6N Domain Registration Continues - Buyout 2021?

The last time we looked at 6n .com's, approximately 68% were registered, or around 680,000 out of 1 million.  That was in January.

Six months later, it looks like registration trends for 6n's remain strong.  It seems there are now about 73% registered, using random sampling.  Using 15 bulk domain searches of 500 random 6n's, here are the percentage registered in each random search:

72.60%
72.00%
71.40%
76.20%
72.20%
71.80%
73.20%
69.60%
70.00%
72.80%
74.00%
75.00%
73.40%
72.80%
74.80%

The total average from all searches was 72.79%, which corresponds to around 730,000 registered 6n domains.

Random searches are fairly accurate at this level, so it seems to be a reasonable assumption that there were approximately 50,000 6n's registered since January.  If this pace doesn't change, 6n's should be completely bought out in around 3 years.

Of course, a lot can change, and sometimes the last numbers are the most difficult to get registrations that stick, as they are usually the worst numbers.  On the other hand, as the percentage of available 6n domains sinks to 20% or even 10%, sometimes speculators see a target for a buyout and quickly buy up the remaining domains.

5n Domains Rising?

According to ShortNames.com, prices for 5 digit .com domains may have climbed noticeably over resistance in the past week.  For the last couple years the floor price for these domains has hovered under $400, frequently touching this resistance but never really rising above.  But just looking at the recent chart, this may have changed.

Here are the past sales as reported on ShortNames, which seems to signal a possible floor for these domains at around $500:

10028.com auction $10,028 3/6/2018 Namejet
13442.com auction $550 3/6/2018 Namejet
14055.com auction $1,413 3/6/2018 Namejet
13782.com auction $1,500 3/6/2018 Namejet
34958.com auction $500 3/6/2018 Namejet
54560.com auction $580 3/6/2018 Namejet
60504.com auction $500 3/6/2018 Namejet
67330.com auction $1,000 3/6/2018 Namejet
76640.com auction $560 3/6/2018 Namejet
77483.com auction $600 3/6/2018 Namejet
80544.com auction $760 3/6/2018 Namejet
84520.com auction $500 3/6/2018 Namejet
94660.com auction $550 3/6/2018 Namejet
42020.com auction $1,720 3/6/2018 DropCatch
42030.com auction $796 3/6/2018 Godaddy
20635.com auction $800 3/5/2018 Namejet
15089.com auction $800 3/5/2018 Namejet
29924.com auction $550 3/5/2018 Namejet
47727.com auction $560 3/5/2018 Namejet
52242.com auction $550 3/5/2018 Namejet
52349.com auction $721 3/5/2018 Namejet
71019.com auction $800 3/5/2018 Namejet
63443.com auction $560 3/5/2018 Namejet
87125.com auction $1,500 3/5/2018 Namejet

However, it may just be that the quality of names on auction has been fairly high as of late, and this might just be a blip on the charts if we wait a while.

It should be noted that there's one (not so pretty) 5n sitting for a fixed price of $388 at Godaddy with no takers as of yet.  The domain is 54790.com.  So maybe don't call a $400 floor just yet.

Will be monitoring in the coming weeks to see if there is a prolonged rise in the baseline price for 5n.com domains.  Stay tuned.

Charting NNNN.com Domain Prices Over Time

Using the very useful data from Shortnames.com, we created a rolling average of NNNN.com prices since 2008 and charted it on a log chart.  The result is pretty interesting:



















What seems like an extreme parabolic rise on a linear chart looks like a more steady rise on a log chart, followed by consolidation (bull flag?) over the last couple years.

Now a warning, the data for the average sale price isn't perfect.  In order to try to get the average baseline sale price we did a rough elimination of large sale prices, since these were throwing the averages out of whack.  We'll probably go back over this and try to use a more refined standard deviation calculation.  But the chart should work fairly well as a rough approximation of baseline prices for these domains over the last decade. 

We'll post more log charts for other numeric domain categories in the future.

Q4 2017 - How Did .Com Domains Fare?

Pretty well it seems.  The Verisign Domain Name Industry brief is out for the Fourth quarter of 2017.

Registration of .com domains remains strong, with 131.9 million .com domains registered as of December 31, 2017.  This is an 0.84% increase over the prior quarter, and a huge improvement over Q4 2016, which saw a decline of 1.17% in .com domain registration.  Year over year, it's a 2.73 % increase in .com domain registration.

Here is the updated chart:

Number Registered (Millions)		Quarter		Increase (%)
131.9		Q4 2017		0.84%
130.8		Q3 2017		1.24%
129.2		Q2 2017		0.62%
128.4		Q1 2017		1.18%
126.9		Q4 2016		-1.17%
128.4		Q3 2016		0.71%
127.5		Q2 2016		0.71%
126.6		Q1 2016		2.10%
124		Q4 2015		3.25%
120.1		Q3 2015		1.35%
118.5		Q2 2015		0.59%
117.8		Q1 2015		1.90%
115.6		Q4 2014		0.61%
114.9		Q3 2014		1.06%
113.7		Q2 2014		0.44%
113.2		Q1 2014		1.07%
112		Q4 2013

Registration is still moving along, despite 130 million .com domains already being registered.  

Registration of .com Domains Continues

Every year I wonder if we are going to reach an inflection point in the registration trends for .com domains.  However, every year registration continues apace. 

In the last 15 quarters, there was only 1 quarter (Q4 2016) where .com registration declined.  Here are the numbers for .com domains for the last 15 quarters (from Verisign):

Number Registered (Millions)	Quarter	Increase (%)
130.8	Q3 2017	1.24%
129.2	Q2 2017	0.62%
128.4	Q1 2017	1.18%
126.9	Q4 2016	-1.17%
128.4	Q3 2016	0.71%
127.5	Q2 2016	0.71%
126.6	Q1 2016	2.10%
124	Q4 2015	3.25%
120.1	Q3 2015	1.35%
118.5	Q2 2015	0.59%
117.8	Q1 2015	1.90%
115.6	Q4 2014	0.61%
114.9	Q3 2014	1.06%
113.7	Q2 2014	0.44%
113.2	Q1 2014	1.07%
112	Q4 2013

The 4th quarter of 2017 should have ended on a strong note.  There are apparently 134 million .com domains registered now.  Will be interesting to see the official numbers once Verisign publishes them.  

The average increase is about 1% a quarter, which is just astounding given how many domains are already registered.  If this pace continues, there should be about 150 million .com domains registered by the end of 2020.  How many of these will be short domains?  Trick question!  The short domains are (nearly) all registered.  

Probably we will see the complete (and sticky) buyout of 6 digit .com domains by then (all 1 million of them), as well as a bigger dent in the 5 letter .coms and the 7 digit .coms.  Prices for the premium short numerics and letter domains may also continue to rise, we shall see.  

How Many LLLLL.com's (5L.com's) Are Registered? Update

The last time we looked at this, in 2011, only 10.8% of these domains were registered. 

In other words, out of  11,881,376 domains, around 1,283,189 were already taken.

It's now 2018, and we re-checked a random sample of these (10 samples of 500 random character strings, so 5,000 total).  It came out that an average of 29% of these domains were registered. 

This means that registration of LLLLL.com domains has about tripled since 2011.  There are now 3,445,599 5 Letter .com domains registered.  Still less than half of the overall pool, but a steady stream of registrations nonetheless. 

What does the registration look like for 7N.com's?  This is somewhat of a parallel, because there are 10 million of these.  A whopping 3% of these are registered, or around 300,000...  Shows the dangers in trying to do a parallel between numbers and letters based solely on scarcity.  Letters are still far more popular on a 1:1 basis. 

6n Domain Registration Update - Buyout Coming?

It's been a while since we've updated the blog, let alone checked the 6n.com registration numbers. 

Back in 2011, 84,000 Were Registered

We looked at this back in July of 2011, when there was 8.42% registration of the six digit .com domains.  Remember, there's a million total of these, so this equates to about 84,000 registered domains.  I ran another spot check a year later, on May 16, 2012.  At this point 9.36% were registered, so a slow climb of about 1%.  I did another spot check a couple years later, on March 21, 2014.  At this point, 13.96% were registered. Registration had picked up a little, but was still running at a pretty slow rate.

Nearly 700,000 6n's Registered Now

It's now several years later, and how many of these domains are registered?  From random sampling it looks like around 68% are registered.  In other words, almost 700,000 6 digit .com domains are now registered.  At some point in the last few years registration of 6n's exploded.  This is similar to where things were for five digit domains 10 years ago, around the time of the initial buyout.  There were around 20-30% available to register.

And Selling Too

It's a fair bet than in a decade, all of these will be registered, and even the worst domains trading well above reg fee.  Another crazy stat about 6 digit domains?  There have been over 550 sales of these domains for more than $1,000.  And there have been over 11,000 sales of these domains for more than $100.  The biggest sales went for more than $20,000. 


So 6n's are for real.  We'll keep an eye on the registration trends, and see if we can estimate when the buyout is likely to occur. 

Update/Correction:  Man, I've been out of this space for a while!  Russell from Shortnames.com notes that 6n's were bought out in 2015 for a while, before the bubble popped.  This actually makes some sense, as 5n's were rapidly bought out back in 2008, and then it popped and a number of them were available for registration for several years.  The "real buyout" took time.  Funny thing is, LLLL.com's were bought out before the 5n's, and the LLLL.com buyout was stickier originally.  But over time, the 5n.com's were worth more.  Shows the value of supply/demand (100k 5n's v. 450k+ 4L's) as well as the Chinese market's focus on numerics.