Thank you for your experience based comments
@Jurgen Wolf.
Here briefly is my response:
(a) The question of whether registry sales should be excluded depends on whether the question is "How many organizations are purchasing (and using) ngTLDs?" or "How much money can individual domainers make? Of course those on venues like NPs are interested predominantly in the second question, although I believe that the overall health depends on use of an extension, and both questions have relevance.
(b) The report of course says "
the registries dominated high value sales"so I don't disagree with your statement that if you excluded all registry data the numbers are different. I have several times made estimates of the percentage of the number of sales and the percentage of total revenue that are registry, for those interested in the second question - e.g.
here I estimated that while only about 30% by number of NameBio reported ngTLD recent sales are to registry, about 54% of the dollar value is to registry. Some others on NPs suggested that the 54% should be higher.
(c) I am not sure that you looked at the actual list on NameBio of the sales but I would urge you to do so (not just the top 10 but the entire list of 167). I think you will readily convince yourself that while many of the big sales to registry, there really are a lot of nonregistry sales in this dataset (for example look at the Flippa sales if you want a smaller set to go through). I quickly went through the 167 and I would say that 54 are likely registry (all of the JB sales, the Alibaba few, all of the global, I think the 8 Dynadot, the 4 tech although it is possible they are reselling originally premium in some cases but I counted all 4, at least 4 of the Sedo handled ones, and I think 13 of the Alibaba cloud). So about 32% by number are registry, about the same number I found in different data earlier. The hardest to figure out are the Alibaba Cloud, some of which are Chinese resellers and some are registry, and West also.
(d) Yes most .top sales (and registrations) are from/to China. Actually that is true in other niches like short numbers I think (correct me if I am wrong on that). I am not clear why that is important who the buyers are? Except that it means to be successful with top you should try to figure out ways to serve that market. There are about 10,000 new businesses starting each day in China. Yes, different extensions are popular in different regions.
(e) You say "
Average for nTLDs is mid-high $xxx, from real practice with thousands domains..." If you are saying what I think, then I totally agree with you. The full report (the one at the link at the bottom of the post) actually talks about why I think it is a good thing that now we have significant numbers of non-registry sales mainly in the $150 to $450 range. The main thing that changed in this report is that there was a lot of activity at that price level (particularly at Flippa but also other places). I know that some will discount that as too low to be meaningful, but I would point out that the median price for .com NameBio sales today was $249 and the median of .org today was $172. Some days are a bit higher, but most NameBio reported sales are in the hundreds of dollars. I agree that very few ngTLDs sell for more than that if that is what you are saying. A few do, like the ones in the top 10, but that is not the norm.
(f) While I am sorry that you have trouble selling Moscow.top (it is an elegant name), it is one domain and I am not clear what that means to us all in a broader context. As with any domain name you make a list of who might want the domain name and how likely it is to get the name in front of them. I admit, I find .top hard and have asked on NPs for advice on how to get domains in front of potential Chinese buyers.
(g) What encouraged me about the past month was that there were a lot of obviously non registry sales that were in a lot of different extensions. Yes .top, .tech and .global still had a fair amount of the pie, but more diversity than the last 6 months especially in the $150 to $500 range. As I said in the previous reply, and also in my original full report if you go to the bottom of it, it is easier to sell legacy extensions.
I know many on here have felt burned by .mobi or ngTLDs and I do get that. I try to always look at as much and as current data as possible, and that is simply what I have tried to contribute to the community through these monthly posts. I really am not forcing anyone to read them!
Have a good day, and thank you for taking the time to express you comments. Best wishes for every success in your domain business.
Bob
