Not much new or in depth in the article but it does draw attention to the fact that month after month .top leads (or very near top) the ngTLDs in sales volume and number of sales, and often places several of the top few sales of month.
As has been noted the registration base is more China focussed than any other extension by far (well I guess .cn would be more). This means NameBio is probably missing many sales.
I was about to point out that a number of English words do sell, but
@Fancy.domains has nicely provided evidence.
The fact that Afternic do not handle the extension (at least now, surely with setting up a Chinese office they would reconsider? I have no insider information just speculating) skews Western sales prospects.
The names I have held personally, a few of which were decent, never get any offers and I only sold one for a trivial amount. I have let many of mine drop, but each month when I do stats I am impressed by how strong the market seems to be.
It is true as
@bmugford points out that the sales volume in the extension has been strongly skewed by major registry sales of 2 and 3 character names. Although really, even in well developed extensions like .com in the last year 0.1% of sales accounted for 27% of the total volume in .com. Nevertheless I predict we will see a modest decrease in coming year in .top just because so many of the short premiums have now gone to end users or long term investors.
I also find the extension unusual in that the number of meaningful websites in it is much lower than for example xyz or online or club or many others. It seems to me a higher percentage are being held as investments, perhaps. It also has way worse abuse characteristics than most of the other major ngTLD extensions, another negative.
I did have a look at the NameBio data for under $100 sales in the past year. There were 138, probably a reasonable number, but mainly at low values. Most were at Dynadot. I suspect some off the registrar marketplaces that don't report also have many sales. Only 7 of the 138 were above even $25 though.
The extension perplexes me somewhat.
Bob