Wednesday, May 20, 2009

More NNNNN.com Bidding on Snapnames

In my email from Snapnames today, I noticed the following NNNNN.com's that are receiving a lot of interest. Note the prices here are starting prices, not final prices. With all the interest final prices should end much higher.

Domain Price Bids
55000.com 79 22
56000.com 79 13
72000.com 79 9
77000.com 79 17
79000.com 79 9
88000.com 79 18
89000.com 79 9
91000.com 79 9
93000.com 79 9

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Several NNNNN.com's up on Snapnames

Got my daily email from Snapnames and noticed a lot of numerics today, and a lot of NNNNN.com's. Here's the list of domains up for auction today, the current price, and the number of bidders so far:

08000.com Price: 79 Bidders: 5
11300.com Price: 79 Bidders: 7
14000.com Price: 79 Bidders: 12
20000.com Price: 79 Bidders: 58
9669.com Price: 79 Bidders: 63

20000 is a really nice domain, as is 9669.

Friday, May 15, 2009

New Popular Numeric Site

I just checked Alexa.com's rankings for the top 100 site in China, and the old standards were there, but there was a new entry, 58.com. This site a year ago was only in the top 10,000 global sites, now it is in the top 1,000 (#759), and is in the top 100 in China (#81). So it has really shot up.

Now what this site offers, I have no idea... It looks like a directory of some sort, possibly an Ebay-time auction site? Who knows, it's all Chinese to me.

Random Snapshot of the NNNNN.com Landscape

Post-buyout, it is interesting to look at what the NNNNN.com landscape looks like. This is hopefully the first of many random samplings of the NNNNN.com's to see whether they are developed sites and what types of sites they are and who owns them. This is a very crude analysis, I just looked quickly to see whether it was an Chinese site, Marchex site, or parked, and if there was no site or parked, I made a brief survey of who the owner was (if there was any Asian-sounding name, I just marked it as Chinese, with no intent to offend anybody just to get a quick survey). Here is the results from looking at 102 randomly generated 5-digit numbers:

50 are Marchex zip code sites
12 have no sites but Chinese owners (it appears)
8 are parked sites with Chinese owners (it appears)
8 are parked sites with unknown owners (I couldn't find them using a quick whois lookup)
8 have been deleted and are available
7 are parked sites with US owners (it appears)
5 have developed Chinese sites (it appears)
2 have no sites but have US owners (it appears)
1 is a parked site with a Japanese owner
1 is pending delete

Although the sample has a significant margin of error, it seems to comport with previous random samples in terms of the number of Marchex sites, and it comports with the recent random samplings suggesting that about 10% of NNNNN.com's are available, whereas before the buyout in February, 2008, about 20% of NNNNN.com's are available. Of non-Marchex sites, 26 have Asian owners, 9 have US owners, and 8 have unknown owners. Not surprisingly, all the non-Marchex developed sites are Chinese.

Here is the list of sites from the random sample:
02293
Marchex
03085
Deleted
03161
Parked - US Owner
04073
Marchex
07983
Marchex
09909
No Site - Chinese Owner
10377
Parked - US Owner
11189
Parked - Chinese Owner
13104
Marchex
13853
Parked - Chinese Owner
14949
Parked - Unknown Owner
15377
Marchex
15479
Marchex
16054
Marchex
18241
Marchex
19397
Marchex
19421
Marchex
19486
Marchex
19710
Marchex
21771
Parked - US Owner
21934
Deleted
22699
No Site - Chinese Owner
23363
No Site - Chinese Owner
26474
Parked - Chinese Owner
26673
Parked - Chinese Owner
28490
Parked - Chinese Owner
29295
Parked - Unknown Owner
29379
Marchex
30929
Parked - Chinese Owner
31647
Marchex
31703
Marchex
32234
Marchex
33603
Parked - US Owner
33654
No Site - Chinese Owner
33718
No Site - US Owner
34005
Marchex
35871
No Site - Chinese Owner
36072
Marchex
36153
No Site - Chinese Owner
37631
No Site - Chinese Owner
37663
Marchex
40356
Marchex
41001
Marchex
42754
Marchex
44602
Parked - Unknown Owner
46460
No Site - Chinese Owner
46864
Marchex
47016
Marchex
47124
Marchex
48622
Marchex
49323
Parked - US Owner
50006
Marchex
51659
Parked - US Owner
52485
Deleted
53451
Deleted
54570
Deleted
54690
Parked - Unknown Owner
55251
Parked - Japanese Owner
56093
Marchex
56152
Marchex
56175
Marchex
56412
Chinese Site
56503
No Site - Chinese Owner
56691
Parked - Chinese Owner
57433
Marchex
58090
Parked - Chinese Owner
58140
Deleted
58310
Marchex
58781
Marchex
59826
Marchex
60082
Marchex
61104
Parked - US Owner
61415
Marchex
69310
Parked - Unknown Owner
69580
Chinese Site
70821
Chinese Site
71387
Parked - Unknown Owner
71474
Marchex
71706
No Site - Chinese Owner
72328
Marchex
72348
Marchex
72456
Marchex
72856
Marchex
73082
Marchex
73102
Marchex
76033
Marchex
76494
Deleted
76894
Deleted
79587
Parked - Unknown Owner
84649
Marchex
85904
No Site - US Owner
86507
Marchex
87837
No Site - Chinese Owner
88679
Pending Delete
88747
Chinese Site
91219
No Site - Chinese Owner
92311
Marchex
92664
Parked - Unknown Owner
95866
Marchex
96982
Chinese Site
98830
Marchex
99512
Marchex

Thursday, May 14, 2009

NNNNN.com Renewals Update

I have done some random sampling of available NNNNN.com's and it looks like my predictions that about 1/2 of NNNNN.com's bought in the buyout last year would be renewed was accurate. After looking at 5 samples of 500 random NNNNN.com's, the result was that 9.6% were unregistered. The margin of error in this sampling is 1.94.

Not surprisingly, NNNNN.com's that start with "0" had the highest percentage unregistered. I did 3 samples of 500 random NNNNN.com's starting with 0, and the result was that 16.5% were unregistered. The margin of error here is 2.33.

As of the end of January 2008, there were 19,346 NNNNN.com's unregistered. Now it appears there are only around 10,000. If anyone is looking for signs of long-term strength in the NNNNN.com market, I think this is a pretty good one. Despite a severe recession and the collapse of the buyout, many people still seem to understand the value in these domains. It is still to early to tell whether registrations of NNNNN.com's are going to continue to move in a positive direction, but this news should be somewhat encouraging to those who are holding for the long-term.

Friday, May 8, 2009