higher than the first 6 months of 2019 or 2020, as the graph below shows.

Image-IO-annual.png

It should be kept in mind that a decrease in the overall average price does not necessarily mean that retail prices in the extension are decreasing.

CO Decline

The decline was even more dramatic in the .co extension, which dropped 34% in number of sales, 48% in average price, and 66% in sales dollar volume.

Image-CO-annual.png

US Sales Up

One country code extension that bucked the downward trend was .us, that saw a 37% rise in the number of sales, 40% higher average prices, and a sales dollar volume 92% above the same period in 2021.

As the following graph shows, the uptick in .us began in 2021, and intensified in 2022.

Image-US-annual.png

Other Country Code Extensions

I tracked many other country code extensions, and here are comments for some not mentioned earlier. Note that in many cases the number of sales is relatively small, so the apparent trends may not be statistically significant.
  • .de is always one of the best performers, and that remained the case in early 2022 with a $4056 average price and $1.4 million sales dollar volume in the six month period. While down 19% from a strong 2021, the dollar volume is higher than 2019 or 2020.
  • The .me extension was down almost 28% in number of sales, but up just under 22% in average price, so down about 12% in sales volume. The average price during the first six months of 2022 was $1797.
  • The .tv extension had an increase of just over 45% in number of sales, but a drop of more than 50% in average price, so sales dollar volume was down about 29%. The average price was still $1477 in 2022, and was only down when compared to a very strong 2021.
  • The .vc extension, popular among venture capital firms, was down slightly in dollar volume, but the average price increased to $2973.
  • Reported sales in .gg, a country code that appeals to the gaming community, seem dominated by investor acquisitions, with an average sales price of only $430, down significantly from the previous year.
  • The .cc extension approximately doubled sales dollar volume in the first months of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021, although that is somewhat lower than 2020. The average price grew by 51% in 2022, to $1298.
  • The .ai extension, popular for artificial intelligence, was down in number of sales, up in average price to $1317, and down about 44% in sales dollar volume when compared to the first six months of 2021.
  • There was not a lot of change in the .ly extension, somewhat popular as a branding alternative, with sales dollar volume down 7.1%.
  • The picture was mixed, but generally down, in other national country code extensions. The UK’s .co.uk was down 46% in sales volume, China’s .cn down 42%, India’s .in down 41%, and Canada’s .ca up 1% in dollar volume, although based on a small number of sales. Most of these extension have high average sales prices.

New Extensions Surge

While the average price of new gTLD extensions was down slightly in 2022, to a still healthy $1830, that was more than made up by a surge in number of NameBio-reported sales. There were almost 3 times as many reported sales during the first six months of 2022 compared to the same period of 2021. As a result, sales dollar volume was up 265% for new gTLDs as a whole. The trend over the four years is shown in the graph below.

Image-AllNew-annual.png

New extensions accounted for just over $4.8 million in sales volume over the six month period.

XYZ Grows 10x Each Year

Much of the growth in new gTLDs was in .xyz. The growth in dollar volume was spectacular, going from just $3340 during the first six months of 2019, increasing by a factor of about 10 to $31,400 in the same period of 2020, followed by another increase by 10 to $314,000 in 2021, and a growth of about ten times once more to almost $3.2 million in dollar volume during the first six months of 2022.
Image-XYZ-annual.png

As a result, .xyz went from representing only 0.2% of overall new gTLD sales volume in 2019, to 23.6% in 2021, and now 65.2 % of all new extension sales volume.

It seems unlikely that .xyz can keep growing at this rate, and the last month has had a lower rate of reported high-value .xyz sales.

Other New Extensions

While .xyz accounted for much of the growth in new extension sales, a few others played roles in that surge. Here are comments on some other new gTLDs that I tracked.
  • Supposedly driven by the interest in NFTs, the .art extension had a superb first six months of 2022, growing from 1 sale in early 2021 to 45 in 2022, accounting for just over $210,000 in sales dollar volume.
  • The .network extension had taken off in 2021, going from just 1 and 0 NameBio-reported sales in 2019 and 2021, to 26 reported sales during the first six months of 2021 and 38 sales in the first six months of 2022. The cryptocurrency and web3 emphasis on networks probably accounts for the increase. There was about $32,000 in .network sales volume during the first six months of 2022.
  • .cloud does not account for many sales, but they are at good average prices, $4468 in 2022.
  • .app remains one of the most solid new extensions. The number of sales was up 85%, although down almost 10% in average price. As a result sales dollar volume in the extension was up 67% during the first six months of 2022.
  • .club is another solid performer, although the sales volume was down almost 60% in 2022, mainly due to a drop in number of sales.
  • The number of sales are small, but a few other new extensions I tracked were .online, up 25% in dollar volume; .link down 29%; and .one up 120%, although based on less than $13,000 in sales volume.

Other Extensions

Here are notes for a few TLDs not mentioned earlier.
  • .biz had more sales, and was up 3% in sales dollar volume. The extension accounted for just under $61,000 in sales volume during the six month period.
  • The .info extension was up almost 48% in dollar volume, representing $126,000 in reported domain sales over the six month period.

Average Prices

I collected the average prices for the first six months of 2022 in the following graph.
image-AveragePrices-First2022.png

At first glance, the average price information will seem surprising. Many new and country code extensions have substantially higher average prices than .com and other legacy extensions. For example, the average .app 2022 sales price was $3802, the average .ca $3872, .de at $4056, .cloud at $4468, .art at $4685. This compares to a .com average sales price of $1044, or .net at $894. Even extensions like .biz at $1384 had a substantially higher price than the legacy extensions in 2022.

But the average price picture is misleading when using NameBio data. That is because there are substantially more wholesale acquisitions in the legacy extensions, with many trades for each retail sale. That drags down the average price. In the country codes and new extensions, without a well-developed and reported wholesale market, the reported sales are dominated by retail sales.

Keep In Mind

It is important to keep in mind that by no means all domain name sales are reported in NameBio.

NameBio reports a higher percentage of wholesale transactions than retail. As wholesale prices have risen, there is probably a higher percentage of wholesale transactions reflected in recent years.

The ratio of number of NameBio-reported wholesale to retail sales varies with extension. As noted earlier, this means one must be cautious when comparing average prices across extensions.

Also, a relatively small number of high-value sales can have a big impact on average prices.

It is hard to know if there are significant differences between extensions in the fraction of sales that are reported in NameBio. There probably are to some degree.

Over the years, what gets reported in NameBio has changed. That impacts the data.

Rising wholesale prices have pushed more wholesale transactions about the $100 that appear in the NameBio record available without a subscription.

Keep in mind that for some extensions the number of sales in a six month period is relatively small, introducing considerable statistical uncertainty in results.

I collected the data right at the end of the six month period. That means sales reported later, but that occurred during the six month period, will not have been included. Therefore, you may find slightly different data if you later check NameBio. Since I was consistent in how I did this in 2019, 2200, 2221 and 2222, however, there should not be a systematic bias.

Past Years

This is the fourth analysis of the first six months of the year. Here are links to the previous articles:

Please share in the discussion what you conclude from the data.


Thanks to Namebio, an amazing resource for investigation of domain name sales data.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
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I think GD promoting its own .co's, and unregistered .co's, but not yours, so they don't sell, but they are grabbed/catched anyway. They sell, unless you are the seller.
Your price=100, they won't bother for 20 commission.
Your price=1000, ..if it can really sell, why not "let it drop".
Your price=10000, it can't sell, so don't work on it.
I'm not saying this is happening, but such things must be happening,
otherwise more domains would sell.
 
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So much information...thanks again Bob!
 
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Amazing data Bob! Thank you!
 
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Once again amazing information shared by Mr. Bob... It's really great.... So nice of you Mr. Bob... And thank you very much
 
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Phenomenal report!

You've made an art out of data analysis.

Great research and excellent presentation.

Thanks.
 
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I am a numbers guy, so I always appreciate your posts Bob. You do a great job with the available data.

The questions I always have are what percentage of the market do the namebio numbers really represent and how much a few outlier sales or the channels that are measured can skew the numbers?

I feel pretty good about my .com and .org heavy portfolio based in the above, but there seemed to be some positives people could latch onto for just about any type of investment model.

So maybe we will each cherry-pick our data from this to justify our existing biases?

Did you take away any one or two things that are indicative of what you believe are long-term “buy” indicators or data that will affect the makeup of your portfolio?

For me, I think the .org chart is probably the most significant to me and likely to influence my buying criteria.

Thanks for your work on this
 
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Very informative, Bob thanks 😊
 
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How much time you put in this Project?
 
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Brilliant analysis as usual. I agree with your numbers
 
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The questions I always have are what percentage of the market do the namebio numbers really represent and how much a few outlier sales or the channels that are measured can skew the numbers?
I don't know with any precision, but as a guesstimate I would think NameBio might be capturing 20% of the retail sales and maybe 80% of the wholesale side. They do a good job of collating data from all of the main auction places. On the retail side, they have the BuyDomains sales (or at least all except lowest prices); the Sedo sales from $2000 up except when privacy purchased, and a variety of smaller marketplaces and private sellers that report. They are missing most DAN, almost all Afternic, the brandable marketplaces, and some private sellers and brokers. Definitely a number of big sales not reported and that would influence average prices.
So maybe we will each cherry-pick our data from this to justify our existing biases?
I agree, it is natural for humans to do that. With this, a .com seller could say see vast majority of sales volume is .com, a new extensions person could say see the huge increase (especially in xyz), and even a country code could say while not as great as 2021, still really great average prices and better than 2019, 2020. Even someone selling .biz, .info etc. has positives.
Did you take away any one or two things that are indicative of what you believe are long-term “buy” indicators or data that will affect the makeup of your portfolio?
The good question. While I mainly do these analyses for the community, I do always ask myself did I learn anything that I plan to act on. I found it really interesting that both .xyz and .vc had a noticeable jump while total volume was still small (a few years ago), so someone alert to that could have jumped in while the market is still good in a TLD for acquisitions. I tried to find some TLD that seemed poised that way in year one. You could see .art with the huge one year jump, but it seems to me the best may well already be over in it, although it had a great 2022. The .org numbers seem promising, but important to also look at what type of names sell in that. I plan to keep my best .orgs. The big question I am asking myself is are there still legs for .xyz to expand to broader types of names. I don't know, could argue either way.

So no simple messages. If I was in USA, this data would make me really look at buying possibilities on .us.

No one interpret this as investment advice, the simple answer is even after looking at lots of data, I don't see clear patterns.

I found the multiple 10x increases in .xyz interesting, and if I see an extension jumping by a lot, even if total volume small, I at least would look at it and try to understand why.

Thanks for great questions.

Bob
 
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How much time you put in this Project?
Thanks for the question. It is probably good that I did not keep track so don't know a precise answer :unsure:

As a rough guesstimate, I started with the spreadsheet from last year's analysis, made a copy, added columns for the 2022 data. That was just some minutes.

On July 1 I extracted the data from NameBIo, so I could use the time interval 2022 and it would automatically be the 6 months. I selected one by one each TLD, and recorded average price and number of sales into my spreadsheet. The final analysis I did this for 33 TLDs, but explored 10 or so more to see if there might be worthwhile data. This step was pretty mechanical, but had to double check data. Maybe it took an hour or so.

I then inserted formulae to calculate the volume (NameBio give that but easier to calculate in SS from number and average), and all of the percentage change data. That really is fast with copying down the formulae. I had the basic data within about an hour, even with some checking and adding other calculations like percent that were .com, percent of new .xyz, etc.

Then I looked carefully at the results, roughed out the messages I thought it suggested, and decided what graphs I wanted to present. I am pretty fast at putting graphs together (they are all done in Numbers), and except for first and last they were similar format here, and that made it much faster. I don't know exactly but it took maybe several hours or so to get them the way I wanted and export pngs for each.

Then I began the actual writing and editing. I do that directly in a markup code that NamePros uses. It always takes longer than I would think, and this lots of numbers to check back and forth on from the spreadsheet. I had a draft in maybe a few hours.

But then from draft to final is always a few more hours. I first go through several edits in my word processor, then when I feel good with that, I do the first import into NamePros. I go through a series of paste, preview, catch things and correct in my text, repaste, preview again, etc. In this case that all took a few hours, and it is seldom less than that. At the end I did a final check on every number in the story, so hopefully no errors got through. I then do file uploads of the images as the last step, along with setting the category terms, etc.

Right after posting I do one final read through and check, among other things checking every link (not too many in this one).

So total time on this? Probably order of 10 hours of actual time, although I probably spent more time working on it due to distractions (checking that my domain names had not sold :xf.cool: , etc.) Some stories take less time. The ones that actually have taken the most are ones where I visit and categorize hundreds of sites, like I did for .xyz and .com big sales. They would take more time than this, even though all the graphs on this one may seem more time consuming.

I like to analyze data and present it in hopefully a digestible fashion, so while it does take a lot of time, I do enjoy it. I think it is one way I can contribute to the domain community, and the NamePros community in particular.

Bob
 
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I'm not saying this is happening, but such things must be happening,
otherwise more domains would sell.
I am not sure I have much to comment. I think it is in the interest of the marketplaces to sell as many domains as possible, since they work on commission. Probably appropriately priced names are the best, as they combine reasonable sales probability with reasonable price.

I think overall the system that end users find and buy names is not optimal, and if someone can make it better, more names will sell. I agree that many good names, that would be good for businesses, go unsold for many years, unfortunately.

Thanks for taking the time to share your views.

Bob
 
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Its 2022 why are we still counting $100 names?


Can you imagine all the coms that sold $100 or under that were NOT reported? They weren’t reported because its not of huge consequence when domains change hands between domainers or at a cheap auction price and the volume would be beyond enormous. These are predominantly to other domainers as is everything below a certain amount.

It does nothing but make buyers think thats what they should pay kinda like GoDaddy’s valuations where majority is valued above 1K but below 2K even on obviously valuable names.

I appreciate the various analytics you do Bob but I wish the lower tier was eliminated off NameBio. I would like to see more on end user pricing and less on wholesale or bottom tier prices.

Everything goes up in price every single year (including renewals) but not domain pricing.

Other than that, good to hear we may not be in dire straits as some would have us think. At least not yet. But if we removed the for sure wholesale tiers where would we really be?

Since NameBio is just a portion (of predominantly wholesale sales) I am not convinced it really reflects the current end user market anyways. Its a helpful tool but far from a total or clear picture on the state of end user domain sales.

I guess nothing can really pin that down with any certainty when so few people and companies report internal sales like SH, BB, DAN, etc don’t release the data.
 
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I guess it's subjective to what you believe adds value to the big picture, Karmaco. NB reports them, we can pick and choose the facts we want to see and apply them to our narrative accordingly. It's good to see the pulse on the dot-com layers of trade, being such an important ecosystem of the internet.

How would you separate knowing the end user from the fellow trader? An impossible task likely, maybe just a handful of the obvious. We would also be eliminating entire tiers.

For example, was the maga sale an end user, or investor? In terms of determining wholesale vs end user.

Such a rich, abundant presentation and analysis. Thank you Bob.
 
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I would like to see more on end user pricing and less on wholesale or bottom tier prices.
Hi

closing sales prices today, cannot be defined so clearly as "end-user or wholesale" purchases.

as said before, since domainers have an enormous amount of capital, one would have to check each name after the sale, to see whether or not the domain was developed after purchase.

many 4 figure and some 5 figure sales/purchases, are done between other domainers,
so what amount is the cut-off?

i think regardless to the amount of any sale, all sales are indicative of "market activity".
that activity level, could be the contradictor or what validates, those claiming sales are down or up,
across the board.

though i don't draw any conclusions,
any data supply channel can have an impression and may cause some to act upon it.

just saying....

imo...
 
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Thanks for many good points in your post @karmaco .
Since NameBio is just a portion (of predominantly wholesale sales) I am not convinced it really reflects the current end user market anyways. Its a helpful tool but far from a total or clear picture on the state of end user domain sales.
Agreed, NameBio listed sales may not reflect the retail market well. It could be so much better if Dan and Afternic sales were in, and the main brandable marketplaces.

That said, NameBio is the best we have, and I would argue it is better to have some data than only our individual or selective social media data. It is important to keep limitations in mind. The Keep In Mind section at end of article collects some of the caveats. In particular, the average prices should not be regarded as average end user sales prices in most TLDs.

Why still count $100 sales? If there was a clear dividing line between sales to end users and acquisitions by investors I would switch to it, but having looked at this a lot, there simply isn't. Some low $$$ sales are indeed to end users, and some $25k plus sales are to investors, more than I actually would have thought. As @biggie correctly points out, the only way to really divide would be to check the status of each name, and even that would leave many names, the majority, uncertain, since lack of use for names that sold a few months ago does not necessarily tell you anything about who bought it.

I did consider increasing the threshold this year, but then the comparisons with previous years would no longer be valid.

There are two other reasons to include low value sales. As @biggie points out just above, any sales are indicative of activity. Also, it is not a clear picture, but there is some evidence that low value sales in a TLD or niche often precede a later rise in higher value sales.
its not of huge consequence when domains change hands between domainers or at a cheap auction price and the volume would be beyond enormous.
The reason that I concentrate on dollar volume of sales, rather than the number of sales or average price individually, is dollar volume is not all that dependent on the large number of low-value sales.

To demonstrate this, consider .com only sales for the 6 month period in 2022. When I included all sales over $100, there were about 63,300 sales with a 6-month dollar volume of just over $66 million. If I only consider sales of $1000 and more, a dividing line some might choose, the number of sales shrinks substantially, to just under 11,000, but the dollar volume of sales is not much different, now just under $54 million. The sales of $1000+ represent about 82% of the .com sales volume for this period. I am pretty sure the relative trends in sales volume picture would not change much in most TLDs if I increased the limit to $1000.
I appreciate the various analytics you do Bob but I wish the lower tier was eliminated off NameBio. I would like to see more on end user pricing and less on wholesale or bottom tier prices.
When I look in detail at a specific TLD, I do often break down the data. For example this analysis of XYZ sales looked at end use both for all sales over $100, and just for the names that sold for over $1000.

Thanks for your comments. While I think the trends would not be much different if I had made the limit higher, I agree the case can be made to do that.

Any reader can of course do their own analysis rather easy for any cutoff they prefer, just by setting the minimum price in the NameBio search box.

Thanks again for your clearly stated concerns.

Bob
 
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Thank you Bob - great analysis as usually! (y):xf.smile:
 
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Here is a bit of bonus coverage that I did not include in the article, for those who invest in .tv and wondered how its volume has trended in the first six months of the last few years.
Image-TV-annual.png
 
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Kudos, Bob, for your distinctive community service posts. Despite a domain data deck that's missing a lot of cards, you consistently lay-down a winning hand of insights into the domain game.

Breaking down domain sales is complexed beyond comprehension as so much happens behind the curtain, and so much falls beyond the industry's conventional data points, like Sales by Extension.

The .TV sales report is a good example. As I invest in both .TV and TV.com, I know that the TV.com economy dwarfs the .TV economy in terms of;

(Godaddy) Estimated Value: Meta.tv: $6,724 | MetaTV.com: $794,888.00.
(Google) Usage: ".tv" About 5,100,000 results | "tv.com" About 67,500,000 results.
Sales: the top TV.com sale price of $5MIL (for AsSeenOnTV.com) is more than All .TV sales combined.

Extension focused data points do not reflect the actual scale of domain sales within an industry, like TV.
Keyword domain sales/use, across all extensions, reflects the true scope of domain investment by industry.

But, of course, that is a herculean task I would not wish on any community service volunteer.
However, we do need to make readers aware domain extension data is a small slice of the domain sales pie.
 
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