People are creating websites in droves.
Website building platform Wix (Nasdaq: WIX) reported first quarter earnings today. It had a solid first quarter, but things got really interesting in April. As domain name companies can attest, there has been a boon in people registering domains and creating websites due to the Covid pandemic.
In April 2020 compared to April 2019:
- 63% more people signed up for a Wix account
- Net paying subscribers added during the month jumped 207% compared to the April 2019 growth rate
- Collections (cash receipts) soared 76%
- Online store subscriptions grew 580% compared to the year-ago growth
- Online store transactions grew 110%
Earlier this year, Wix said it was too early to determine the impact Covid would have on its business. Now it has lifted its guidance going forward, citing the change in consumer behavior “creating a vast tailwind for our business.”
For Q1, both revenue and collections were up 24% compared to the same quarter of 2019. Wix’s base of paying customers increased by 162,000 to 4.7 million during the quarter and 6.9 million people registered for accounts.
Great for domain names, people are now thinking of taking their future in their own hands.
Good news for domains.
There was a Wix ad I had seen on Youtube and it said how many people were creating websites a day on Wix (it was A LOT) but I missed the number, tried to rewind the ad but it wouldn’t let me. For some reason I am thinking it was like 75,000 ? Not sure, that seems high but maybe it was that number. I know it caught my attention. Did anybody see that same ad and know the number?
Jamie,
I got this of of Google.That is a big number.
“45,000 new users sign up for Wix every day. Over 22 million mobile sites use Wix”
The Wix website says there were 50M users in 2014 and 150M in 2019. So they must be adding around 20M users a year which is close to 55,000 a day. So Jamie’s observation of 75,000 is very likely to be correct since the company is reporting a big jump recently.
https://www.wix.com/about/us
In contrast, the May 13 daily NameBio report records just 369 sales above $100. So there must be a colossal number of new Gs and hand registrations being made every day to facilitate the enormous demand for websites.
Wix counts a user as anyone who signs up for an account. Only about 3% of users are paying customers, and you need a paid account to have a domain name. Otherwise, you have a Wix subdomain.
Regarding NameBio, it’s only catching the public sales. Many (most?) of these public sales it captures are investor-to-investor.
Thanks for the extra info Andrew.
If you take 3 percent of 75,000, you still get the big number of 2250 a day. If you added Godaddy mini websites and other competitors, a very big number would result.
The last Sedo weekly report which should be mostly end user sales had just 61 sales above the $2,000 threshold or whatever. That’s only 9 domains a day! Well it is one of the major venues. Of course they make lower value sales as well.
I know most end user sales aren’t reported but I don’t think they could come anywhere close to the thousands of names being registered daily for the site builder websites.
I believe that most people choose an available domain name. That said, looking at Sedo’s sales over $2k is very limiting. Their typical sale is less than $1,000. Afternic delivers a lot more sales, and we don’t have access to their inventory.
Wow- the proof is in the numbers- and April clearly showed some very compelling data for website creation- will have to see if this continues well into Q2- but this is positive for domains!
Very exciting for domains, lets hope this chips away at those keep telling me domains are dead and everyone will buy on Amazon and in social media sites like Facebook
BREAKING NEWS
I just sold my first domain using the Uniregistry Afternic DLS network!
I haven’t seen any of these sales reported anywhere before.
It seems to work exactly the same as Godaddy or other qualified registrar names in the DLS. Got the email last night (as well as another from Uni saying a separate BIN sale has closed as well).
From mid March to mid April, I only made one sale, but from Mid April to today May 16, I have made 8. That’s my fastest sustained sales velocity ever.
What about Shopify?