ICANN has a pretty good reporting tool on their site (I’ll give you the url at the end because I want you to read my article first :-)). It’s a dynamic tool that shows registry numbers. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a graph today showing registrar rankings which is what I was seeking. I normally use WebHosting.info for that but something about the numbers there seemed off so I thought I’d go to the “source”, ICANN. Hopefully, some day soon we’ll be able to see that (or at least I’ll find where).
Regardless, viewing this chart gave me an insight on something I’ve been thinking for some time; the exponential value of dot.com domain names. By the nature of the distribution of registration numbers, it’s really difficult to place .com on a chart along with the others with any sort of true proportion. Dot.com has about 100 Million domains registered. The next largest (not including ccTLDs is dot.net which is in the range of 14 Million.
So ICANN’s solution is to use a chart based somewhat exponentially (Ok, more accurately, multiples of ten but you know what I mean). It goes from 100 (one hundred) to 1,000 one thousand to 10,000 (ten thousand) to 100,000 (one hundred thousand) to 1,000,000 (one million) to 10,000,000 (ten million) to 100,000,000 (one hundred million) and finally includes 1,000,000,000 (one billion). Who knows? I remember when I thought two or three million domains registered was amazing!
But here’s the point of this article. This distribution is a picture of aftermarket values which I’ve seen as exponentially distributed as well. My method is not scientific but I still think it holds water. Here’s kind of how it goes….
If Fences.com is worth $80,000, then Fences.net or Fences.org are probably worth something like $8,000 and Fences.us is worth in the range of $800. Everything removed from the generic dot.com domain reduces it’s relative value exponentially.
This can also be extended to adding important words to the generic term (still in dot.com). For example, using the Fences.com example again… SteelFences.com (two keywords in the domain) might be worth something like $8,000 and SteelYardFences.com (three keywords) something like $800.
I was first introduced to this idea from a friend on a forum ten years ago. I think it’s still true today. Let me know your thoughts. And if anyone has insight on a source of good and current registrar ranking data, please make a comment or send me a note.
Now the wildcard is New TLDs. I wonder how this will play out with domain values?
Here’s the ICANN reporting URL.
