This is a guest post written by Simonetta Batteiger, Director of Sales Operations North America. The article discusses Sedo’s 2009 Market Study (that’s a link to the pdf file), which was recently released. The information in the study is valuable to domain investors and can be helpful in seeing market conditions and trends.

————-
Looking for some domain inspiration? Check out the latest Sedo Market Study to help you identify market trends and new opportunities! Our market study gives insights into overall marketplace activity, top domain sales and successful domain extensions. Sedo’s continued focus on innovations around our marketplace strategy resulted in a record number of 10,070 domain sales in Q4 and helped solidify our position as the most successful global marketplace for domains in the secondary market.

The 2009 Market Study shows Sedo’s strong growth in sales through our global platform in 2009, versus 2008. Sedo represented 64 percent of the top 100 public sales in the domain industry, with the next closest competitor coming in at 8 percent. This growth was also fueled by impressive quarter over quarter results, with a 5 percent increase in domain sales in Q4 of 2009. In addition, Sedo accounted for 11 of the top 20 biggest sales industry-wide, compared to only 5 of the top 20 sales in 2008. This included a surge in geographical and descriptive domains, including the sale of Fly.com for $1.6 million, Russia.com for $1.5 million, Call.com for $1.1 million, and Brazil.com for $500,000.

Which extensions are the most successful ones?

The study reveals that the .com extension continues to be the most popular generic top level domain (gTLD), accounting for 44 percent of all domain sales on the Sedo marketplace in 2009. In looking at its place among other gTLDs, the .com displays an even greater lead. The extension accounted for 72 percent of all Q4 2009 gTLD sales and 74 percent of 2009 gTLD sales. In contrast, the second most popular gTLD, the .net extension generated 11 percent of 2009 gTLD sales, and only 6 percent of all domains sold on the Sedo marketplace last year.

In terms of the best-performing extensions for average sales price, Sedo’s study saw the sharpest rise in .biz domains. This growth can be attributed in part to the growth in sales of one character .biz domains, which first became available through the .biz registrar in September 2009.

Fixed price names represent a strong growth sector of the market

We’ve seen a significant four percent growth in the number of fixed price domains changing hands in 2009, as compared with 2008. This figure will continue to grow this year, as domain owners apply fixed prices to appeal to more buyers.

What are the top selling categories?

The top selling domain categories of 2009 included software, employment, services, regions, country and cities, tobacco, insurance, three-character domains, hardware and casinos.

Read the complete 2009 Market Study

What’s coming up in 2010

Looking forward into 2010, we expect to see ongoing demand for premium virtual real estate, with geo, descriptive, .org and .com domains leading the charge. Sedo is unique in it’s ability to actively reach out to domain investors and more importantly to end user buyers representing organizations of all sizes to leverage domains to meet their business goals. Our ongoing monthly GreatDomains auctions, our monthly changing Industry Spotlight features (check out sedo.com/tech) and our quarterly vertical promotions and auctions (see sedo.com/travel) will help us push these numbers even higher in 2010. If you want to be a part of these, feel free to reach out to me anytime!

If you have any questions, feel free to email Simonetta – simonetta at sedo.com.