Tuesday, February 27, 2018

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.

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

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.  

Wednesday, February 7, 2018

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.