new gtlds Analysis of ngTLD Sales

[Bob Hawkes]

I just released my fourth (monthly) analysis of NameBio reported ngTLD sales. This was another huge month for .top, but .app also did very well for such a new extension, snagging two of the top five sales in the 30 day period. Here are the highlights.

During the monthly period ending June 22, 2018 there were

• 104 recorded ngTLD domain name sales;
• The average sales price was about $3450, while the median price was $1580;
• In terms of major sales, 8 were for $10,000 or more;
• The highest price sales in this period were bz.top for $53,904, RN.app for $15,000, host.app for $14,162 bet.top for $13,861 and ttt.top for $13,130;
• There were sales in 16 different extensions during the reporting period;

The complete report with commentary, links (to sources and the previous three similar analysis reports) and a list of all extensions sold during the 30 day period is available here:

https://agreatnameforyou.blogspot.com/2018/06/ngtld-sales-report-may-23-june-22-2018.html

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

And if NO REGULAR 4F sales - you may forget about renewals for 500+ domains apriori.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Regarding comparison to .NET

Even with 20-50 good .NETs you can be in SIGNIFICANT profit.
And you need at least 5x times more nTLDs to get the same cashflow.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Even .app noise has finished already.
3.5 months elapsed - just few "short" sales and that's all.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

And even if you have them - you will not receive any offers.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Regarding LL/LLL.TOP
They ALL are Premiums.

Yes of course. Those were the easy ones to categorize! (Although even with those there have been cases we know background where they are being resold, like the interview on here re ex in top)

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Registry has troubles with Moscow.top - it is availabe for registration ~4 years already and for symbolic price...
This was just example of almost zero demand outside CN.

Your English domains (if any) have no value for Chineses.
Except some crypto related terms and something MEGA.

I am not sure what you mean by registry has problems with Moscow so won't respond to that part.

I do accept, and have said previously myself, that .top is a unique case, and a challenge for those outside China, so agree re English to some degree. Nevertheless the list of sales last month in top does include quite a few English words e.g. frog, koala, dolphin, BlueSky, gravity, quadrant, zebra, furry, prime, reset, face, furry.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

I am sorry that you have trouble selling Moscow.top

And again...
This trouble is not mine...
This domain is available since 2014.

Regarding English (and not only English) singulars .TOP
Almost all valuable words/names are Premiums as well.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

+ use WHOIS...
Very helpful tool to distinguish "regs" and "aftermarket sales".
In most cases I can determine them even without WHOIS.

You are talking about TLD where domainers are just spectators.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

+ there are many Chinese newbies with cryptoincome...
They don't know how to reinvest their money and burn it by regging Premium .TOPs...

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

They also like to burn it with .online except Premiums... because .online requires the same premium fee yearly.
With .TOP Premiums - renewal is standard.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

WHOIS is the best information source to get what is going...
When you research it continiously and daily - you have chances to avoid mistakes and to make money...

For me NameBio is already like Estibot... just for fun.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

So if an average domain investor holds say 500 new TLD domains across dozens of extensions but none of them are five character or less .TOP domains what does their cash flow probably look like?

X sales at median price of $xxx per sale
500 renewals at average cost of $xx per domain
Net cash flow?

The comparison to .Net and .Org is interesting. I still hold dozens of .Net domains. I think I sold one last year for low $XXX but it has an original registration date from the late 90s. The last year I had a net addition of .Net registrations to my portfolio was likely 2008 ( every year since more drops than adds). The last year I had a net addition of .TV domains to my portfolio was likely 2012 (since then occasional adds but far more drops as $30 renewals consume the rare sale).

I like the way you posed this @garptrader - I think you have hit on various key ideas, sales as fraction of a portfolio, how many years typically hold, sales prices and renewals are all important factors. Registry sales and premium renewals complicate the calculation, of course. I may try to do a more quantitative calculation, but I suspect numbers would show that a net sale would be more likely, when registry values excluded from ngTLD sales the average price would be same order of magnitude or slightly favour ngTLDs, renewal costs (once premiums excluded if no registry sales counted) would be pretty similar when averaged over holding time if the investor seeks the best renewal deals, and that overall it is better ROI to invest in net or org but the new extensions would be within a factor of 2 or 3 when everything is factored in. An earlier calculation I did trying to work in most of these factors found that ROI is maybe 40% for new extensions compared to all (mainly com) - I think uncertainty in some factors means it might really be 20% or maybe 50%. Thanks again for a concise, clear, insightful comment.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

Regarding sales under $500...
This can be done with any traditional domains... for such results - nTLDs are not needed at all.

I agree that the median prices in both legacy and new (and many 'general') country code are similar. A domain investor might therefore, I agree, say why not simply stay with what I know. I think that is a totally smart move for many domainers, probably the majority. Of course the same argument could be held for all sorts of other extensions such as .io, .co, .pro etc. that many find to be worthwhile investments.

But just because the median prices are similar, most a bit under $500 as you say, does not necessarily mean that end users, and therefor domainers might want to consider new extensions. Early in 2018 I laid out 12 reasons in this post in case interested.

Thanks for your comment, @Jurgen Wolf - at least they keep the thread in the active list , and multiple viewpoints are always worthwhile!

 

[Bob Hawkes]

For me NameBio is already like Estibot... just for fun.

I disagree with this so strongly that I am lost for words!

Yes, NameBio has well recognized biases because certain venues list and others don't, it generally under represents private sales, it does not include sales less than $100, a few registries report premiums and most do not, etc.

But it does have a wealth of daily updated sales data from many of the most important venues. It is trivial to search in powerful ways, it easily gives statistics. In minutes I can see if words starting or ending a certain way have sold, and where and when and for how much.

I am so grateful to Michael and his team for creating such a fantastic tool, and making it readily available to us all, free! I do accept that in any field, there are multiple sources of information, some quantitative and some qualitative. These should not be discounted, but nor should a widely used, long term, powerful database of domain sales value.

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Also keep in mind the following, starting from this post:
https://www.namepros.com/threads/the-pro-discussion.522420/page-303#post-6863855

 

[Jurgen Wolf]

Regular inbound inquiries only on .life
Very low conversion with other nTLDs...
From my own experience.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I have just posted the new monthly ngTLD sales analysis (covers Aug 23 - Sept 22, 2018 inclusive), based on NameBio sales information. While number of sales is up (but see Note 1 in full report) as well as number of extensions with sales, the average price is considerably down, as is the number of major sales and the total dollar volume.

Here is the summary:

• 313 NameBio recorded ngTLD domain name sales in the 30 day period, with $198,500 total sale volume (Although see Note 1).
• The average sales price was $634. The median price was roughly $198.
• In terms of major sales, 3 were for $10,000 or more 30 were for $1000 or more.
• There were sales during the month in 46 different extensions, the most since I started these reports. Ten different extensions had 10 or more sales in the month.
• The highest sale during the month was AD.top which sold for $32,232. AR.studio at $15,495 and transparency.online at $10,000 took second and third places.
• There were ngTLD domain sales during the month at 10 different venues. Flippa had the highest number of sales, but Jiangsu Bangning had the highest sales volume. Sedo took third place in sales volume.
• For the 100 highest value sales in the month: 12% were 3 letter (or less), 32% were single word, 36% were two word, 3% were three word, and 17% were other.
• Registries accounted for just over 40% of the dollar volume of these sales, but less than 10% of the number of sales this month (Note 3).
• So far in 2018 there have been 1120 ngTLD sales in total listed on NameBio, with an average sales price of $3743, accounting for a total of $4.2 million sales volume.

A few of the names sold in the last 30 days that I personally liked (in no particular order): ticket_city, games_business, smile_direct, AR_studio, a_company, Mr_glass, biomedicine_online, Chelsa_fun, wonder_top and Plato_top. I think these, and a number of other sales, do a great job of congruence between the name and the extension. Interestingly some of these such as ticket_city went for deal prices imho. The most valuable domain name sold in this period in my opinion? Probably AR_studio (although in terms of price it was second). Clearly the names smile_direct and Mr_glass have great value to one or a few specific end users. I like the idea of Chelsea_fun, even though the price was modest. I think it could be a model for effective use of this relatively new extension.

When I was doing the venue part of the analysis I realized that GoDaddy had only a single ngTLD sale during the reporting period! So many legacy sales are there, and I believe they routinely report to NameBio, so why is it not a venue for ngTLD sales? I also looked at Sedo over the years in ngTLDs. There is a trend toward higher prices (slightly) and higher volume of sales. For example at Sedo alone this year there are 132 sales with $4124 average price 2018YTD and total volume $544k. The 2017 average was $3939 and 2016 was $2473.

The full report, including notes on limitations, methodology, possible problems, etc. is available at the following link. If you scroll to near bottom of each report I give links to all previous reports in one place for those who wish to do comparisons.

https://agreatnameforyou.blogspot.com/2018/09/new-extension-sales-analysis-aug-23.html

The next report will be out in the last week of October, and will cover the period ending Oct 22. Note that the analysis includes all sales reported in NameBio during the period, but does not include any other ngTLD sales even if reported on reputable sources. Please do keep in mind which venues do, and do not, report to NameBio in considering the report.

Read the small print on the full report but essentially this is for educational purposes, should not be considered domain investment advice, and is offered without warranty and you are responsible for your own domain investment decisions. As always, I am so appreciative to Michael and the folks at NameBio for making such an awesome database of information available to us all.

Take care and have a good day, NPs friends.

Bob

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I seem to hex the ngTLDs as just after my sales report we had two days in a row with not a single NameBio reported ngTLD sale!.

Past week has been one of the quietest in months for new extension domain sales. Just 9 sales in NameBio database over 5 extensions (top, xyz, online, app, plus) across 5 different venues (West, Sedo, Flippa, Alibaba Cloud, Jiangsu Bangning), $780 average selling price, range $117 to $1341.

https://namebio.com/?s==UDN1gjN3gTM

Does anyone know if the .global registry have stopped reporting to NameBio? They typically had 12 or so major sales per month, but the last was Aug 12 and not a single report since then on NameBio.

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I am a bit late for the most recent analysis, but will be posting a new analysis in the next day or so. Stay tuned!

 

[Bob Hawkes]

I meant to add that although I did my best to designate each sale as registry or not, and while some are easy to do that with certainty, for others it is challenging. It probably could be done better with paid tracking services, but I simply did the best possible using free access services. Therefore the stats I give re registry percentage could be higher or lower.

Also, I should add that I actually downloaded sales data at end of period, and I know some have been added to NameBio database for the dates in the reporting period after that time. Following past practice I did NOT add those into this analysis. This results in some significant under-reporting. I talked about the phenomena in context of daily reports in this post at NameTalent.

Bob

 

[Primary Names]

I am planning to do a year in review, not just for new extensions but for several major categories. It won't have the same detail as the monthly ones but hopefully will be useful.

I will be doing the final month for 2018 soon in the regular format.

Now that I have gradually formalized how I do them, my plan is to do the 12 monthly reports for 2019 and then a detailed compilation of them. I don't have plans to go back and do Jan and Feb of 2018 though (the way NameBio works it is tough to extract just one month from in the past).

I agree that Jan and Feb seem like good months (just got an offer a couple of hours ago through Undeveloped on one of my ngTLDs so year off to good start!), and it is unfortunate I did not start the series until March. I hope this year to cover the entire year with a consistent analysis procedure.

Bob

Hey Bob, Did you do the annual reviews on ngtlds, as mentioned in this post ?
Cant seem to find it here.

Your website ( nametalent.com ) too does not seem to have been updated since Jan2020.