Despite all the good efforts of domain publications, such as DNJournal, or dedicated products, such as NameBio, the vast majority of domain sales go unreported.
There are several reasons why most domain sales aren’t ever publicized:
- Collecting the information of sales from a variety of domain venues, such as Sedo, GoDaddy, NameJet or Flippa, is a passive task. As most of these venues only report sales above a certain amount, there are numerous others that remain “in the dust.”
- Many times, the seller and the buyer engage in a formal or informal “NDA”, agreeing to not disclose the sale’s particulars. On some venues, such as Sedo, the buyer can pay extra to keep the sale private.
- Quite often, the sales provided contain errors or typos, allocating the wrong amount for the wrong domain. It’s very hard to collect and verify every domain sale accurately.
- Dozens of other venues, including domain forums such as DNForum or NamePros, are rarely included; many such domain sales are the result of private transactions that follow a public sale.
- Brokered domain sales are, for the most part, private. Unless the domain sells for a sizable amount of money, the brokers keep the transaction under wraps. And why should they disclose it, when often times, their corporate buyers are established companies that wish to remain under the radar!
- International transactions that occur outside of the US are also, for various reasons, harder to uncover and share. Many domain sales in Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia and Oceania occur without the rest of the world ever learning anything about them.
- Direct corporate acquisitions are covered in a shroud of mist, and these domain sales are the hardest to crack; often, the analysis of financial declarations is required, such as in the case of Cars.com.
Overall, the domain industry is a living, evolving organism that will soon celebrate 30 years since the first commercial registration of a domain name.
With large sales, such as that of 360.com making the news, it remains to be seen how far and how fast the domain industry will continue to grow.
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a passive task
surely you mean massive – doesn’t sound very passive
Carl – It might be massive, but it’s definitely passive: the venues provide the info.
The real issue is that most of the transaction do happen on top 10 brokers. We run a league of top 100+ brokers and have contacted most of them to release the data. Some did, some did not. E.g., NamePros acknowledges the need but not there yet. But the truth remains the truth, 20% of the venues account for 80% of the deals if not more.
By the end of the year should have data from some 300 places, do stay in touch if you want to hear more insights.