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analysis How Are Investors Pricing Their Domain Names?

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A domainer can ask any price he or she wants for any domain name. Each domain name is different, so looking at what prices others ask will not inform how any particular domain name should be priced. However, since there are frequent discussions around prices being too low or too high, I thought it would be interesting to look at the distribution of buy-it-now prices.

With the Advanced Search feature of Dofo, it is easy to search for domain names with any set of characteristics, such as extension, length, pricing, etc. Dofo covers the major marketplaces, providing a large sampling of priced domain names.


Buy-It-Now .COM Prices

I first looked at .com domain names, and restricted the search to those with 4 characters or longer, representing the sort of names most common in domain investor portfolios. Had I included 2 and 3 character names, other than a few more high-price names, the overall distribution would not be much changed. I also excluded domain names with hyphens or numbers from all of the results presented here.

I repeated the search multiple times with different price bins, obtaining the results shown below. There were about 12.6 million priced .com names in this analysis.

COM_BIN.png


Here are some of the features of the distribution.
  • 61.6% of the .com names were priced between $1000 and $4999.
  • Only 2.2% were priced at $25,000 or more, and only 0.2% above $100,000.
  • About 13.7% of the .com names were priced at less than $500.
The results were much as I expected, although the drop-off at $5000 was somewhat more dramatic than I might have guessed.


A Look At .ORG Prices

It is generally felt that .org domain names have lower prices, so I did a similar analysis for .org.

ORG_BIN.png


It is true that the drop-off in .org domain names priced above $5000 is somewhat more dramatic than for .com.
  • 78.1% of the .org names were priced between $250 and $4999.
  • About 2.4% were priced at $25,000 or more, not very different from .com
  • Only 0.2% were priced above $100,000.
  • About 10.6% of the .org names were priced at less than $250.
The results were more similar to .com than I expected, although there are fewer .org priced $5000 to $25,000.


What About .CO Pricing?

The .co extension has found increasing use among startups and other businesses as an alternative to .com. The distribution of .co domain name prices is shown below.

CO_BIN.png


The .co results show more domains priced at the lower levels, although some are priced to $75,000 and a few beyond that.
  • 71.7% of the .co names were priced between $250 and $4999.
  • About 1.2% were priced at $25,000 or more, somewhat less that we saw for .com and .org.
  • About 21.2% of the .co names were priced less than $250, substantially more than for .com.
  • In fact, 12.1% were priced less than $100.
The results show a wide distribution in prices below $5000, with relatively few priced above that.


Prices of .IO Domain Names

The .io extension also has strong adoption by startups. As .io domains are relatively expensive to hold, I did not know if that would influence the prices sought. The distribution of .io domain name prices is shown below.

IO_BIN.png


The .io results indicate a fairly wide distribution in prices, although fewer lower price names compared to .co.
  • 57.8% of the .io extension names were priced between $1000 and $4999.
  • Of that, 41.5% were priced between $2500 and $4999.
  • About 7.5% were priced at $25,000 or more, significantly more than for .com, .org or .co.
  • About 6.1% of .io domain names were priced less than $500.
The results show most price their .io names in the $2500 to $5000 range.


How Should .REALTY Names Be Priced?

During the summer there was a very good promotion on first year registration of .realty names. However, the renewal cost is very high, so most domain investors will try to sell the names within the first year. Since the sales record in the extension was minimal, and very few were even listed for sale in the aftermarket prior to the promotion, it was difficult for investors to know how to price .realty names.

I did the analysis for .realty extension names a couple of times, about two weeks separated, and there were dramatic changes. I think investors are still trying to decide on pricing levels. The following analysis is based on 6640 names listed for sale the day I did the analysis.

REALTY_BIN.png


The .realty results indicate most are priced below $2500, although with a few much higher.
  • 67.8% of the .realty extension names were priced between $750 and $2499.
  • Only 1.1% were priced at $10,000 or more.
  • Just 0.9% were priced less than $250.
  • There seems a fair amount of value-pricing to promote a quick sale, or perhaps recognizing that many clients may be small firms. There were 12.0% of .realty domain names priced between $250 and $499.

Do-It-Yourself Price Distributions

If you are interested in price distribution for some other extension, or domain length, it is easy to obtain results for any type of domain name.

Here are the steps.
  1. Go to Dofo, and click the Advanced Search wording just below the search bar.
  2. Click the Extensions button and check the one you want. If you do not see it explicitly listed, just type it in, without the preceding dot, and it will appear and check it. If you do repeated analyses, Dofo keeps any previous extension selections, so be sure to clear that before you start.
  3. Under Sale Type select Domains For Sale and Buy Now Domains.
  4. If desired, under Length set a minimum and maximum number of characters.
  5. Under Price set the minimum and maximum.
  6. Click the Search button, and it will show you how many domain names for sale were found with that characteristic.
  7. Repeat the preceding two steps for each price range you want to check.
Through the More Filters options you can further restrict the search, for example to look at pricing on a particular marketplace. That is also how you set whether you want to include names with hyphens or numbers, or in a specific domain name creation date range.

Don’t be overly influenced by prices others are asking, but if you want to find out how typical your pricing is, it is easy to find out, thanks to Dofo. Keep in mind that these are asking prices, not sales prices.

Wonder what names are priced $25 million and up? Here is the list! Although many of the top ones seem listed by a single seller on Flippa, and have now been taken down.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Another great article Bob
Thanks for sharing!
 
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Hi Bob, a quick one:

If your closely watched dot com selling category is $1k to 5k, how can another sample category (.org) get extended to $250 to $5k? Statistically speaking, it's it like saying Bill Gates walks into a bar and everyone is worth...

Once the price bracket gets extended by that much, of course the final percentage will be significantly different (but also significantly irrelevant). For the sake of the features of the distribution to be relevant, wouldn't it be easier to simply stick to 250-5k or 1k-5k across the spectrum?

Back to reading...

Your stuff is so catchy. This point was just so obvious it had to be shared.
 
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observe here is the pricing pattern of .com and .io. This shows how domain investors (not end-user for sure) are pessimistic about .com and bullish on .io.
An interesting perspective, and certainly true that many investors are bullish on .io. It should also be kept in mind however that the type of name available for marketplace listing is very different in different TLDs: many .io listings are prime single words, whereas the era when many single word .com were priced in marketplaces is largely in the past.

Investors tend to price most domains high $XXX to $XXXX while most buyers have a budget of $XX to low $XXX. Thus, portfolio turn is abysmal. Imagine what would happen to any electronics retailer with a 1% annual portfolio turn.
There definitely are buyers who are resistant to pay more than low $$$. I think we partly see some names priced in that range for those hoping to increase the sell-through rate.

Thanks for all the hard work you put into your research and writings
Thank you for your kind comments. Of course the really hard work was put into those who created tools like Dofo and NameBio that make analyses such as this so relatively easy to do.

The drop-off at $5000 I think is normal because makes more sense to list these domains just with a make offer option as it is more rewarding to negotiate a price.
That is an excellent point. Also, many of the premium names are probably not even placed on the marketplaces.

a small exercise about .com domains with 5-15 characters
Thank you!

There are several market segments / tiers that move differently. Actually 3 of them. There is the "market" range, the "retail" range and the "top payer" which is something only a single buyer will likely ever pay on the lifetime of a domain.
I agree that there are various communities of buyers, and someone in the domain world should be servicing each of those communities. I believe a range of prices for a range of domain qualities makes sense.

nteresting to compare it with sales prices.
Here is slide from Namescon 2018 Godaddy sales report.
Thanks. Overall the Afternic/GD sales data and .com asking prices seem broadly consistent, considering that many domains sell for less than asking prices.

For the sake of the features of the distribution to be relevant, wouldn't it be easier to simply stick to 250-5k or 1k-5k across the spectrum?
I should perhaps have made clear that the bullet points were mainly intended as a brief summary of that distribution, rather than as comparison with other TLDs covered. Therefore I made the range wider for TLDs that seemed more spread out, such as .co and .org, compared to more concentrated ones .io and .com. I agree that the absolute percentage in the different range is probably not significant. Perhaps I should have left at just the graphs, with give the full picture. Thanks for pointing this out.

Thank you everyone for your perceptive comments and encouragement.

Bob

PS In most cases there seems a pretty significant drop at $5000+. One thought I had, is that not the limit that some corporate credit cards have for an individual purchase? I wonder if there is pricing less than that to support possibility of impulsive acquisitions.
 
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One more note:

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You know, Bob, Microsoft got nailed for this quite a few times! :)
 
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You got me thinking again (y) Re-evaluated some, added one additional. Thanks!
 
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Thanks for the remarkable post Bob. Love reading it.
 
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Thank you for writing! It is easy to understand and detailed. I feel it is interesting, I hope you continue to have such good posts. i also invested a medium cost for this @ certivatic.com/iso-certification-in-bahrain/ domain
 
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Last moment as almost hate thought of others picking out best because i dropped prices over all trying to encourage a sale. I just hate also to come off unapproachable with a bin out of question to buyer. Would be nice to negotiate to middle rather trying to entice.
 
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I bought a domain poker.buzz, is it good can anyone pls tell?
 
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The only .com domains I sell to end-users that are priced under 10k are made-up words. A great .com domain is worth a lot more than people think.
 
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Wonderful write up. Thank you!
 
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Great research, thank you @Bob Hawkes

I did not see this article at the time you wrote it, so I'm Glad you linked it today (y)
 
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61.6% of the .com names were priced between $1000 and $4999.
Only 2.2% were priced at $25,000 or more, and only 0.2% above $100,000.
About 13.7% of the .com names were priced at less than $500.
For dot com, sheesh! Reevaluate your pricing $$$$$$$$$$
Does the extension alone determine price?

Make no mistake, using the gold standard for your name does not automatically turn it into a gold bar. Rather, and thankfully, these stats reflect an understanding of such. There are times to reevaluate name pricing, but it being a .com shouldn't be the catalyst for doing so.
 
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Best resources, Thank you again
 
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