Top 10 domain names sales of 2009

The findings revealed that the most valuable domain of the past quarter was software.co.uk, which sold for £150,000. This was closely followed by horseracing.co.uk and onlinecasino.co.uk, which both sold for £100,000. 

This trend was reflected internationally, with fly.com Sedo’s top selling domain name globally for 2009, sold for a fee of £1,152,173. 

The results are due to be published in Sedo’s Domain Market Study which assesses the performance of the internet’s biggest secondary domain market.

 Jeremiah Johnston, Chief Operating Officer of Sedo, “This quarter’s findings suggest that marketers are really looking to capitalise on the benefits that keyword domains offer. Search engines like Google put significant weight on the keywords within domain names, so having a generic domain name that incorporates a keyword relevant to a particular industry can take a website right to the top of search engine rankings. Purchasing domain names like this also increases the amount of traffic being driven to a website, as our estimates suggest up to one in six searches are made directly via an internet’s browser. ” 

Results also revealed a surge in the number of Geographic Domain Names, with the top ten selling .com domain names from last year and the final quarter including a number of well known global locations. This included the sale of russia.com for £904,319 and brazil.com for £302,489 in the past year and the sale of Kiev.com for £54,601 and Sudan.com for £75,295 in the last quarter. 

Johnston commented, “Geographic Domain Names are really important to any travel marketer looking to drive sales for a particular region. With recent research revealing that more than three quarters of senior travel industry professionals are optimistic about the prospects of the travel industry in 2010[1], purchasing these web addresses will help drive traffic to sales pages  as travellers look to purchase tickets to a particular destination.”  

The report also revealed that the average price of a .co.uk domain was priced at £1,543.39 in 2009 and that .com domains are the most popular gTLD (generic top-level domain) accounting for 44% of Sedo’s sales last year. 

Johnston added, “While .co.uk domain names continue to perform well, it is unsurprising that the .com extension remains the most traded gTLD on the web. It will be interesting to see whether this changes, especially following ICANN’s decision to open up the number of extensions available for acquisition, together with the introduction of Internationalised domain names, where web addresses can be registered in different scripts, such as those written in Chinese or Arabic.  

While some of the most valuable domain names may sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds, it is also encouraging to see that the average domain name is much more affordable. Average .co.uk domain prices remain reasonably priced and continue to allow marketers with smaller budgets to build their domain portfolio.”  

For a copy of the report, please visit http://www.sedo.co.uk/press/domainmarketstudy2009-uk.pdf.

www.sedo.com.

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