Domain analyst Bob Hawkes published an overview of domain name transactions for the first half of this year on the domain industry professionals forum NamePros. It is based on transactions included in the statistics of the NameBio, and, of course, cannot claim to be complete, but it gives a good idea of market trends. And these trends are rather positive. The main thing to note is the significant increase in the volume of transactions. If in the first half of last year their total volume was just over $66 million, now it is about $85.5 million, that is, immediately 29.6% more.
It only makes sense that .COM maintains its leading position: it accounts for 73.7% of the total transaction volume. If in the six months of the previous year the volume of transactions with names in .COM amounted to $51.8 million, then in the first half of this year - $66 million (an increase of the same 29.6%). But the best dynamics were shown by the Anguilla national domain .AI. Here, the volume of transactions more than quadrupled compared to the same period last year and reached more than $5.54 million.
Things are going well in .ORG. Frankly speaking, the first half of last year was a period of slight decline for it, but this is already in the past: this year, in the first 6 months, the volume of transactions with names in the .ORG domain amounted to approximately $5.03 million, an increase of 25.7%. This is the best result in the 6 years that Bob Hawkes has been publishing his reviews. The national domain of the British Indian Ocean Territories .IO also showed good signs of recovery. It showed a noticeable decline in 2022 and 2023, but in the first half of this year it rapidly surged upward. The volume of transactions for names in this domain zone amounted to almost $1.78 million, which means an increase of a gigantic 86%.
The successes of .AI and .IO largely predetermined the good results of country code domains in general. They, like the .ORG, have shown the best results over the past 6 years. The volume of transactions with names in national domains exceeded $12.1 million. A significant contribution to this, in addition to .AI and .IO, was made by .DE - the national domain of Germany. And finally, new domains also improved their results. The first half of last year turned out to be almost a failure for them: the total volume of transactions then amounted to about $1.8 million. Now it has almost doubled. It is also worth noting that 35.9% of all new domain name transactions are in .XYZ.
