Slowly dying? Let’s look at the numbers. — Is Sedo
A look at Sedo’s sales, week-by-week.
Today Konstantinos Zournas over at Online Domain published an article with the provocative headline “Is Sedo Dying”?
Konstantinos published data from the most recent Sedo sales note and compared it to the same week the year ahead of.
The prior week it was 492 domains for $1.0 million compared to 545 domains for $1.6 million in the same week of 2015. He then points out:
You can instantly see that absolute value has dropped by half a million (if you take out autism.rocks that is not the norm), there are only 59 domains noted this year compared to 218 last year, sold domains are a bit down, and “buy now” listings are up.
It sets off alarm bells when someone shows so little data. And the reason for the drop in listed sales is since Sedo now only notes sales over $2,000.
Konstantinos did say he “checked many other weeks ahead of these” in coming to his conclusion.
Are Sedo’s sales really down? Is it more than a hangover from what was probably a great Q4 thanks to China?
I charted out all of the weekly sales notes going back to the first week of January last year. For weeks that Sedo combined sales notes (e.g. two-week note following the holidays), I divided these evenly across the weeks. It also looks like Sedo didn’t send a note for one week last year, so there’s a one week gap in my numbers. Note that Sedo rounds its weekly transaction numbers, so the totals aren’t exact.
SEDO WEEKLY SALES 2015-PRESENT
It’s tough to see much of a pattern. Sales from week-to-week are quite choppy. The orange trendline shows upward movement, no doubt helped by a couple of big weeks near the end of 2015 and so far this year.
At the same time, total noted sales in the first 25 weeks this year are slightly higher than the first 25 last year — and even the last 25 of last year when Chinese demand was in full swing.
SEDO TRANSACTION VOLUME 2015-PRESENT
From a volume perspective, you can see the spike in late 2015 (thanks to three and four letter sales). You will also see that the past few months have been a bit lower than usual. Average weekly volume over the past 12 weeks has been 517 compared to 586 in the same 12 weeks the year ahead of.
This isn’t a complete anomaly. The first 25 weeks of this year averaged 553 transactions. Last year it was 584.
The trendline is down.
I hope this data helps put Sedo’s sales in more perspective than a one week snapshot.
Now, the reality of domain name marketplaces is certainly changing. I doubt many end users go to Sedo.com to search for domains. Same with Afternic.com. There are essentially two major drivers of domain sales now:
1. People landing on a parked page
2. People seeing an exact-match syndicated listing at a domain registrar
The marketplaces that can win these two are positioned well.
