With several domains sold for 8-figures numbers this summer and a growing list of premium names changing hands, this year could make a splash in the domain names secondary market.
Crisis, which crisis? The domain names market has seemed quite bullish in the past months, as secondary sales of premium domain names are hitting new highs. Just in August, connect.com sold for $10 million while nfts.com raked a whopping $15 million. As documented by DNJournal, at least 10 names changed hands for more than $1 million this year, making 2022 a noticeable year for this market. Besides, the sale of nfts.com is the 4th biggest ever recorded.
Historically, the resale of premium names has always been significant. In the late 1990’s, several 7-figures sales showed the world that cyberspace had its own real estate logic. Notably, in 1999, loans.com or wine.com sold for $3 million each while the owner of business.com scooped a spectacular $7.5 million. At a time where Google was still a small start-up and Facebook did not exist, people understood that owning a piece of “virtual real estate” could be as valuable as owning a real, high-value property.
More than 20 years later, this is still true. The fact that a 4-letters name like “nfts” that doesn’t mean anything for most people on earth could sell for the price of a building in a capital city (or an island in the Pacific Ocean) could seem like pure speculation. But NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens, unique digital assets recording ownership rights on a blockchain) are already a multi-billion dollars market and experts foresee it will become a hundred billions market in the 5 years to come. It’s only logical that a very generic domain name in this new market, for a technology that could be a key to the metaverse and transform digital ownership, can attract such big money.
All in all, one hundred domains were sold for more than $50,000 apiece so far this year. This includes very short names (like ddl.com and grt.com, both sold for about $3 million each in July), generic single dictionary words (yachts.com for $600,000 in June, kindness.com for $227,000 in July) or, more rarely, multiple-words names (CybersecurityJobs.com, $205,000 in March).
The .com is still the king of the secondary market, but high value sales in alternative gTLD are now common. If the 20 biggest sales were all for .com names, the list of the 100 biggest sales this year show a dozen names in the .xyz extension (wrap.xyz, $110,000 in April, for instance).
