I know that Namebio data isn’t perfect but here’s the topdown view of the data that is available...
I took this snapshot at the H1 interval for 2017 (a couple of weeks ago), and doubled both the sales volume and revenue for a simple extrapolation of 2017. Unless Q3 and Q4 contain a heavier weighting of the overall annual transactions, it looks like:
- 2017 will be slightly down when compared to 2016 and 2015 in terms of total recorded sales.
- However, this year will be marginally above 2016 in respect to average transaction value.
A couple of other notes:
- The average deal size of any year can be skewed by a handful of super-sized sales.
- [Long-term trend] The average sale size is shrinking (or potentially more smaller sales now reported).
- [Long-term trend] The volume of transactions is increasing (or again, just more data feeds available to Namebio). The recent rise of 'liquid' transactions is the most obvious driver of this trend.
Below, I’ve also broken down the Top 1, 5, 10, 20, 50 and 100 transactions of each year. This hasn’t been extrapolated for this year but shows the position as at close of H1 of 2017. The Top5 sales this year account for almost half of the total $ for 2017. Most years, the Top5 sales equate to between 20 to 40% of the Top100 sales. This could be bad news if it means there's compression in the rest of the ‘tail’ (sales 6 to 100) in terms of overall ($) value.
The years 2011, 2012 and 2013 look unusual in both graphs. Either this is a fallout from the financial crisis or has been mentioned to me that its most likely to be missing sales data from one of the major marketplaces.
A potential reason for lower liquidity in 2017 could be short-term investors pushing money out of domains and into crypto. The remaining sales hopefully contain a higher proportion of ‘end-users’ and thus a higher sales price. It would also be cool to know the composition of the sales by domain type (brandable, premium one-word, liquid, etc). I've only used public facing data for the graphs above but someone with access to the full data set could answer this in more depth.
Personally, 2017 has been slower than 2016 - but the few sales that I've had, have mostly been to end-users who've paid close to or above asking price. Not statistically significant but backs up the hypothesis above.
Not an award-winning analysis but hope it's of some use to the thread.
(One last bonus graph below, couldn't help myself. Looks like 2004/2005 might be incomplete datasets?)
