The Summer months tend to be the slowest time of the year for my business. I typically see fewer inquiries and do less deals during the Summer. In a tweet sent early this morning, Efty reported that there have been a record number of inquiries made via its platform in August – and the month hasn’t even ended:
August usually is a slow month for domain name sales but at Efty we've been seeing an ALL time high for confirmed inquiries so far this mth pic.twitter.com/DxgQgL2OmM
— Efty (@eftycom) August 28, 2017
One reason for the increased inquiry activity could be the growth of the platform. Earlier this month, the company announced it had reached one million domain names on its platform. With more domain names being added to the platform, one can assume that more inquiries will be made (although the quality of domain names on the platform is also important).
In looking at the chart shared on Twitter, it looks like the number of inquiries is growing, but it also looks like August saw a much higher growth rate than previous months. Without knowing the number of inquiries submitted (this was not on the chart), it is difficult to see any statistical significance.
Like usual, I have had a relatively slow month in terms of volume of inquiries. I operate a relatively small domain portfolio, so my business does not always represent the greater domain investment space. I am curious what you are seeing with your investments this month.
Does negotiation take place via sellers email address or on the Efty platform?
What geographical location are the servers of the landing pages?
I will ask Doron to answer as I use my own landing pages and don’t know the answer.
Hi Garth,
Negotiations take place directly via the seller’s email. We’re not in the middle and do not have access or insight into your sales data at Efty.
We’re working with IBM Softlayer and our name servers are strategically located in Amsterdam and Hong Kong.
Thanks Doron.
I had a fair amount of domain name inquiries in August through my NameSelling.com website as well.
Seemed like it started happening right after Bitcoin split into two.
Could be a coincidence, but I don’t think it is.
Do you have a crypto – BTC – chain – heavy portfolio?
I probably own more crypto domains than the average domainer.
But only some of my domain Inquiries were about crypto domains.
Thanks for the mention Elliot. We’re pretty sure that the noticeable growth in confirmed inquiries so far this month can be mainly credited to the work that has been done earlier this month on improving load times as well as several other improvements we pushed live such as 404 redirects and a couple of UI changes we made to our For-Sale landing page themes.
Morgan Linton recently wrote a piece asking “if the page load time of a landing page impacts the number of inbound offers you get?” and it seems the answer to that question is yes.
I also want to add that the chart shown on Twitter is for confirmed inquiries only meaning the interested party has verified and confirmed their email address and offer made for the domain name.
Doron,
Great platform. In the future do you think will get an ip locator or traffic stats to see how many people have landing on page.
Hi Don,
We have integrated with Google Analytics for this so you already can get very detailed insights into where traffic on your For-Sale landing pages or marketplace is cominh from (direct, referral, social, location etc).
The chart would be more helpful if it also showed # of domains on the platform. I’ve seen a pick up since mid August or so in inquiries. As far as crypto its a good example of a newer industry with growth that will need domains for websites.
The number of domains on the platform is now 1M+ but I think the number you need is the # of domain names that are using our For-Sale landing pages (pointing at our name servers). Currently, that is around 14% of all domains.
Here’s the number of domains using our name servers based on data from a third party provider (DomainTools.com) from the last few months:
April: 100,045
May: 106,545
June: 128,889
July: 137,081
We also have quite some users that chose to forward their domain names to their marketplace site instead, using services such as Nameserver.io – these domain names are not included in the above stats.
Are the other 86% of domains not for sale, or what are they doing?
Efty is a domain name management platform at it’s core so we have a ton of users that use our software to track renewals, stay organized and gain all sorts of insights into their portfolio’s performance. We also have integrations with most of the key parking companies such as Bodis, ParkingCrew, Sedo and VooDoo so that you can easily add domains that make decent PPC revenue to those platforms from within your Efty account.
And of course we have a lot of investors that are using Efty for the marketplace feature that allows you to set up your own custom domain name shop. Some examples of Efty powered marketplaces can be seen at http://www.dnbx.com or http://www.namerockstar.com