Over the July 4th weekend, a very strange thing happened. A few Chinese domainers apparently registered nearly 500 NNNNN.com (five digit .com domains). As of this morning, I could only find 34 of these domains available for register, out of 100,000. I know I missed one day of drops, and haven't done a bulk scan, so the number may be a little higher, but my guess is it's under or around 50.
It looks like we are barreling forwards towards an imminent buyout. While previously we had noted that the registration rate had slowed somewhat, from the multi-year average of 13 domains per day to around 7 per day, it appears to have picked up steam on a massive level. Why these purchasers bought the domains is not evident, perhaps they noticed that the domains were nearly bought out and wanted to get in before a potential gold rush or perhaps they have other goals for the domains. What is interesting though is the sheer volume of registration activity in what is usually a pretty sleepy domain space. Somebody is starting to put some serious money into registration of these domains, and the lowest quality ones as well.
We will keep monitoring the situation in the days and weeks to come.
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