Name Sales Price Down 15% — Median Domain

Median price drop not as severe as average.

The prior week I wrote regarding Sedo’s 2008 Market Study, which showed a 21% drop in the average sales price of domain names to $2,098. I explained that the “average” number doesn’t matter, and that we ought to really pay attention to the median. The median is the midpoint. If you ordered all 36,884 domain names from lowest price to highest, the median would be right in the middle (technically, the average of the 18,442th lowest domain and 18,443 lowest domain).

An average price can be skewed drastically in one direction or another by a few outlier sales.

It turns out that’s the case this year since there were fewer million dollar sales. Compared to last year, the average dropped a lot since there were fewer outliers near the top.

Sedo’s analytics team kindly calculated the media domain sales price for me. This year’s median was $500, compared to $588 last year. That’s a drop of 15%. So the “typical” domain sale is down 15% year over year compared to the 21% average decline.

You’ve probably heard the expression “there are lies, damn lies, and statistics”. The $500 median may not be representative of the entire domain name sales universe. It’s a combination of mostly investor purchases but a lot of end user purchases as well. But Sedo probably has the best and most diverse data set to work with. Some other sales venues have higher median sales prices, but they don’t let people sell domain names for $60.

Thanks to Sedo for providing this data.