Saturday, January 31, 2009

79 MILLION .com Domains!

According to Domain Tools, today we passed another benchmark in domain history. Over 79 million .com domains are registered, 79,000,932 to be exact. Shows that even in an economic downturn the number of available .com's to register keeps shrinking. And when you think that out of those 79 million, only 1k are NNN.com's, 10k are NNNN.com's, and 100k are NNNNN.com's, you see how truly scarce numeric domains are compared to the total number of domains that are already registered. Next stop, 80 million!

Thursday, January 15, 2009

NNNNN.com Buyout A Year Later

We are nearing 1 year from the buyout of NNNNN.com's. As with nearly the entire domain market, things have not gone as well as many hoped. What I have done, and I think many others will do as well, is trim our portfolios and renewed the better domains. Numbers that start with 1 or other low numbers, have good number sequences, get decent traffic, represent words on cell phones, etc., are more likely to get renewed. There were about 20k NNNNN.com's available a year ago this time. I guess anywhere from 5k-15k will get dropped, probably somewhere in the middle. This is probably healthy for the NNNNN.com market in the long run, more time for people to develop their domains, wait for demand to catch up to supply, etc. The underlying dynamics that suggest strength in this market are still there, we are just in a massively bad economy for domains included, and it will take more time for Chinese internet penetration to expand (although this is happening very rapidly).

Some criteria for keeping domains I have used (not a complete list):

* Is the .org/net/info/cn/etc. owned/developed?
* Are people searching for the number or are advertisers advertising based on the number (check google adwords keyword tools for both)
* Check if the number is a US zip code, a big city foreign postal code, etc.
* Type the number into google products search and see what comes up, you may be surprised.

Also, to look on the bright side, you can see from the following SnapNames auctions that NNNNN.com's are still attracting lots of interest if they are good numbers. The numbers below are not from completed auctions, but from the e-mails SnapNames sends out telling people to join existing auctions, so final sales prices are probably much higher. Anyways, here's hoping for a better year for NNNNN.com's in 2009!

1/13/09 90049.com Price 79 Bids 8
1/5/09 88336.com Price 13 Bids 4
1/5/09 99949.com Price 25 Bids 3
1/4/09 16969.com Price 20 Bids 3
12/24/08 29299.com Price 13 Bids 3
12/8/08 99881.com Price 26 Bids 5
11/13/08 53666.com Price 12 Bids 3
11/5/08 31333.com Price 12 Bids 3
10/7/08 33559.com Price 12 Bids 3
9/18/08 69000.com Price 79 Bids 4
9/17/08 55552.com Price 59 Bids 3
9/17/08 90034.com Price 104 Bids 4
7/13/08 98116.com Price 60 Bids 6
7/13/08 98118.com Price 60 Bids 6
7/10/08 11800.com Price 79 Bids 10
7/9/08 95032.com Price 79 Bids 9
7/1/08 02200.com Price 21 Bids 5