Domain Magnate

Here is the recent registrations stats for End of June 2008, or the latest data available. Top 3 tlds, .com, .de and .cn make up over 100 million domains, .net pushed to the 4th place.

We can see an enormous growth in .cn registrations, but this is mostly due their extremely low price. Many sites offer Chinese domains for just $0.13, yes, 13 cents only!

.co.uk is now slightly above .org and with UK pound going strong unlike the US dollar, the recent week’s sale of Phones.co.uk for $345k and LegalJobs.co.uk for $40k in addition to the previously reported sale of Cruises.co.uk for $1.1. Million comes to show how big the .co.uk tld is.

Apotheke.eu (“pharmacy” in German) sold for $81K last week and as the EU expands and grows tighter we can expect the .eu names to grow as well.

.asia is the new kid on the block and while many consider this new extension completely useless, there was one good sale in dnjournal last week: LasVegas.asia for $30k.

There are 1,426,613 .ru domains registered in total and 60,491 .su
.ru stands for Russia and .su is the obsolete extension of Soviet Union, which is still being used.

But the shocker is all 3 character .ru domains are registered! I could hardly believe that the first time I heard about it mentioned on NP, but a bunch of random checks show that this is true, most appear to be registered by one company: LEGATO LLC and were taken a month ago.

Personally I think the buyout is quite premature, there is hardly enough reseller interest to sustain market values above reg fee for these and it’s highly probably that they will all be dropped in a year, in a same way as it happened to LLLL.com around year 2000, when one company bought about half of them and dropped them a year later realizing it was a bad idea.

One thing is clear though – this should help push the LLL.ru domains prices up on the market. The current prices for these seem to be around $250 and up.

For comparison LLL.ca domains sell for a minimum of $100 now. Canadian tld recently passed 1 million registrations. LLL.co.uk names sell for $1k and up, there are currently about 7 million of them registered.

New, great story by Ron of dnjournal read more »

I was just checking the recent sales of cvcv.com at tdvr.com and noticed a strange thing.

Both sold on sedo, same week, almost same letters and similar quality, yet such a big difference in price, why?

“Fehu” has 162K results in google and there is a developed site over at fehu.org, with alexa below 1 million, so it has some traffic. It also seems to have some mystical meaning, but that can hardly contribute much to a reseller price. read more »

New record for .ca sales: $41000 for banks.ca at Pool.com today.

Previous high .ca sales:

savings.ca $36,050 2006-03-28 Pool
cruise.ca $33,363 2006-05-23 Pvt Sale

Some argue whether banks.ca is really worth much because there are only 6 banks in Canada, although I think it’s an excellent finance related domain and its value will only rise as the .ca registrations approach 1 million.

Banks.com is a developed site so it’s possible that they had interest in banks.ca as well.

Other reports suggest that the winning bidder was ready to pay as much as $112K!

Pizza.com is scheduled to be auctioned in GreatDomains monthly auction in 5 days.

Reserve is set to above 1 million and if it sells we might see another high value sale to top the annually charts.

Pizza.com is also a small developed site, which in this case probably doesn’t add much value. The new owner will definitely build something much larger to bring profits that can justify a 7 figures price for the domain.

Top 6 domain tlds finally hit over 100M registered combined.

Here are some interesting stats for today March 9, 2008

74,104,230 .COM
11,035,393 .NET
6,611,743 .ORG
4,978,080 .INFO
1,943,952 .BIZ
1,400,328 .US

Over 1 Million .com domains registered today only, compared to 142K .com deleted. Long live the .com

.jp domains hit 1 million. No surprising for the world’s second largest economy.

As of March 1 there were 1,003,285 Japanese domain names registered.

More stats here

Marchex reports: $37 Million for The Fourth Quarter of 2007

Fourth Quarter 2007 Consolidated Financial Results:

• Revenue was $37.0 million for the fourth quarter of 2007, compared to $32.6 million for the same period of 2006.
• GAAP net loss applicable to common stockholders was $774,000 for the fourth quarter of 2007 or $0.02 loss per diluted share. This compares to GAAP net income applicable to common stockholders of $5.0 million or $0.01 loss per diluted share for the same period of 2006. The GAAP diluted EPS calculation in 2006 excludes the effect of the non-cash non-recurring discount on preferred stock redemption of $5.8 million, net of dividends on the redeemed preferred shares of $197,000. The fourth quarter 2007 results included non-cash stock-based compensation expense recorded under the fair value method of $2.1 million, compared to non-cash stock-based compensation expense of $2.6 million for the same period in 2006. read more »