The traditional .com dominance in the top 100 sales of the year was shaken somewhat in 2024, with just over half of the top sales for the year in .com.
While much of the change was due to the continuing surge in high-value .ai sales, .io and .net both had better than normal years, and new extensions were up from any previous year.
The top 7 sales were all .com, however, as were 19 of the top 20 sales of 2024.
Here is the link for the NameBio Top 100 Domain Name Sales of 2024. On the same page you will see individual links for each year from 2003 to the present. Note that these lists are updated as sales are added to the database, so the data you see may not be exactly the same as was present when I did this analysis.
To get on the NameBio Top 100 Sales list in 2024, the sale needed to be $85,000. The average sales price was $457,648 for the top 100 list, with a median of $142,131. 83 of the sales on the list were $100,000 or more.
The lists are pretty similar, but DNJournal also maintains a top sales list.
The Million Dollar Club
There were 6 NameBio-reported sales in 2023 at $1 million or more, up from 3 in 2023.
The top sale was rocket.com that sold for $14.0 million.
The second-highest sale was gold.com, that sold for just over $8.5 million.
The other names rounding out the million dollar club were shift.com, TP.com, BestOdds.com, and koko.com.
In terms of sellers, Hilco Digital Assets had the top two sales on the 2024 list, and Hilco Streambank the third-highest sale. Afternic had the fourth-highest, Rick Schwartz the fifth, and Atom the sixth.
.COM Dominates Top, but Not Overall List
The .com extension dominates the top of the list, taking 19 of the top 20 sales. The bet.bet sale in eighth place at $600,000 was the only non-.com in the top 20.
However, if one looks at the overall list, there was a significant decline in .com, from 68 places last year, to 52 .com names out of the Top 100 sales. As the graph below shows, .com dominance has been weakening for several years, but 2024 saw a sharper decline.
The country code extensions had a good year, scooping up 30 places, with 20 of these in the .ai extension. In 2023 .ai had 9 places on the top 100 chart, and no more than 2 in any previous year.
There were also 5 .io names in top 100 of 2024, the most that extension had in any single year that I have studied. In 2024 there were single representatives for .ar, .co, .co.u, .com.au. and .gg.
The overall distribution is shown below, with .org scoring 3 places, unchanged from the previous two years, .net with 3 places in 2024, the most for that extension in any of the last five years.
New extensions had their best year with 12 places, up from 9 in 2023. Within new extensions, 5 of the names were .xyz, with 2 in .bet, and single entries for .app, .earth, .game, .love, and .network.
Generally Short Names
The names are on the annual Top 100 list are usually fairly short, and that was true in 2024. The average length of the second level domain term, SLD, was just 5.6 characters, and the median 5.5 characters.
There were 4 sales of single-character names on the 2024 Top 100 list, x.game, 7.io, 0.io, and X.ar.
I show the histogram by length below. The longest name was MortgageBroker.com.au that sold for just over the equivalent of $198,000. Only 4 of the names were longer than 10 characters, and only 2 were 12 characters or more.
Name Type
The Top 100 Sales List for 2024 is dominated by single-word English names, that make up 63 of the 100 sales. There were 7 two-word names but only 1 three-word. I show the overall distribution by type of name in the graph below.
There were some brandable-type names, with creative spellings or made-up terms, and also a few acronyms and other very short names.
There were 3 numeric names, and another 3 were alphanumeric.
It would be hard to categorize by sector, and a number of the names are not yet in use, but betting is well represented in the list.
Some Plurals
While the majority of the 2024 Top 100 domain names were singular, generally preferred for branding, there were a number of plural names, such as bagels, solutions, and falcons, all in the top 20 places.
Comparison with Previous Years
By most measures, 2024 was a moderately good year. The following table shows how the different years compare in terms of top sale price, the number of sales above $1 million, the number of sales above $100,000, and the size of sale needed to make the NameBio Top 100 for that year.
Top 100 Sales – NameBio Annual Lists
| 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | |
| Top Sale (Million $) | 30.0 | 3.15 | 4.17 | 15.0 | 3.0 | 14.0 |
| No. Sales >= $1M | 7 | 3 | 18 | 9 | 3 | 6 |
| No. Sales >= $100k | 62 | 75 | all | 80 | 62 | 83 |
| Minimum Make List | $60,750 | $77,000 | $125,000 | $83,160 | $62,380 | $85,000 |
Second Half of Year Stronger
The the second half of 2024 was a bit stronger in terms of number of top sales, with 56 of the 100 sales happening in the second half. A number of significant sales happened during the last week of 2024.
Who Reported Top Sales
Don’t read too much into this, since some sellers report sales and others do not, but here is the breakdown by venue for the 2024 Top 100 NameBio Sales List. Overall, it is a pretty diverse list of sellers. In addition to those listed here, there were 11 sales listed as private, and another 12 sales, listed as Other below, by named sellers with a single sale on the list.
For this chart I have consolidated the two segments of Hilco reporting major domain sales, and similarly for Booth. Others means the seller was specified, but there was a single Top 100 sale in 2024 from that seller, while Private are reported sales without a seller or venue indicated.
Congratulations to all of the investors who managed to have a sale on the Top 100 for 2024.
Keep in mind that by no means all sales get reported on NameBio, so this is a subset of the total sales picture for the year. A number of high-value domain name sales are not disclosed because of nondisclosure agreements.
It should be noted that the top 100 list was actually the sale of 99 different names, with girlfriend.ai selling twice during the year.
I last updated this article on Jan. 1, 2025, but it is possible there will be late additions to the list. You can see the NameBio Top Sales of 2024 at this link which is automatically updated if any new sales are added.
Next week the NamePros Blog will look at sales dollar volumes in different extensions in 2024, including comparisons with previous years.
Best wishes for domain name investing in 2025.
Sincere thanks for NameBio, the source of the sales data, including the easy-to-use annual Top 100 lists. Also, thanks and congratulations to all of the sellers who reported their sales.
News Source:Bob Hawkes，This article does not represent our position.
