The British company Brandpa, engaged in domain business and digital marketing, has published a study State of the Domain Industry. Within its framework, the company's specialists interviewed more than 1,000 active domain investors in January. The results of the study, perhaps, do not say too much about the state of the industry itself, but they reveal a lot of interesting things about the people who are involved in the domain business.
First of all, it is worth noting that this business seems to be the lot of adults. 51.3% of the respondents were aged 31 to 45, 23.7% - 46-60 years old, and another 13.2% - over 60. Only 11.2% of investors aged 18 to 30 years old, and younger 18 - 0.7%. This may indicate that the domain business is not very attractive to young people. However, the second possible explanation is that young people simply do not have enough funds to enter this business.
Almost half of the respondents (43.3%) have been buying and selling domain names for more than 5 years. Another 28.7% - from 3 to 5 years. Beginners who learned about domain purchases less than a year ago made up 10.7% of the survey respondents. It is very interesting that the domain business, judging by the results of the survey, does not require investors to be constantly involved in transactions. 27% of respondents reported that they spend no more than 1 hour per week buying and selling domains. Another 25.7% - from 4 to 10 hours. And only 9.9% of investors spend more than 30 hours a week doing this activity.
However, the profitability of this business is not at all as high as it might seem when you read news about multimillion-dollar domain deals. 55.3% of respondents admitted that they sell the bulk of their domain names at a price of 1-3 thousand dollars. For 23%, the amount of most transactions does not reach even a thousand dollars. And only 1.3% said that most of their names are sold for more than $50,000. Accordingly, 43.7% of investors reported that they earned less than $3,000 from domain deals last year. And only 4% received a profit of 50-100 thousand dollars. But investors remain optimistic: 56.3% of respondents expressed confidence that in the new year they will be able to sell more domain names than in the previous one.
