Domain Survey Results: Part 1 – What Domainers Are Buying

I did a survey back in September of this year and asked my readers a few questions about their domain buying and selling habits. This is only the first of many surveys and I plan to repeat this exact survey again in February to see how the results change over a 6-month time period. I did this survey for myself and for all of you so we could really drill-down and get some data behind what’s going on in the domain buying and selling markets right now.

To make the data more digestible I’ve decided to break this post into three parts, What Domainers are Buying, What Domainers are Selling, and a Recap and Analysis of the results. I hope that this data helps to open all of our eyes to where the opportunities are for buyers and sellers and hopefully provide a nice solid dose of reality. Now as an Engineer and a bit of a stats geek and I know that with surveys like these you can only use them as an estimation, nothing more. You can draw whatever conclusions you would like from the data but at first I’d just like to provide the data and save my analysis for Part 3.

domain buyers price range

The above chart shows the price range that survey respondents are buying in. As you can see a majority of people are buying domains for under $100 with almost everyone (87% to be exact) buying domains below $1000. Only 5% of the people surveyed were buying domains over $10,000. 32% of the people surveyed were buying in the $100 – $1,000 range but as you can see from the chart above the real action is happening below $100.

Domain Buyers TLD

Now for TLD. It should come as no surprise that 82% of the respondents indicated they were most interested in buying .com domains. What I do find interesting is the other TLDs that made the chart and those that are missing. .com, .net, and .org are on there and surprisingly .mobi made the list as well. You will notice that .ca, .mx, .de, .info and a number of other TLDs didn’t get a mention. In most cases this is probably because my survey question asked what Primary TLD you are buying right now and we all know .com is king.

I said I wasn’t going to draw any conclusions, and I’m not, but I will point out one interesting observation I have from the data above. You have the best chance of making a sale with a .com name under $1,000. Once you start to deviate in any direction, i.e. a .com name in the 5K range or a .net name in the $500 range your pool of buyers decreases dramatically. Tomorrow I’ll be providing this exact same data except for domain sellers. By putting these two pieces together you will easily be able to see as a buyer or a seller where any potential disconnect or missed opportunities might be!

Thanks to all of you who contributed and I look forward to sharing even more data with you as the week goes on!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton