Sedo, the leading online marketplace for buying and selling domain names, announced the findings of its annual Secondary Domain Market Study, which revealed continued growth in demand for premium domains in 2008. Valuable online real estate yielded $77 million in revenue, and resulted in an overall eight percent sales increase over the 2007 total of $72 million.
For the first time, a country code top-level domain (ccTLD), Kredit.de (German word for credit), which sold for more than $1 million, ranked the highest on Sedo’s top 10 domain sales list of the year. In fact, the German .de country code proved to be the strongest selling ccTLD of 2008 with 6,159 sales. The .co.uk was the second most popular with 1,305 domains and a sales volume of more than $4 million. Meanwhile, the .us top-level domain (TLD) grew significantly in 2008 with a 12 percent increase in sold domains and a 40 percent growth in sales volume over the previous year.
Sedo’s complete list of highest selling domains in 2008, include:
Kredit.de: $1,176,672
Invest.com: $1,015,000
Printer.com: $650,000
Villas.com: $478,149
Tell.com: $400,000
Lowfare.com: $365,000
Banners.com: $360,000
770.com: $350,000
SC.com: $300,000
Triplecreditreport.com: $260,000
“Our annual results validate the continued investment momentum in the secondary domain market, despite the slow economy,” said Tim Schumacher, chief executive officer for Sedo. “We expect that high quality domain marketplaces such as Sedo, will sustain industry growth this year and beyond as companies, developers and entrepreneurs continue to leverage the web as an effective marketing tool to boost revenue.”
.com Remains King of the TLDs
Beyond the numbers above, Sedo’s study showed that .com remained the most wanted extension. As the best selling worldwide TLD at Sedo, .com drew 76 percent of all sales. Coming in at number two was .net at nine percent, and .info secured third place with seven percent of sales. These results remained consistent with the generic top-level domain (gTLD) shares in 2007. Overall, every worldwide TLD except .biz saw an increase in the number of domains sold in 2008.
