June 2020 Domain Industry Report

It has been 6 months since Covid-19 was first seen. A lot has changed in the world in half a year. As we mentioned in our previous monthly reports and in our article titled “Pandemic, Domain Industry and COVID-19 Related Domain Names”, the Domain Industry does not seem to be affected by pandemic much.

In June 2020, more than 4.96 million domain names were registered in the whole world. .COM, as usual, was the most popular domain extension with 3.3 million domain names (66.5%). 

The number of registered domain names in May 2020 was 4.91 million.

Top Keywords of Domain Registrations

The top 10 keywords of domain names registered in June 2020 are shop, online, home, life, group, store, black, tech, news and pro.

The other 9 most popular keywords are the same with the previous month. “Black” entered the list this month. It seems the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black American man, and the “Black Lives Matter” protests also affected the domain registrations.

More than 18 thousand domain names that contain the “black” word were registered. Lives, matter, street, life, and protest are the other keywords often used with the “black” keyword. Almost 2 thousand domain names include both black and lives and more than 1.5 thousand domain names include black and matter.

*We exclude the stopwords such as the, and, my, of, for, in, to, etc, from the list in all our domain industry reports.

Top Extensions

.COM is the most popular extension in June 2020, as usual,  with more than 3.3 million (66.5%) domain registrations. That means more than 110 thousand .com domain names were registered every day averagely. 

You can see all domain extensions and their latest counts on Dofo’s Domain Extensions page.

Top Countries

The United States has the most domain registrations, as usual. 1.51 million domain names registered in the US which is 80 thousand less than the previous month. 

Some countries had an increase compared to the previous month. For example, China has 104 thousand more registrations in comparison to May 2020. It had 315 thousand registrations in May 2020. 

India is another country whose domain registration increased by 36 thousand. It had 106 thousand registrations in May 2020.

Netherlands, Vietnam, Australia, Spain, Brazil and Hong Kong are the other countries that are not in the top 10 but have more than 30 thousand domain registrations.

* We use the registrant country data of Whois records in the top countries analysis.

** A few of the popular whois privacy services use addresses in Panama so we exclude Panama from the list.

Top Domain Registrars

1.18 million (24%) domain names registered in June 2020 were registered with GoDaddy. 61% of domain names were registered at the top 10 registrars, above.

Wix has been keeping his place on the top 10 registrar lists for several months. It means, starting from the Covid-19 Pandemic, more people have wanted to create websites and online businesses.

5 of the top 10 domain registrars of June 2020 are also in the all-time top 10 domain registrars.

Expiry Date Statistics

91% of the registered domains in June 2020 were registered for one year.

5-year registrations and 10-year registrations are high in comparison to other multiple year registrations. 

This statistic was almost the same in the previous month.

10% of the registrations of COM, NET, and ORG extensions are made for more than one year. For new gTLDs, we see that the one-year registration rate is higher than 97%. 

(Note: All the data in this report was taken from Dofo. We didn’t include the country code domains in the statistics because of the lack of accuracy.)

Top Domain Sales of June 2020

In June 2020, 70 domain names were sold for more than $10,000 and 9 were sold for more than $50,000. The most expensive sale was kick.com at $276,007. 

7 of the top 10 sales are .com and there are two ccTLDs: expert.ai and sleep.com.au in the list. There is also a .net domain sale: fm.net.

There are two 3-letter .com domain name sales (qty.com and qjv.com) and four 4-letter .com domain sales (kick.com, myty.com, herz.com and vafo.com) this month. 

Six domain names that only consist of numbers were sold above $10,000. These are:

• 444555.com – $36,050
• 3196.com – $27,706 
• 112211.com – $13,738 
• 4042.com – $13,250 
• 3709.com – $12,500 
• 89388.com – $10,578

kick.com – $276,077 

kick.com, the most expensive sale of June 2020, was sold for $276,077. This is the 4th largest domain name sale of 2020, so far.

The domain name has not started to be used actively yet. According to the seller, a domain consultancy company Right of the Dot, the buyer is an end user, and they will start to use it soon.

More than 180 extensions of “kick” are registered and 35 of them are for sale on several domain name marketplaces.

believe.com – $200,915 

Believe.com was sold for $200,915.

The domain purchased by Believe Believe Distribution Services, a Paris-based company. They also own tens of domain names that contains “believe”. Although believe.com is redirected to believemusic.com, we may see a domain upgrade soon.

There are 18,878 registered domains that include the “believe” keyword. 179 extensions of “believe” are registered and 35 of them are for sale.

believe.in was sold for $4,250 in 2011.

expert.ai – $107,495 

Expert.ai was sold for $107,495. It is the most expensive .ai domain sale ever.

It seems an Italian company, Expert System SpA, purchased the domain name and started to use

More than 340 extensions of “expert” are registered and 137 of them are for sale on several domain name marketplaces. 

The most expensive .ai domain sales: 

• expert.ai – $107,495
• music.ai – $101,500
• analytics.ai – $50,000
• human.ai – $45,000
• think.ai – $21,988

greenstreet.com – $100,000 

Greenstreet.com was sold for $100,000.

The domain was purchased by a consulting firm Green Street Advisors. They are using greenstreetadvisors.com as their official website. Therefore, GreenStreet.com was redirected to greenstreetadvisors.com after purchase.

74 extensions of “greenstreet” are registered and 6 of them are for sale.

sleep.com.au – $70,000 

Sleep.com.au was sold for $70,000.

According to domainer.com.au, the domain name was Sleeping Duck, an Australian Company. The company uses sleepingduck.com as its official website.

This sale is the 10. most expensive sale among all .com.au domains.

288 extensions of “sleep” are registered and 65 of them are for sale.

Some other extensions of “sleep” were also sold before:

• sleep.org – $7,500
• sleep.us – $4,822
• sleep.cc – $2,180

fm.net – $70,000 

Fm.net was sold for $70,000.

The domain was purchased by an American media company Featherston Media. It seems the buyer company started to use it as their offical website. The previous official website featherstonmedia.com is redirected to fm.net.

3 other extensions of “fm” were also sold before above $10,000: 

• fm.nl – $19,748
• fm.org – $18,000
• fm.de – $15,049

lifeinsurance.com.au – $69,300 

Lifeinsurance.com.au was sold for $69,300.

The domain name was bought by an Australian Company, Money Pty Ltd. It has a “coming soon” landing page for now. The same company bought money.com.au for $280,000 in 2019 as well. 

This sale is the 11th most expensive sale among all .com.au domains.

230 extensions of “lifeinsurance” are registered and 107 of them are for sale on several domain name marketplaces. 

cogent.com – $60,030 

Cogent.com was sold for $60,030.

The domain name is redirecting to a sale landing page. So, most probably it was purchased by a domain investor. 

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What do you think will it be in July 2020? Please share your comments below.