What Donuts’ data tell us regarding the fresh top level domain market
A look at premium sales and which TLDs drive the most volume
Donuts, the largest top level domain operator in terms of number of strings, published a note regarding its sales in October. While the firm doesn’t provide absolute numbers in its note, it does give us some insight into the fresh top level domain market.
Let’s start with premium domains. Donuts lists its top 20 premium domains registered in October, ranked by wholesale price. The top sale was prime.mortgage, followed by health.studio.
Running some checks at domain registrars, I believe the wholesale price for prime.mortgage is regarding $2,500 and health.studio is regarding $1,000. The 20th highest sale on the chart, millionaire.dating, is regarding $800 a year wholesale. So sales of $1k+/year premium domains are still meager, but there’s a lot of activity sub-$1,000. (Keep in mind that this list doesn’t include renewals of premium domains.)
The firm also lists its top 10 top level domains in terms of registrations. The list is topped by .live again, but this doesn’t tell us too much regarding success. While .live is one of Donuts’ better domains, first-year registrations are only a few bucks, so price has a lot to do with the volume. It would be interesting to see this list ranked by total registration revenue.
As I pointed out last month, people tend to register second level domains in fresh TLDs that are similar to the terms they register in .com. Online and Life are the top two at Donuts.
You can view the full monthly note here.
