.io Why .IO will greatly appreciate over time

[TehNeth]

So I'm convinced that .IO will significantly appreciate in value over the next decade.
Allow me to explain it from an angle that most domain investors might be unfamiliar with.

Some background first. I am not a professional domain investor but I've always had an interest in this market.
I'm an independent game developer with a special focus on casual multiplayer games, namely the so called .IO browser games. ( I own and have developed Ninja.io & Zapper.io among others )

You may or may not be familiar with many of the more popular .IO games like Agar.io, Krunker.io, Surviv.io or Slither.io.
These games literally have hundreds of millions of players, and their app versions often have 100m+ downloads. These are the type of games that kids play at school and adults play at the office, because they don't require installing any software.

Here's the thing: there's not a kid growing up without having played a .IO game at some point during their primary / highschool / college years. The domain is essentially burned into their collective memory, and in a matter of years these kids will be adults starting their own business, and they won't have forgotten about the extension. It will be a naturally familiar TLD to them, and this will offset its appeal compared to the many alternatives out there.

I think many investors underestimate the degree to which mere familiarity with the domain among youth will potentially influence its future value.

I've seen a bunch of great blog posts on .IO here lately, but none of them mention the importance of its exposure through gaming, which I think is vastly underestimated.

 

[Doron Vermaat]

Great post. I agree that mindshare for .io is not only huge within the technology vertical but also among many youngsters due to the gaming link the extension has.

For me, revenues and sell trough rate from .io domains have outperformed .com since last year.

 

[superprogrammer]

Agree, lets not forget jenkins.io

 

[Domaining Ocean]

Agreed! Thanks for sharing.

 

[barman]

Love this post! This is something I've never even thought about.

It may come as no surprise, but I'm well invested in .io names (see: recent buzz about my sale of jackpot .io). So a post like this is -chef's kiss emoji- This whole thing about games built on .io might explain why my giant.io gets a lot of traffic haha

Thanks @TehNeth !

 

[TehNeth]

Love this post! This is something I've never even thought about.

It may come as no surprise, but I'm well invested in .io names (see: recent buzz about my sale of jackpot .io). So a post like this is -chef's kiss emoji- This whole thing about games built on .io might explain why my giant.io gets a lot of traffic haha

Thanks @TehNeth !

Congratulations on your sale. A very reasonable price imo.

.IO has definitely been on an upward trajectory, especially the gaming and crypto related domains.
Allow me to illustrate with my own limited experience over the past several years.

Back in early 2017 I acquired ninja.io for ~5K USD. This seemed like a reasonable price for a premium gaming domain at the time. I was actually surprised that it was still available at that price point.

About a year later I tried to acquire swipe.io, which I planned to develop into another .IO game.
Unfortunately the asking price of 5BTC (~30K USD at the time) was too steep for me.
Too bad I didn't have a crystal ball, because less than a year later it sold for 68K USD to some crypto company. Premium .IO gaming domains are now beyond the budget of many independent devs.

Concerning browser games, I get the impression that there may also be a shift towards more serious gaming. The quality of browser games has been increasing steadily, which is primarily driven by major advances in browser performance and standardization of key technologies related to networking, graphics and computation (webgl, websockets, ecma spec evolution, improved js engines etc).

Consequently, these higher quality browser games start competing with other big-budget games, justifying a larger development budget, which will draw bigger gaming companies able and willing to pay more for premium gaming domains. I'm speculating here, but imo this could further drive up the value of the .IO TLD, perhaps along with .GG.

Covid has also had a positive although perhaps transient effect on the popularity of these games and thus demand for related TLD's.

 

[ecalc]

there's not a kid growing up without having played a .IO game at some point during their primary / highschool / college years. The domain is essentially burned into their collective memory, and in a matter of years these kids will be adults starting their own business, and they won't have forgotten about the extension...

True but a lot of fond memories also end up in the digital trash heap, for example .net, napster, wii, 3d tvs, etc.

.IO has definitely been on an upward trajectory

Not as measured by reported sales:

time period	reported .io sales
2018	$1.3M
2019	$0.9M
2020 ytd	$0.46M
trailing 5 yrs	$4.9M ($0.98M/yr)

source: namebio

 

[TehNeth]

True but a lot of fond memories also end up in the digital trash heap, for example .net, napster, wii, 3d tvs, etc.
Not as measured by reported sales:

time period	reported .io sales
2018	$1.3M
2019	$0.9M
2020 ytd	$0.46M
trailing 5 yrs	$4.9M ($0.98M/yr)

source: namebio

Yeah, true, sometimes these things just die off. I just don't see it happen for .IO but history might prove me wrong.

The sales figures are interesting. I suspect the crypto bubble of 2017/18 might have something to do with the relatively high 2018 volume.
The 2020 ytd doesn't surprise me though given this crazy quarter.
As Bob Hawkes analysis would suggest, single word .IO domains appear to be in vogue, and most low-hanging fruit has been claimed. This might go some way explaining sales figures.
I do wonder what percentage of sales actually does get reported and the y-o-y discrepancy.

But like I said, I'm not a professional trader and I simply haven't done any thorough analysis on this particular market. I mostly look at it from the perspective of a game developer and I've definitely seen gaming-related .IO domains appreciate, including the ones that I own and the offers I received on them.

 

[Doron Vermaat]

I love NameBio but I believe we're better off to stop using it to measure sales volume across extensions. The only sizeable marketplace currently reporting end-user sales is Sedo, a marketplace in decline, with many sellers having moved their domains to other solutions and marketplaces over the last few years.

 

[Rhinnnn]

Thank you, @TehNeth, for this look at .io from a non-domainer perspective. It does seem that this is an extension that's bound to grow in popularity and value in the immediate future.

I love NameBio but I believe we're better off to stop using it to measure sales volume across extensions. The only sizeable marketplace currently reporting end-user sales is Sedo, a marketplace in decline, with many sellers having moved their domains to other solutions and marketplaces over the last few years.

Indeed, NameBio is a good tool to use but it's certainly not the all-seeing eye that we'd need for a proper look at sales. People may notice that NameBio reports GoDaddy sales, but those are just from auctions - very few end-user sales there.

 

[Spex]

I'm an independent game developer with a special focus on casual multiplayer games, namely the so called .IO browser games. ( I own and have developed Ninja.io & Zapper.io among others ).

Great post all around. I'm interested in the ".IO" games. Are they all developed from scratch, or is there a market for "white label" games that someone could buy, rename and submit to the app stores?

I know nothing about this industry, so forgive me in advance if I misused any terms. Thanks

 

[TehNeth]

Great post all around. I'm interested in the ".IO" games. Are they all developed from scratch, or is there a market for "white label" games that someone could buy, rename and submit to the app stores?

I know nothing about this industry, so forgive me in advance if I misused any terms. Thanks

Most IO games are built from scratch, though generic implementations do exist of some of the more popular and simple concepts like Agar.io and Slither.io. The source code for these projects is typically available on github.
When a relatively simple concept takes off, dozens of competing spin-offs and clones are produced, and the market tends to become saturated fairly quickly.

A lot of .IO games are produced by independent developers. Successful IO games have recently been acquired by larger companies though. For instance, the recent acquisition of Surviv.io by Kongregate.

 

[April004]

Agree!
Even new .IO domain registrations (specifically related to gaming/tech/smartphone) have increased on our site slightly higher than .NET, .ORG, .CO, domains!

 

[maksimfa]

I do think that .io is the new .net, and far more common for tech companies to go there.

I currently use artlist.io for my youtube videos.