Quicksearch
Calendar
|
December '08 |
|
||||
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 | ||||
Crisis or no crisis for domain names?
Wednesday, December 31. 2008
There's no real suspense here: yes domain names are also being hit by the current economic downturn. Aftermarket domain sale volumes may not be falling too much, but transaction values are certainly down as sellers adapt to the end of the "anything sells (even a dud domain)" era by dropping their prices.
Another sign of a cooling off in the second hand domain market: NameMedia has shelved plans for a $172 million IPO which the professional domain seller had filed back in November. Current market conditions have been named as the main reason for not going ahead with the stock market listing.
Yet it's far from being all doom and gloom for the industry. Record sales are still happening. Take AT&T's purchase of YP.com for a mouth-watering $3.85 million cash payment in November. The American telecom giant is the operator for the US Yellow Pages, so the two-letter domain is an obvious bonus for the company's telephone directory service.
The sale shows that good names will continue to hold their value during the current downturn, just like top real-estate tends to fare much better than the rest of the property market in such times. Think top-flight New York apartments and you'll get the idea. Just like that kind of real-world property gemstone, a two-letter .COM domain has undeniable intrinsic value.
So as usual, the crisis is really a way to bring back a level of sanity to some over-inflated values. It's also an opportunity for savvy investors to fill their shopping basket with great deals. In a few years' time, they'll be the ones behind the headline-grabbing sales you'll be reading about on this blog…
Pre-crisis numbers show continued domain name growth
Friday, December 5. 2008
But for how long? That's the question some people will no doubt ask themselves while reading Verisign's latest domain stats. The .COM registry's numbers cover Q3 2008, so miss out on the full impact of the credit crunch. They show no real signs of slowing domain growth.
Even though there was a small decline in the rate of overall domain registration growth, this is easily explained by the historical trend for a weaker third quarter when compared to registration volumes for the first half of any given year.
Overall, across all TLDs, there were 174 million registered domains at the end of September 2008. That's a 19% increase year over year. The world's TLDs added a total of 11.5 million names in Q3 2008, a decline of 2% in growth rate from Q2 2008 and also 2% less than the Q3 2007 growth rate.
There were 68.9 million names registered across the ccTLDs at the end of Q3 2008 (89.4 million for .COM and .NET combined). That's 5% growth over Q2 2008 and 26% over Q3 2007. China's .CN stole a march on all other ccTLDs by moving into top spot ahead of Germany's .DE. The next three are .UK, .NL and .EU, but the top three ccTLDs all experienced flat growth rates in Q3 2008.
Check out www.Domaines.Info's stats for comprehensive registration numbers including overall top ten, gTLD top five, ccTLD top five, regional top fives (Europe, Asia, America and a top three for Oceania) and an overall top 40. Each chart shows current month registration numbers and compares them with the previous quarter's registration numbers. Growth rates are given and where possible, local market penetration is shown as a "number of domains per 100 people".
