Analysis of NamePros Reported Domain Name Sales

For more than 19 years NamePros members have been reporting sales in the thread, started by @RJ, Report Completed Domain Name Sales Here.

In this article I look at sales data posted at NamePros so far in 2024. I went through the thread, noting the domain name, date sale reported, price, sales venue, buy-it-now (BIN) or negotiated, inbound or outbound, acquisition mode, and hold time. Since it is open format reporting, not all data is available for all sales.

For the period from Jan 1, 2024 through June 12, 2024 there were 271 reported sales. A couple of these were lease-to-own (LTO) transactions that had not completed, and I excluded those, since it is possible they will not complete. Therefore the analyzed number of sales was 269. I did count LTO sales that had completed. Note that I went by reporting date, and in some cases these were for sales made on earlier dates. These 269 sales totalled $1,042,083..

Please note that many members cloak from Google search the names, for example by placing spaces or slashes, so please do not comment on specific sales in the comment section below.

Wide Variety in Prices

As would be expected, there was significant variety in sales prices, since these ranged from major sales of high quality names to liquidation price transactions.I show the distribution of sale prices below.

The overall average price was $3888, while the median price, the middle value when they are arranged in order, was $1300. Not all, but the majority of sales were clearly retail.

There were two sales at or above $100,000, and only 7 sales at less than $100, with 3 of those at $99.

Most Sales are .COM

The majority of sales were .com, 67.5% of sales reported.

There was a huge gap between the 183 sales in .com during the reporting period, and second place .org at 10, and .cc third at 9. The graph above shows all extensions with 3 or more sales over the period surveyed.

Many Extensions Had A Sale

Although the majority of sales are .com, there were many extensions represented. Top Level Domains (TLDs) with 3 or more sales were, in order of number of sales: .org, .cc, .ai, .xyz, .co, .net, .fr, .io, .vc, .se, .app and .us.

I was somewhat surprised that the number of sales in .ai. .co and .io was not higher. There were 2 sales recorded in .fi, .shop, .tv, .wiki and .wtf.

Single sales were reported during the survey period in these extensions: .af, .bet, .bi, .bot, .co.uk, .consulting, .dev, .esq, .fund, .homes,
.link, .me, .network, and .science.

Afternic Dominated Sales Venues

Afternic was the most reported sales venue, with 48.9%, followed by Dan at 25.6%, and Sedo and Atom tied at 5.9%.

Plot of the most common sales venues reported. This was from the NamePros Report Completed Sales thread for the period from Jan 1, 2024 through June 12, 2024.​

There were a few sales reported from other venues including AlanAdlari, BrandBucket, BrandPa, GoDaddy Auctions, DNWE, Dynadot Marketplace, Efty, Namecheap Market, and NamesCon, but not more than 2 from any one of them.

For at least 14 sales, the seller simply used a service to close the sale, with Dan the most popular venue to close, followed by Afternic, Escrow and Sedo.

One high-value sale skewed the results, but when I look at dollar volume, rather than number of sales, Dan at $423,853 slightly outperformed Afternic’s $373,882.

Afternic Fast Transfer Popular, But Not Dominant

The Afternic Fast Transfer network was the source in 40.9% of the Afternic sales. I had expected this to be a bit higher, but keep in mind that Afternic Fast Transfer only applies to certain extensions, and that the registrar must be approved for Fast Transfer.

Hold Times

If these results are indicative, most names are held a substantial period prior to a sale. The hold time was not reported for all sales, but it was in many cases. The average hold time was 25 months, while the median was 11 months. The hold times ranged from less than 1 month to about 180 months, that is 15 years.

While some of the sales after 10 year plus hold times were at high prices, this was not always the case. For some domain names the name was eventually liquidated after a long hold period for not much more than the accumulated costs.

Most Sales BIN

At least for this dataset, buy-it-now purchases were much more common than sales negotiated up from some lower offer. While the process was not specified for many sales, when it was, there were about 3.8 buy-it-now sales for every 1 negotiated sale. In terms of actual numbers, 126 sales were BIN and 33 were negotiated, with the process not clear for the other sales.

Most Sales Inbound

While there is a fair amount of discussion around outbound techniques on NamePros, it turns out that in this dataset the vast majority of sales were inbound, at least for those where the process was reported or obvious. In 133 of the sales the process could be determined, and 124 of these were inbound and just 9 outbound.

Great Variety in Types of Names

While certain themes were repeated, there was huge variety in the type of names. They literally varied from a single-character name to a 7-word name.

The Acquisition Process – Many Hand Registrations

While many sellers did not indicate how they had acquired the name, for 144 sales this information was provided. I was surprised by how many names had been hand registered HR – 62.5%. That was followed by closeouts at 11.8%, and then registrations after expiry, using tools like ExpiredDomains, at 8.3% and auctions, mainly expired auctions, at 8.3% as well.

144 of the NamePros reported sales from the first half of 2024 provided information on how the name was acquired. Here HR means hand registration, DR is also technically a hand registration but following a drop, closeout refers to names that were in an expired auction but not sold at auction, purchase refers to a wholesale acquisition, NP are acquisitions where it was stated the name was obtained at NamePros, and backorder is the process of obtaining names as they drop through a service.​

Just to stress, almost half of the sales had no acquisition data provided, so this is possibly a skewed picture of the acquisition process.

Things Are Looking Up

While some sellers report sales in bunches, and a few large sales can skew results, I did tally the dollar sales volume per reporting month. This shows that indeed April and May were weak months, as has been anecdotally reported.

The good news is that even though I did not correct for the fact that we only have 12 days of data for June, it is by far the highest month of reported sales in 2024. That was influenced by two high-value sales, but it does seem that the market is picking up again.

Reporting Sales

There are arguments pro and con for reporting your sales – see Reporting Domain Name Sales.

Even if you report your sales to NameBio, there is still a good case to be made for reporting sales also in the NamePros Report Completed Domain Name Sales Here thread. While NameBio restricts your report to the price, date and venue, at NamePros you can add context such as the negotiation process, hold time, acquisition process, and inbound/outbound, and share your thought process in acquiring the name, or how it was priced, or other information. All of these help others learn from your sales and expertise.

Thank you to all who report their names, to the Report Completed Domain Name Sales Here, or to NameBio. Your data helps inform our domain investing.

I look forward to your discussion of this analysis, but as noted at the start, please do not mention specific names and sales in the comment section.