Every month many great articles about domain names are published. This post highlights a selection of noteworthy articles published since I last wrote in this series at the end of January.
Among the topics featured below are domain names startups are using, domain registration statistics, guidance for hand registering domain names, the .io domain extension, website use data, and a list of great domain podcasts.
What Extensions are Startups Using in 2020?
James Iles, a long time contributor to the NamePros Blog, now also writes on his own site JamesNames.com. In this featured article, James used Crunchbase Pro data for 991 companies that started in the first five months of 2020. Not surprisingly, 61% used a .com extension name, but 7% selected an .io domain name, and 10% selected one of the new extensions. Read James’ full analysis here.
A Look at Recent End User Sales
Andrew at DomainNameWire publishes a regular stream of great content. I find his periodic post on the end users of recently sold domain names particularly interesting. In the June issue he covers 20 domain names that sold recently. In it you will learn the use for he domain names expert.ai and JAFO.com along with 18 others.
May 2020 Domain Industry Report
The Dofo Blog has been publishing a lot of insightful data-evidenced domain information, such as the May 2020 Domain Industry report, published in mid-June. This is a monthly feature that looks at aspects such as number of domains registered, top keywords, extensions and registrar share. In the May 2020 report 4.91 million domain names were registered, about 67.2% in .com. Popular keywords include shop, online, home and life.
Hand Registering Domain Names
While it takes skill and hard work to find great domain names available to hand register, there are still available gems. In this article on the NamePros Blog I look at how to evaluate potential acquisitions, including links for things like prior sales, companies using similar terms, popularity, trademark search, etc. While written for hand registrations, many of these criteria also apply to any domain acquisition. The article builds on earlier post here on NameTalent looking at how to evaluate a domain name acquisition, and the key question who would want this domain name.
A Look at Hyphenated Domain Sales
Raymond Hackney at TheDomains is one of the most prolific domain industry writers, publishing dozens of articles each month. In this article he looks at a few big sales of domain names involving hyphens. As he relates, hotel-reservation.com was a huge flip, going from four figures to six figures in a couple of years. Last year, I published on NamePros Blog an analysis of hyphenated domain name sales, looking a sales, prices and sell-through rates.
Domain Name Podcasts
I had been planning a NameTalent article on podcasts, but now James Iles has already published a great post on domain name podcasts. He includes podcasts that have been around a long time, as well as recent podcast series started by Josh Reason, Alan Dunn and Keith DeBoer.
The .IO Extension
I wrote a two-part series on the .io extension for the NamePros Blog. Part one looked at the history of the extension, along with some of the politics regarding the region and extension, as well as statistics on .io domain name sales. In part two, I summarize the sorts of domain names that sell in the extension, looking at type of name, length, etc.
Domain Names and the Top Websites
My last pick also comes from the Dofo Blog. This article analyzed the domain names used by the top 1 million websites. The article uses Alexa ranking data, which as with any methodology is susceptible to possible manipulation by site owners. The study found that 50.5% of the sites are .com. The .org extension edged out .net in popular website use, but the .ru country code extension had more popular sites than either of them. Online is the most used word in the domain names, with other popular words including web, shop, tech, pro, free, group and world. I was somewhat surprised that about 60% of the most popular websites used two-word domain names. As a comparison, last year on the NamePros Blog I looked at the ranks of the more popular extensions using the Cisco Umbrella extension rankings.
Suggestions
If you want to suggest an article for inclusion in the next issue in this series, just reach out. I also highlight interesting articles on a daily basis on my Twitter account @AGreatDomain.
