Top 100 Brandable Domain Name Sales In 2016: Data, Trends, and Insights

Making a profit with domain investing requires knowledge, skill, and a lot of data analysis. How many words do the best domains have? How many characters is ideal for a startup domain name? Even if you find the perfect name, where should you go to sell it?

The insights that can be found through strong analysis of the data of the top 100 brandable domain names sold can help investors get the insights they need to be ahead of the next trend and only spend time on domain names likely to succeed.

Here’s what we will cover in this analysis:

1. Raw data of top brandable domains
2. Major insights from analysis
3. Takeaways for domain investors

Let’s get into it!

Data of 2016 to 2021 Brandable Domains

• 2016
• 2017
• 2018
• 2019
• 2020
• 2021

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Raw Data of Brandable Domain Sales

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4 Major Insights From Top Domain Sales

The data from the top 100 selling brandable domains gives some really interesting contrasts to what the numbers from general sales tell us. There are multiple surprises here that can alter, or enhance, the way investors should approach searching for domains that VC-backed startups might be interested in.

Our approach was as follows. We obtained the top sales data from the Namebio database. We then analyzed the data in Microsoft Excel to extract insights. 

1. Marketplace with Highest Sales Numbers ($)

The sales by numbers show some clear winners. Uniregistry had the highest sales numbers by total revenue with around $1.8 million in sales from the top 100 domains sold in 2016. This number is the highest by far for the year.

Sedo comes in second at around $800,000 of sales from the top 100 brandable domains. This is over 4X the third-place NameJet, which has a small lead above all the other most popular markets behind it.

Takeaways:

• Uniregistry had the largest revenue sales of top 100 brandable sites by far
• Sedo put in a respectable second place for sales of brandable sites
• There is a huge drop off from the 1-2 spots and everyone else

2. Marketplace with Most Volume of Sales

Uniregistry was responsible for nearly half of all the top 100 sales, with 49 of them. Sedo follows in second with 28. This should be no surprise based on the revenue numbers earlier.

The number of domains sold drops off pretty quickly after that with NameJet only having 5 sales, SnapNames 3, and everyone else just one or two.

When looking at the top marketplaces by the number of top brand domains sold they match up with the number of marketplaces by revenue. This shows that there wasn’t one domain sale that created a huge gap – Sedo and Uniregistry are the top marketplaces by both standards.

Takeaways:

• Uniregistry was the top place to sell valuable domains to startups in 2016
• Sedo had a respectable second place showing
• All other marketplaces were far behind Uniregistry and Sedo

3. Number of Words in Top Branded Domains

An interesting divergence here compared to the studies of total domains bought by startups. Among the top brandable domain sales, 2-word domains actually beat out one-name domains 53-45. The remaining two were three words in length.

This shows that although one-word domains sell at a much higher rate than two-word domains when it comes to the highest-selling names, two-word domains could actually be the way to go. 

While selling it could be a bit more challenging, the higher revenue numbers count as a positive selling point for spending more time on the two-word domains.

Takeaways:

• Surprisingly, two-word domains make up more of the top 100 sales than one-word domains
• One-word domains still hold their own as some of the most valuable
• Three-word domains accounted for 2 of the top 100 sales, which is a bit surprising considering how few three-word domains are bought compared to one or two words

4. How Many Characters in Top Domains?

Eight characters were the most popular length for top-selling domain names. The range with the most top-selling domains is 4-8 which is a very interesting data point.

Since 6-9 characters or 6-10 characters are the two consistent sweet spots, having 4 character and 5 character domains clearly beating out both 9 and 10 was not expected.

What does this mean? Hard to say off of one year of data but this suggests that good sellable 4 and 5 character domains might be harder to find, they are also more likely to be valuable to a VC-backed startup when you can locate one of these gems.

Takeaways:

• 8 characters is the sweet spot for domains in the top 100 by quite a margin
• 4 and 5 character domains are surprisingly well represented in the top 100
• Contrary to what was expected, 9-character domains don’t make up as many top 100 as would be expected.

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Final Takeaways for Domain Investors

There’s a lot of good data here that is actionable when searching for those perfect domain names to sell.

1. Uniregistry and Sedo are the top places to sell for high revenue sales.
2. Good two-word domains are worth the time to find since they sell for top 100 revenue at a much higher percentage than one-word domains.
3. Eight characters is the sweet spot for domain names, with harder to find shorter domains at 4 characters also worth taking a chance on.

Keep these in mind and you will likely see your domain investing efforts grow in very profitable ways.