Sedo.com has released it’s 2009 Q4 report for domain name sales. These reports provide some extremely important data to domain name buyers and sellers. Here is some of that data and some of my thoughts about them.
.com domain names held the highest amount of domain name sales for the year of 2009 out of all domains sold on Sedo, with a 44% stake. The Q4 report holds a massive stake at 72% and a 74% stake out of all gTLD extensions for the whole 2009 year. (.com, .net, .org, .info, .biz) .net comes in with 11%, .org follows up with 7% with .info closely behind at 6% and .biz at 2%.
This clearly tells investors to buy .com domains, as they hold the highest chance at selling!
ccTLD’s is lead by .de in Q4 with 54% of sales.
Sales Volume
The secondary domain name market continues to grow. There was a 5% growth from 2008 to 2009 and that was in a very crappy economy.
Offer / Counter Offer, Buy It Now ? Q4 results
44% of domain sales used Offer / Counter Offer with only 12% of sales coming from Fixed Price (buy it now).
Marketplace auctions accounted for 29% of sales (domains sent to auction on an offer)
5% from auction events (special auctions)
Average Prices
The average price took a $719 dip from Q3 sales price average. This is not good for sellers, but good for buyers! The average sales price for 2009, .com was $1,829. $1,367 for .net and $1,338 for .org
Top Categories
The follow are the 10 most popular categories for 2009
Software
Employment
Services
Regions, Country, Cities
Domain Industry
Tobacco
Insurance
3 Characters
Hardware
Casino
You can view the full Q4 and 2009 domain names results for Sedo (PDF) at that link.
Leonard Britt
I would use the median price rather than average price as a better indicator of what the typical domainer realizes from a sale. Five sales – $100, $200, $300, $400, $4000. The average sale is $1000 but 80% were well under that figure. The median sale would be $300.
Also note the 15% Q4 year over year increase in the number of domains sold (10070 vs 8754). It would be interesting to see how that breaks out. I suspect there has been modest growth in .Net sales and more significant growth in CCTLD sales.
Michael Bilde
Strange that offer/counter offer was so much more effective than the fixed price option.
Hasn’t Sedo been telling sellers for a long time that setting a fixed price would increase chances of selling considerably?
Jamie Zoch
@Michael,
It is likely the case that the majority of the domain names are listed as offer/counter offer and the reason they are the most that sell. Since that is a default setting and domain owners seem to never want to price a domain with a BIN.
Michael Bilde
@Jamie,
Yes, that is probably the reason.
I have begun using fixed prices on most of my listings there, but still do not see a clear pattern as to whether it is more effective or not.