We’re now just over the 1-Month mark into the New Year and it’s business as usual around the domain industry. In fact, domain sales have started off really well this year with NameBio reporting a total of 10,404 sales. I’ll break those sales down into more detail below and also include some of the biggest transactions thus far in 2020!
Extension Breakdown
Most readers can probably guess which extension has achieved the most sales so far in the New Year. Obviously, the leader is .COM with a total of 8,794 sales. Follow up extensions include .NET with 272, .ORG with 444, .IO with 109, and .DE with 44. Other country-code extensions have also started 2020 off with better averages when compared to last year. For example, NameBio reported just 23 .CA sales in all of 2019 – an average of just under 2 per month. Just one month and one week into 2020 and the .CA extension already has 5 reported sales.
Marketplace Breakdown
With so many sales in fewer than 40 days you’re probably wondering which marketplace is responsible for the most sales. GoDaddy leads the way with 6,729 reported sales. Follow up domain marketplaces include DropCatch with 1,032, BuyDomains with 450, Sedo with 381, NameJet with 873, and Dynadot with 175. Some companies I believe have under-performed are Flippa with 60, Afternic with 3 and Uniregistry with 75.
Domain Length Breakdown
Liquid domains versus numeric domains versus keyword domains. There are so many different types it’s worth having a section dedicated to the sales figures for each. So far in 2020 there have been 1,214 reported sales for domains between 3 and 5 letters long (excluding hyphens & numbers). More specifically, 532 were LLLL sales and 521 were LLLLL sales. 5,392 total sales have been reported for domains between 6 and 12 letters long (excluding hyphens & numbers) and 2,489 sales reported for names 13+ letters long (excluding hyphens & numbers). There has been 2 NNN domain sales (453.net for $3,025 and 265.cc for $25,000) to go along with 20 NNNN domain sales and 161 NNNNN sales.
Top Domain Sales
Now let’s take a look at some of the top domain sales this year and see what’s been happening with them.
results.com – Sold on 01/19/2020 via Sedo for $264,000. It’s a great domain and was purchased by a B2B company that appears to be located outside of the United States. The domain is already developed and appears to be clean looking website.
apuestas.es – Sold on 01/23/2020 via Sedo for $123,340. I’m a little surprised to see a Spanish domain rank #2 on the list this year, but it’s true. The domain, however, appears not to be parked or developed. Instead, it just goes to a blank page.
7910.com – Sold on 01/23/2020 via GoDaddy for $83,250. There aren’t usually many NNNN.com domains that popup on the sales chart, but this one ranks #3 in largest sales thus far in 2020. It’s not developed or parked at the moment, though. Instead, it just returns a Server Not Found error.
koles.com – Sold on 01/16/2020 via NameJet for $73,055. This could have been purchased primary for type-in traffic since there is an extremely large company in the United States that goes by Kohls. Considering they’re pronounced the same and people tend to miss-type, I’m sure this name has some type-in traffic coming in. It looks like the new owner has already started capitalizing on that because the name is currently parked.
chauffage.fr – Sold on 01/16/2020 via Sedo for $69,581. This makes two ccTLD domains finishing in the top-5 for largest domain sales of 2020. The domain hasn’t been developed yet and currently redirects to a webmail login page for OVHcloud, a web hosting provider. That has me thinking development for this domain has probably already begun.
Conclusion
Although liquid domains still aren’t selling for as much as they once were (the lowest LLLL.com sale so far this year was KVAE.com for $100 – the ONLY $100 LLLL.com sale), the sales market is still doing well overall. Last year yielded 107,392 total domain sales – just under 9,000 per month on average. In less than 40 days this year there has been 10,348 which puts the early 2020 average fairly close to last year final figures.
