While the United States is probably the dominant power in domain names, its own country code extension,
.us, has not achieved the same strength. For example, even though Canada has about one-tenth the population of the United States, its
.ca extension has almost double the registration numbers of
.us, and about triple the number of websites in the Alexa 1M.
The reason is primarily because
.com plays the role of a United States country code in many ways. Initially,
.com,
.net and
.org were intended as American extensions, only later coming to be viewed in the global sense.
Nevertheless, the
.us country code has been a significant extension since its
introduction in 1985.
Just last month, two domain names in the extension sold for more than $10,000 each, with
PPE.us selling at Sedo for $20,000 on March 5, 2021, and
hund.us selling for $11,822 on March 24, 2021, also at Sedo.
In this article, I take a look at major sales, the extension sell-through rate, annual trends, and the distributions of sales and asking prices.
Sales Trends
The annual dollar volume of all
.us extension sales (above $100) listed in
NameBio are shown. Other than an abnormally high 2011, the sales volume has been relatively stable. Note that there have been reporting changes during the period covered.
Show attachment 187867
Averaged over the past five years, 155 sales above $100 per year were listed in NameBio, with an average price of about $1000.
Sales Price Distribution
While a few sales are at very high prices, the majority of sales in the
.us extension are at prices under $1000. The full distribution is shown below.
Show attachment 187868
The highest sale recorded in the
.us extension on NameBio is
video.us sold for $75,000 at Afternic in 2007.
Top US Sales Last 5 Years
At least from those recored in NameBio, the top sales in the
.us extension from the past five years are listed below.
live.us $26,000 (2018)cash.us $20,100 (2016)PPE.us $20,000 (2021)wallet.us $18,250 (2016)oxygen.us $17,999 (2020)gaming.us $15,000 (2016)evus.us $13,000 (2016)CreditCard.us $12,500 (2020)CreditCards.us $12,500 (2020)care.us $12,000 (2018)hund.us $11,822 (2021)fly.us $10,000 (2020)shirts.us $10,000 (2016)
Here is the
link to the complete list of NameBio-recorded
.us sales over the last 5 years, arranged by price.
There are several place names among the significant sales, including
Nashville.us and
Miami.us. Interestingly,
Iceland.us also sold for a good price.
One bonus of
.us is that, in addition to representing United States, it is a nice match across the dot in many expressions including the word
us. Domain name sales such as
fly.us,
add.us and
insure.us take advantage of this. Occasionally the extension is used in single-word domain hacks split by the dot, such as
famo.us.
Asking Price Distribution
With
Dofo Advanced Search, it is possible to find the distribution of
asking prices for any extension. The results for the
.us extension are shown below.
Show attachment 187869
While there are some high asking prices, most are $2500 or less, and many less than $500.
This distribution can be compared with asking prices for some other extensions in the article
How Are Investors Pricing Their Domain Names.
US Extension Apparent Sell-Through Rate
It is possible to combine the number of names listed for sale across all of the major marketplaces, using Dofo advanced search, with the number of sales using NameBio, to determine an
apparent sell-through rate. I say apparent, because the majority of retail sales are not listed in NameBio, so the actual sell-through rate is higher by some factor, perhaps about five.
There were 777
.us sales over the past five years, or about 155 per year on average. If we compare that with 140,948
.us extension names currently listed for sale, the apparent annual sell-through rate is about 0.11%. A similar calculation for
.com yields a higher apparent sell-through rate, about 0.63%. However, it should be noted that, almost certainly, there are significantly more wholesale acquisitions included in the
.com NameBio sales than is the case for
.us.
The NamePros US Extension Discussion
Since 2012 there has been an
official discussion, showcase and sales thread at NamePros.
Major Users of US Domain Extension
The best known user of a
.us domain is
Zoom.us, currently the 16th most popular website in the world according to
Alexa 1M.
Other popular sites on the extension according to
DomainNameStats include
BUYMA luxury fashion shopping and
Band, an integrated communications service.
In the Cisco Umbrella estimates of web traffic
.us ranks 8th overall, while somewhat lower in ranking by number of Alexa 1M sites, according to data presented in
Website Traffic Changes for Different Domain Names.
There has been widespread use of the
.us extension by American state governments in the past. Over recent years, some have moved to
.gov extension domain names, however.
The Extension
If looking for more information on the extension, check out
about.us. There is a requirement that
.us registrants have a
bona fide presence in the United States of America.
GoDaddy Registry operate the extension. Neustar had operated the
.us extension prior to the
GoDaddy acquisition of Neustar’s registry business last year.
I checked for
abuse ratings at Spamhaus for the
.us extension, finding 8.4% showing abuse with a 0.69 badness score. That is somewhat worse than
.com, 3.2% and 0.39 score, and
.net, 4.6% and 0.46 score, although not particularly high.
Registration costs in
.us are normally sharply discounted for the first year, with renewal costs of $8 to $10 at a number of registrars according to
TLD-list.
Please share your experiences and outlooks for the
.us extension in the comments section.
Thanks to Alexa, DomainNameStats, NameBio, and Dofo for data used in this article.
The idea to do an analysis on the .us extension was suggested to me by a NamePros member, but I can’t seem to find that post. If that was you, thank you for the idea, and please identify yourself in the comments, if you wish.
TGIF!
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