Who Is First?

This week's Domain Name Journal sales report by Ron Jackson with only 9 of the spots in the top 20 going to .com extension domain names has got a lot of discussion at NamePros. Proponents of the new global top level domains (ngTLDs) have pointed out that 5 of the top spots went to new extensions.  However, critics have justifiably pointed out that it was a single week, and that the Radix release of multiple month of sales had a big impact, and in any case the big sales were by registries not independent domain name investors.

The Study

I decided to look back at the last 100 NameBio daily sales reports on its archive in order to get a broader picture of how often different extensions lead with the highest domain name sale.  For each day I simply noted the extension of the domain name that was in first place.  Here is what I found.

• com 75
• all other cc not listed below 7 (2 in de, 1 each in co.uk, al, fi, us and ch)
• ngTLD 4
• net 4
• io 3
• co 2
• org 2
• legacy gTLD (asia) 1

I did these by hand ticks, and may well have missed one or two (in fact I think I did, as the ticks add to 98 and should 100 for the 10 pages of archives), but this presents a substantially correct picture that com lead about 75% of time. This is of course not surprising.

Discussion

Probably both sceptics and proponents of ngTLDs will find something positive in this analysis. The ngTLD sceptics will  point out that .com lead all ngTLDs combined by a factor of more than 15. Proponents of ngTLDs will counter that some large new extension sales are happening, enough to lead the daily market report, and that the rate at which ngTLDs appear on the market report is higher than it was two years ago (I have not been able  to  quantitatively  check this, but I believe it is true).

While the .com extension dominates the raw numbers, if you scale these results according to registration numbers (since at least approximately the number of domains for sale in each extension probably scales that way), the situation becomes somewhat more equal across extensions, although .com still leads.

To look into this I present below the number of times an extension appears at the top of the NameBio daily report per total registrations in that extension. I used data that about 133.9 million .com are registered, 14.4 million .com, 146.3 million country code extensions in total, and 20.2 million ngTLDs.

• So 1 ngTLD leads the NameBio daily report (during this 100 day period) for approximately every 5 million registrations.
• By comparison 1 .com leads the same NameBio daily report period for about every 1.8 million registrations.
• For .net, the numbers would be 1 per 3.6 million registrations.
• For country code extensions taken in total, about 1 per 11.3 million registrations

These are small number statistics and not all that significant. Within country code, clearly some extensions do much better than the average, while the majority will never lead the NameBio daily report.  It would be interesting to look into similar data for a longer period, and I may do that in the future.

We should not read too much significance into how often domain names appear at the top of the NameBio daily report, or for that matter the top of the Domain Name Journal weekly reports.  Yes, it is interesting to see which domain names are the high price sellers, but more significant indicators of health of extensions are use in actual websites, total sales volume, average sales price, and especially the trends in those numbers. I looked at the website use statistics and trends in this post, and will be looking at the others in future posts.

Links:

• Domain Name Journal weekly report mentioned in this post
• NamePros discussion on the report
• Radix premium sales report first 6 months 2018
• NameBio Daily Reports
• Verisign statistics on domain registrations in different extensions
• Website use and trends of different extensions
• Our site NamesThat.win - thanks for visiting
• Permanent link to this blog post

Original post Aug 10, 2018.

Disclosure:  I hold mainly ngTLD domain names (you can see my complete portfolio here) and  that may be considered a bias.  I do try to use a fair and balanced approach in all of my analyses however.  I am  not associated with NameBio, but would like to acknowledge their incredible database and their generosity to make it available to the domain community. 

Fine Print

This post is offered for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be considered domain name investment advice. While an attempt has been made to be accurate, there is no implied or explicit warranty, and you are responsible for verifying any information of importance to you.

I try to be fair, balanced and objective in my analysis.  If you feel this post does not meet that standard, please express your concerns to me.  As disclosure, I do have a domain portfolio that is predominantly ngTLD domain names, although I do also own a number of .com, .ca, .co and a few other country code extension domains..

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