Domain name transactions help push Escrow.com to its second consecutive quarterly record.
Escrow.com released its quarterly Domain Investment Index (pdf) today, and parent company Freelancer.com released its quarterly results last week.
Total domain name transactions in Q1 2021 were $110 million, up from about $94 million in the last quarter of 2020 and $86 million in the first quarter of 2020.
The company says it handled a record number of large domain name portfolio purchases during the quarter.
The median price of a domain transacted at Escrow.com last quarter was $3,333.
Overall, gross payment volume at Escrow.com hit a record for the second quarter in a row at USD $158.2 million, up 44% compared to the first quarter of last year. The difference between total payments and domain payments is accounted for by transactions for cars, watches, personal protective equipment and other goods.
Escrow.com passed the $5 billion total payments milestone during the first quarter of the year.
The 2/3 character .com chart in particular makes little sense to me. How did sales price go for over a decade until 2018 Q1 hovering near the X-axis with values presumably in the low five-figures to suddenly spiking into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, plummeting again, and then spiking into the hundreds of thousands of dollars again.
Muddled data reports are worse than no data reports. The main issue is that it doesn’t show the volume of transactions. Are these data points based on hundreds of transactions or on five transactions? It lumps in 2-letter and 3-letter domain names. 2 letter domain names are 26x as scarce as 3-letter and are priced entirely differently than 3-letter domain names. It is called a 3 “Character” chart, but is it really 3 Characters being charted (like x3q.com) or is actually three letter domain names being charted?
I reached out to Escrow.com about last quarter’s report and was told that the volumes are so low that the median values bounce around like crazy. In that case, if they don’t have sufficient volume of transactions to publish a meaningful report, they shouldn’t publish the report.
One way to try to make sense of the chart is that wholesale transactions dominated through 2018 Q1 but since then most of the transactions are end-user sales in the six figures.
If the sales in 2017 are:
$10k, $10k, $10k, $10k, $300k, $300k, $300k, the median value is $10k.
If the sales in 2018 are:
$10k, $10k, $10k, $300k, $300k, $300k, $300k, the median value is $300k.
Changing one transaction can change the median sales price from $10k to $300k. Without more information about the transactions, such as number of transactions, range, average, and standard deviations, simply publishing medians can be more misleading than insightful.
I agree. Some of the charts shouldn’t be included because they don’t have enough data to make them meaningful. That’s why I only mention the topline number and overall median.
I am not a big seller by any means, but I get multiple sales every quarter (nothing huge, biggest sale ever was under $200K).
Q1 this year was the biggest quarter I’ve ever had, both number of individual sales and revenue.