Sales volume up, average price down in 2008.
Sedo has released its 2008 Secondary Domain Market Study (pdf), and it provides a wealth of information about the domain name aftermarket.
The domain brokerage company sold over $77 million in domains in 2008, a slight increase of 8% over 2007.
Although overall sales revenue was up, the company saw weakness in the fourth quarter. The company sold 9,727 domain names in Q2 (the peak for the year) and only 8,754 in Q4.
According to the company, the average selling price of domains decreased markedly in 2008, with .com prices falling in half from $5,016 in 2007 to $2,512 in 2008. The overall price for all top level domains fell 21% to $2,098. Although I have no doubt that sales prices have fallen, averages are very misleading. It may be weakness of million dollar sales that drag the entire average down. What matters to most domain investors is the median sales price.
47% of domains transferred by Sedo were .com, followed by Germany’s .de at 17%. .Net, .info, .uk, .org, and .eu each accounted for 4% of sales. I’m surprised to see .eu on the list as sales volume seems to be weak.
domain guy says
as was stated at davos by putin the world has taken a 40% haircut. 40% across the world. every industry and domains is no exception.
Domain Name Media says
Thanks for the link. The ccTLD pie chart was especially interesting with Rick trying to bring awareness to the market. I wasn’t surprised to see .de dominate with 61% of ccTLD sales, but I didn’t expect .cn to only comprise 1% of country code sales considering the number of total registrations.
bernard says
Thus maybe $20M domain name revenue for the domainer outside the domainer crowd, and 80M domains registered by these domainer, thus $800M yearly expense.
Wow what a terrific game!