NNNNN.com Domains (5 digit .coms) All Registered!

NNNNN.com domains have been all registered (bought out) since late 2011.

Since then, daily drops have been falling and recent registrants have been renewing their registrations at high rates.

It's mostly interest from Chinese domainers, who have been steadily buying these numerics (even 90,000 six-digit .com domains are registered now, mainly by Chinese domainers!).

In an effort to conduct some price discovery, and see what the baseline market price is for NNNNN's following the buyout, 10 are on auction right now with no reserve, a $0.01 start price, and registration through May 18, 2013.

Does anyone own NNNNN's? Does anyone speak Chinese and read Chinese domain forums? What are they saying about the buyout over there?

Congrats to all NNNNN.com holders on a successful buyout! Will be interesting to see what market prices are now. There have been a lot of interesting sales at 4.cn, the main Chinese auction site, and 41186.com recently sold for $16,000 elsewhere, but so far awareness of the buyout has been fairly low among western domainers.

 

how much for a 3 digits domain? for example 45n.com

Thanks

 

That's not generally called a 3 digit domain, it's called a 3 character domain (CCC), meaning it is made up of letters (L) and numbers (N). A three "digit" domain has 3 numbers (NNN), like 451.com. 3 digit domains go for around $15,000 minimum. Three character domains like 45n.com go for $500+ I think.

Today's the last day to bid on the auction for the five digit domains.

 

I had 800 of them if I recall back in 2008, but dropped the next year, with the crisis and dropping prices for short domains. It's cool that they are all registered now again, but I'm guessing they still have no reseller value above reg fee. How many of them do you have, rbk?

 

They currently have no reseller value above reg fee. I have over 600 of them now, and am still buying good numbers. I too dropped a bunch after the crash, but started buying again in the last year as I noticed the steady registration trends among Chinese domainers (who actually use the domains).

They key right now is re-registration trends I think.

About 50 NNNNN.com domains expired on average per day in March. In April, only 12 expired per day on average. That is a huge drop coming in supply when those domains drop. I have started tracking the domains that are expiring (using a database of 20% of NNNNN's). Yesterday, there were 18 in my database set to expire (5/7/12). All but three were renewed for another year. The buyout is holding firm now with 40-50 drops/day. But with only 12 drops/day coming in the next month or so, buying may get very crowded. The question is (1) will registrants continue to renew at such high rates, and (2) will that lead to an increase in the market price above reg fee?

I think this kind of tightening of supply is likely to feed on itself, encouraging undecided registrants to renew rather than drop. With the price of average (not great, not terrible) NNN.com's over $10k and average NNNN.com's over $1k, there is a real potential for NNNNN.com prices to explode up. But, of course, there's no telling when that will happen, it could be years off still. Nevertheless, I like what I'm seeing in the re-registration trends and in the potential of 4.cn to become a place to buy and sell these easily for western and Chinese domainers alike. So I've gone back in to NNNNN's. Good to see you around!

 

Excuse me if I seem thick but the.cn mean China right? can we here in the: "UK" purchase .cn domain or are they restricted ? Me thinks it might be worth spending a few hours number searching hehehe, Do you guys think any other extension is worth a few quid £$ ? I have seen a few nums but with .co or com.co ext's ??

 

Yes, .cn is China domains. Some good numeric .cn sales have gone through, a couple weeks ago 10068.cn went for $3,000 on 4.cn (the main Chinese/English domain auction marketplace). But generally Chinese domainers and web users seem to prefer .com domains, and give a premium to those. Since I don't speak Chinese, I don't want to own a domain that will only be used in China. A .com is universal, even if Chinese domainers make up most of the buyers of numerics, there are other uses as well (Marchex owns about 1/3 of NNNNN.com's and NNNNN.nets as US zip code domains, others are used as French postal code sites, Israeli postal code sites, other numeric uses, etc.). A short numeric .com has a lot of potential uses and a well respected extension. A .cn is probably always going to be the backup, not the first choice, for Chinese domainers and end-users.

 

Here's some of the data on the re-registration rates.

I have a randomized dataset of 20% of the NNNNN.com's, and here is what I have found for the percentage of domains expiring by month.

March, 2012 1.5%
April, 2012 0.4%
May, 2012 3.0%
June, 2012 3.9%
July, 2012 4.7%
August, 2012 4.1%
September, 2012 4.2%
October, 2012 4.1%
November, 2012 3.5%
December, 2012 3.3%
January, 2013 4.5%
February, 2013 8.4%
March, 2013 4.2%
April, 2013 5.7%
May, 2013 3.1%
June, 2013 1.3%
July, 2013 1.1%
August, 2013 1.2%
September, 2013 1.1%
October, 2013 0.7%
November, 2013 32.7%
December, 2013 0.5%
2014+ 3.0%

You can see the high percentage of April expirations that were renewed (April 2013 has 5.7% of outstanding domains, April 2012 has only 0.4%). If this trend continues through May and later this year, we may finally see price appreciation in NNNNN.com's. As the market has been easily picking up the 40-50 drops/day, it remains to be seen what happens when drops fall to 10-20/day. Same buying pressure, diminishing supply. I had thought prices would rise with the buyout and they didn't, so could be wrong here again. But it certainly looks good that the buyout has stuck and registrants are renewing their numbers.

 

Thanks for such an informative reply, it seems you have been in this business a long while, I'm just having a look/nose at this 4.cn site, only ever been on sedo and sites like that before so its great to learn outside of the box. Im starting to think the nums names are looking good, hopefully I can buy 1 or 2 or 100 lol.

 

On my blog I provide recent numeric auction results at 4.cn so you can see what different numbers go for right now. The one thing to keep in mind is this doesn't show whether the reserve was met, or whether the domain actually got transferred, rather just what the bidding got up to. Don't have time to dig deeper.

As for re-registration, for 5/7 it turns out even more were re-registered than it initially seemed. I guess the registrars update their registrations at different times. In my dataset, 18 NNNNN.com domains were set to expire on 5/7/12 and 17 were renewed. Yesterday, 29 were set to expire on 5/8/12 and so far 21 have been renewed. I hope to keep tracking these and provide a running count on the blog in regular intervals. So far it shows re-registration rates are high and holders aren't letting their domains drop.

 

Hi, just on your blog site right now, I must say it is interesting to be able to find all that data from one source/site. Yesterday I told you was looking at the.cn site for the first time and I can honestly say forget that lol, we will watch yours instead. Today we bought a few nums domains, was doing a bit of research on the 50's, 60's 70's etc the "years" and came across that the ones that are already registered have been so for the last 10 - 13 years, and was valued at approx $30k +. to cut a long story short hey presto found a few and now the proud owner of ....... 2 x nums .coms

 

Glad you liked the site. Unfortunately, I have no idea what else you just said .

 

LOL, ok here goes again... considering number domain are worth a bit: "$" I myself did a little research and found domains with numbers in such as: 50s.com, 60s.com, 70s.com 80s.com etc Those domains mean the decade for whatever year okay. So we went and did some searching "hand reg" and found a few still available and bought 2 .
Those domains as said, is worth a lot of dollars because they are aged between 10 -13 yrs old from what I found out.

That's all

 

Sounds like you bought CCC domains (mixture of number and characters). I don't know too much about those, although I recently wrote about CCCC.com's and registration rates there. How could you have hand regged a CCC.com though? They are all bought out and have been for years. Especially a prime domain like 60s.com. You would have had to have bought this from a reseller, no?

 

woah, how come so many expire in Nov 2013? Have you sold any?

 

Marchex zip code domains...

I've sold some on 4.cn for $30-$100.

 

Update on re-registration using the dataset (which has a random selection of 20% of NNNNN.com's).

On May 7th 18 domains were expiring, 17 were renewed. On May 8th, 26 domains were expiring, 19 were renewed. On May 9th, 28 domains were expiring, 19 were renewed. On May 10th, 20 domains were expiring, 17 were renewed. Overall, this is a last-minute renewal rate of 78.26%.

Of course, this only counts renewals in the few days before expiration, many domainers had already renewed their domains.

For the first ten days of May now a total of 431 domains have been renewed, whereas 43 expired (although a couple of these will probably be redeemed before they drop).

 

Correction: For the first ten days of May now a total of 376 domains have been renewed, whereas 43 expired (had erroneously counted some new registrations as renewals). This is a renewal rate of 89.74% so far for May.

 

Hello Rkbdomain


Chinese look at the number in different way, the number has their own chinese meanings, can you share some of those information?