question Seasonal Cycles in Domaining

The chart above (click for larger version) represents the number of sales we recorded each month going back five years. The July 2017 number is extrapolated out to the end of the month (divided by 15, multiplied by 31). Seems like for the most part Spring and Autumn are the strongest, followed by Winter, then Summer.

Although that seems like a recent trend. For example in 2012 the Winter and Spring were weak, things picked up in the Summer, and then continued to climb slightly. 2013 had a strong Spring, but the Summer was also either a peak or at least fairly in-line with other months. But after that we start to see a change.

2014 died off in the Summer and then had a slight recovery in Autumn but then died off again. 2015 the Summer was clearly a valley, and then took off wildly due to the start of the Chinese invasion. 2016 started dying off in the early Summer but then barely recovered. And it looks like 2017 is going to be a rough summer, headed towards a pretty massive decline in July.

Also worth noting the huge jump from January to February 2015 is due to us re-launching NameBio and re-writing all of our tracking software, so we were collecting many, many more sales than before.

If you're purely talking about the expired auction game, nobody decides what inventory is coming up other than the previous owners of the individual domains. Personally I think summer doldrums would be counter-intuitive, that would imply people renew at higher rates when they're on vacation. I would think more people would forget to renew when distracted with travel. Of course expired auctions are delayed by more than a month due to the drop cycle, but still.

I would agree that non-expired auction inventory seems lower or worse quality in the summer, but that may be a self-perpetuating myth. If enough people believe sales are crap in the summer, fewer people will auction their names during this period. Less inventory leads to fewer buyers and weaker results, and it gets even worse and more pronounced the following year.

End users may defer acquisitions until before closing of tax period.

what does mean?