3 interesting factoids from BrandBucket’s April Sales Data

BrandBucket, one of the go-to domain name marketplaces for startups published their April sales report last week and, as usual, there were some pretty interesting insights in it. Since insights sounds boring, I decided to bring back a word, that I don’t think is a real word, but should be, so I’m using it – factoid.

TLDInvestors.com did a nice rundown of all the data in sales report so if you want to do a deeper dive I recommend giving that post a read.

This time around BrandBucket added a new piece of data to their report – how long it takes a domain name to sell on average through the marketplace, and that’s where I’ll kick off my three interesting factoids.

  1. On average it takes two years and two months for a domain to sell through BrandBucket – I think this is an incredibly interesting data point and hopefully it also gives you an indication of how long, realistically, you can expect to hold a domain before selling it. That being said, BrandBucket is out there actively marketing their marketplaces and getting regular eyeballs on the domains they have listed for sale…so for an individual domain investors just fielding inbounds I’d say the average time to sell a domain is probably quite a bit longer. This also shows why when anyone talks to me about “quick flips” I make sure to tell them that is not the norm.
  2. Two-word .COMs steal the show once again – as has been the case all year, two-word .COMs are the most popular amongst startups. No surprises there, it’s the reason why this is the main kind of domain I buy, and also why I run a startup on a two-word .COM, they are awesome in so many ways.
  3. Buyers are opting for keywords vs. invented – almost three quarters of the domains sold were keyword names vs. invented names. This also isn’t a huge surprise, when it comes to branding I think startups definitely see the advantage in using words people already know. Learning and remembering an invented word is more work for the customer which means it can be harder to remember and then find your brand, if they remember it!

Like I said above, there’s a lot more data in the report and TLDInvestors.com has some great coverage of it so read this post of theirs if you really want to do a deep dive into the numbers.

Thanks to BrandBucket for sharing this data – you rock!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton