The Escrow.com, which funds are securely deposited through when concluding many large domain transactions, presented its report for the Q3 of the Domain Investment Index. The report records rather multidirectional trends, but in general we can talk about a certain decrease in the activity of the domain market in the period from July to September of this year. According to Domain Name Wire, the total volume of domain name transactions conducted through Escrow.com fell from $89 million in the Q2 to $85 million in the Q3.
It is curious that the Anguilla national domain .AI, whose rapid growth in popularity in the Q3 was reported not only by specialized resources, but also by the world’s leading media, has decreased its performance. If in the Q2 the amount of transactions with names in this domain zone exceeded $1.7 million, then in the Q3 it was about $1.3 million. Other trends include increased transaction volume for non-web content domain names: $49.7 million in Q3 versus $40.6 million in Q2. The median amount of such transactions also increased – from $4,500 to $4,614. This is evidence of the high activity of domain investors who purchase domain names not to create websites, but for the purpose of subsequent resale.
It is also worth noting that the median amount of transactions with two- and three-letter names in the .COM, which traditionally belong to highly liquid domain assets, decreased significantly - from $140,000 to $42,500- compared to the previous quarter. The cost of four-letter names in the .COM domain remained virtually unchanged - $9.9,000 in Q2 and $10,000 in Q3.
At the same time, the parent company of the Escrow.com service - Australian Freelancer.com - published financial results for the Q3. It stated that the total volume of transactions processed through Escrow.com in the Q3 (including transactions not related to the domain industry) amounted to $122.9 million, a decrease of 9.2% compared to the same period last year. Representatives of Freelancer.com noted that the results of the service were affected by a reduction in the number of “very large” domain transactions.
