The Last 5 Years of .IO Extension Sales

The .io extension remains one of the most popular after .com, particularly for technology-oriented startups.

In January 2020 I wrote a two-part series on the .io extension for the NamePros Blog, Why is the .IO Extension So Popular?, and Types of .IO Domain Names That Sell and Where. But that was almost five years ago, so I felt it was time for an update.

Those articles explain why .io is an attractive extension, the sort of names that typically sell in the extension, comparison of prices for terms that sold in both .com and .io, and the possible storm clouds, even then, over the British Indian Ocean Territory.

In this article, I look at the past 60 months of .io sales data, using NameBio as the data source, and including only sales at $1000 and up. While no measure precisely divides retail and wholesale transactions, my hope was that the $1000 and up would correspond to predominantly retail sales.

I also update data on the type and length of name that sells, and whether certain prefixes and suffixes are popular. If you want a quick summary, skip to the least section of the article.

The Big Picture

Over the last 60 months, NameBio recorded 1619 .io sales at prices of $1000 or more, at an average price of $6344, producing a total sales dollar volume of about $10.3 million over the five-year period.

Here is a direct link to the sales list, arranged by price in descending order. Note that this will constantly be updated to the previous 5 year period from the date accessed, so the data you see may be different as it reflects new sales.

The Big Sales

The top .io sale recorded to date in NameBio was the 2021 sale of mint.io for $230,000.

There were 12 .io sales at $100,000 or more, and 35 at $50,000 or more.

Annual Trends

I wondered how the dollar volume of .io sales has changed over the years, and that is plotted below. Keep in mind that is only for $1000 + sales and only for those sales recorded on NameBio.

Clearly 2021 was the best year for .io, both in terms of number of sales at $1000 and above, 440, and the average price, $8267. 2024 is shaping up to be the second best year, however.

If you look only at the median value of the top ten sales for each year, a measure of the extension strength for elite sales, the annual trend is similar. Read more about the Top 10 Index Indicator here.

Predominantly English Single-Word Names

Of the 1619 sales, 869 were characterized by NameBio as single English dictionary words. This is consistent with what I found in the 2020 analysis, when 52.9% were single-word English dictionary terms.

There were 280 two-word names among the 1619, and although NameBio classified 9 as three-word names, only 5 were truly three words. I think it is safe to say unless a truly exceptional three-word term for something, it is best to avoid anything longer than two words in .io.

While many of the uses of .io domain names are in tech and financial services, most of the names sold are rather common dictionary words that don’t indicate the sort of business. For example, the words mint, luck, hero, eleven, ledger, gaming, auction, mountain, avatar, formula, factory, ruby, trade, genie and bank are all in the top 20 .io sales of the five years.

Variety of Lengths, But Many .IO Fairly Short

I looked at the number of characters in the 1619 .io sales of $1000 plus over the past 5 years, with the data shown below. Most of the high-value sales were between 3 and 9 letters in length.

Note that while some legacy 1 and 2 character have traded, I believe the shortest .io that can be currently registered is 3 characters.

I also looked at how average prices vary with .io domains of different length. If we exclude the two 1-character sales, the highest average price was for 4-character .io, at $10,220. Generally, prices drop noticeably for names longer than 9 letters.

Few Numerics and Alphanumerics

Only 32 of the 1619 sales contained a number, although two of the large-value sales were single-digit numerics, 7.io sold for $150,000, and 0.io for $125,000, both during 2024,

Hyphens Rare in .IO

Hyphens are very rare in high-value .io extension sales, just 5 of the 1619 .io sales over the five years contain a hyphen. The longest name that sold was one of these, with artificial-intelligence.io selling at $1064.

Some Plurals Sell Well

While no doubt singular forms of words dominate, there were 178 of the 1619 names that ended in ’s’, many of them plural words. A few examples are decisions, metaNFTs, worlds, pixels and apes, all of which sold at $20,000 or more.

The article I wrote in 2020, Types of .IO Domain Names That Sell and Where, found that 14.8% of the .io sales for that period were plural.

A Number End in ING

There were 38 .io sales that ended in ‘ing’, with a healthy average price of $9811. Among significant sales, gaming at $105,000, boxing at $65,000 and meaning at about $20,000. The NamePros Blog recently covered the general topic of Domain Names Ending in ING.

Prefixes and Suffixes Quite Rare

With the .com extension, it is fairly common to use prefixes such as ‘the’ or ‘my’, but that is rare in .io. Only 5 of the sales started with ‘the’, although a couple of them sold for strong prices, including ‘TheWallet’ sold at $10,000.

‘My’ was not much more popular, with just 7 sales using that prefix.

Since many tech startups start as an app, I wondered if ‘app’ would find use as a suffix, but only 2 of the sales ended in ‘app.’

A number of brands end in ‘ly’ and it is a common suffix in .com, but only 7 of the .io sales ended in ‘ly.’

Few End in AI

There were only 7 sales that ended in AI, with the highest being AskAI.io. at $2140.

Generally Avoid Creative Brandables in .IO

While there are a few, like ‘kreator’ that sold at $3950, creative spellings and made-up words are quite rare in .io names that sell for $1000 or more.

Just One Domain Hack?

NameBio has a category and subcategory to identify domain hacks, and among these 5 years of $1000+ .io sales, it only identified one, scenar.io that sold in 2022. I suspect there might be a few more that sold but not identified as hacks, perhaps.

.IO Is Expensive To Hold

With a wholesale price currently $45 per year, .io domains are relatively expensive to hold long term. As this price graph courtesy of TLD-list shows, prices have been on the rise since 2019.

The lowest price for registration, transfer and renewal for .io, as reported by TLD-list. Prices have increased over the past 5 years.​
Normally the .io extension is not significantly discounted for registrations, although there were a couple of periods during 2023 and 2024 when a few registrars had .io registrations in the $12 to $14 range.

For the past number of years, Identity Digital has operated the .io extension under agreement.

Over One Million .IO Names Registered

According to DomainTools, there are currently about 1.06 million .io domain names registered. That is substantially less than .org (11.0 million), .xyz (3.7 million), and .co (3.3 million), about the same as .me (1.0 million), and significantly more than .fi (0.54 million), .ai (0.54 million) and .tv (0.42 million).

Political Developments

Since 1997, .io has been the country code extension for the British Island Ocean Territory, a group of small islands roughly halfway between Indonesia and eastern Africa. The area is currently mainly a military base.

The Chagossians, who lived on the islands, were forcibly removed from 1968 to 1973. For decades the Chagossians and their descendants have been fighting for compensation, as well as the right to return. In addition, the United Kingdom and Mauritius have disputed sovereignty of the region. In 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled that “the United Kingdom is under an obligation to bring to an end its administration of the Chagos Archipelago as rapidly as possible”.

In October, 2024, the United Kingdom announced that it was handing over control of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius. Under the terms of the agreement, Chagossians will be free to return to live on the islands, with the exception of the main island with the military base, Diego Garcia.

The obvious question is whether the almost certain renaming of the region will allow it to keep the .io domain extension. For a country to retain an extension, the country or region must be included in the ISO 3166-1 list.

If the region were to be renamed something that retains ‘I O’, like Independent Ocean, and remains semi-autonomous, the case to retain .io would seem strong. Also, some country code extensions, such as .su, which originally was Soviet Union, have continued in use long after the country ceases to exist. In other cases, such as .ws, the country code extension continued, even though the region was renamed under independence so no longer fits.

You can read more in this article Future of .io domains uncertain as UK hands over Chagos Islands by Kevin Murphy. Also check out Andrew Allemann’s article .IO Domain Names Aren’t Going Away.

I tend to agree with Andrew, that .io is too well established as a domain extension, for it to go away. Even in the worse case scenario, provisions allow a 5 year period after a country is not longer in the ISO list, and that can be renewed for another 5 years. Therefore, even if in the future the region was no longer listed as IO in the ISO 3166-1 list, any potential change to .io the domain extension is likely at least 12 years in the future.

Update:
The day after this article was published, Kim Davies published on the ICANN Blog the article: The Chagos Archipelago and the IO Domain. As well as confirming information given above about the 5 year transition period, subject to renewal, should IO drop from the ISO list, the article also notes the following requirement:

Country-code top-level domains are operated for the benefit of the country or territory they represent. Managers of these domains must maintain an operational nexus with that country…

Summary

My advice for the type of .io name that may sell for strong prices is not distinctly different from what I wrote in the earlier article Types of .IO Domain Names That Sell and Where.

Based on that analysis, plus this information for the last five years, I would suggest to those investing in .io:

• Concentrate on well-known English nouns, generally of length 9 letters or less.
• To a lesser degree, verbs, and occasionally adjectives and adverbs are sold as well.
• Never more than two-words for .io, and most of the time seek single-word names for this extension.
• Generally avoid prefixes and suffixes, although there are a few significant .io sales with these.
• Terms from math and science, along with terms about payment and financial systems are well represented in the sales.
• Keep in mind the general characteristics of a good brand, such as memorability and simplicity, and in particular if it could fit a startup in tech, payment systems, cryptocurrency, an app, online services, fintech, etc.
• Generally avoid numbers and hyphens for .io names.
• Creative spellings should be only rarely considered in .io, and truly made-up words generally avoided.
• While it is good to check OpenCorporates to see how widespread a term is in existing business names, pay particular attention to how used the term is on company listings on CrunchBase. Of course avoid obvious trademark conflicts.
• You need to price taking account of the significant annual holding cost. While true in all of domain investing, quality over quantity is particularly relevant in .io.
• For any name, one wants to check the status of the corresponding .com. For .io names it is also important to check the status/pricing of the term in .ai, .app, .co, .org and .xyz, as these may be competing in the technology and financial sectors, depending on the name.
• The changing status with respect to the jurisdiction of the islands, and possible renaming, is a concern to keep in mind, although it is likely that any impact would be more than ten years in the future, and despite the furry of articles last month, interest in the extension does not seem dampened.

Update:
Nov. 14, 2024 Information and a link for an article published on the ICANN Blog has been added.