Ever since I started in domaining, I’ve been trying to gauge the size of the market. I think over the years I’ve gotten better at it, so here is my take (I appreciate any feedback in the commentary section if you have more accurate data).

Let’s say the first part of the domaining market is concerned with the monetization of type-in traffic. The majority of this is handled via parking companies running through google and yahoo feeds. Let’s start with the google companies and how much revenue they pull in (a large part of this is then passed over to domainers). The biggest is clearly DomainSponsor, which in my guess pulls in $12 million in revenue a month. Second is Sedo with about $5 million. Namedrive is around $3 million. Fabulous in my view is around $1 million. Then you have the other vanity/private feeds that could add up to another $2 million. That’s about $23 million for the google co’s. Judging the size of the yahoo companies individually is more difficult for me, but my assumption is that they all add up to about 40% of the google co’s, so let’s say that’s another $10 million.  So we have about $33 million flowing into the parking companies every month. Then you have the alternative monetization, which covers everything from affiliate, lead-generation, minisites, zero-click (such as our Elephant Traffic). That is much more difficult to gauge but it could probably be another $5 million a month. So we’re at $38 million/month that is tied strictly to the monetization of type-in traffic of domains. With hopefully monetization slightly improving this year, we can probably peg the size of this market to about $500 million for 2010.

The second main part of the domaining market is concerned with buying and selling domains. This is an area I am much less focused on so I would appreciate the help and reader’s opinions. What we can probably agree on is that Sedo is probably the market leader in this, doing about $100 million a year in sales. Name Media should be around $25 million. Moniker and Rick Latona probably do about $10 million each through their auctions/brokerage/newsletters. Then you have the drop-catching marketplaces (namejet, snapnames, TDNAM, pool), where I am not exactly sure, but my guess is about $30 million a year in total from them (?). Then you have the reported private sales or sales through various non-domaining venues, which probably come to $10 million. And then there is a massive market for portfolios, which are generally traded privately (sometimes through big brokers like Moniker and Namedrive, I am not counting them in their respetive numbers), which probably totals another $30 million a year. Then you have the more minor venues such as NDX Market, Flippa.com, Bido, domain blogs, forums etc, which probably account for another $10 million. If I add up all these visible/semi-visible sales that I mentioned here, we are at about $225 million/year. But then there is a huge market of private deals we never get to here about, not just in .com but across all the various other cctlds. That isn’t almost impossible to gauge, but it is definitely about $50 million/year, it could even be $100-150 million quite easily.

Then you have the other components of the domain business, which I do not really want to include, such as the registrar business, development etc. But those are really not domaining. But if we could include parts of them that are directly tied to domaining, it’s obvious that together with the monetization of type-in traffic and domain sales it adds up to a $1 billion business annually. It’s fun to be part of a billion dollar business, isn’t it?

Tags: accurate data, commentary section, Google, market, monetization, Namedrive, part, private feeds, Rick Latona, traffic, year