Everybody saw Bot.ai sell for $1.2 million. Almost nobody saw what the rest of the market did that same year — and the rest of the market is where the actual money moves.
I spent time with the 2026 Global Domain Report from InterNetX and Sedo this month — a hundred pages of real transaction data — plus fresh numbers from DNJournal and Dynadot. The picture it paints looks nothing like the headlines. Here’s what matters.
Buyers don’t haggle. They click. Seventy-six percent of Sedo’s sales last year were buy-now transactions. Negotiated make-offer deals? Eight percent. When someone decides a name is theirs, they don’t open a negotiation — they check out. I see this constantly on the buy side: the founders who win the name are the ones who recognized it instantly and moved. The ones who “think about it” come back to a sold page.
The center of the market is the middle. Sedo’s median sale price was $818. For .com, $595. Read that again. The six-figure sales shape perception, but the report is blunt about it: most trading happens at price levels accessible to startups, small businesses, and investors, and the mid-market is the core driver of domain trading. The headlines are the lottery tickets. The market is the grocery store.
.com is still the house. Sixty-six percent of Sedo’s sales were .com. Germany’s .de took 11% (Sedo’s home turf), .net and .org 3% each, .ai 2%. Sedo moved names in 383 different extensions — but two-thirds of the money still flows through three letters. I love new extensions, and I own plenty. But when I’m advising a startup on the one name they’ll build on for a decade, the data keeps saying the same thing: .com first, everything else as strategy.
Premium names don’t just sell. They stick. This is the number I keep coming back to. Radix — the registry behind .tech, .store, .online and others — just posted a record half for premium registrations: 4,424 of them, with revenue up 50% year over year. But the renewal curve is the real story. First-year renewals: 51%. After year two: 73%. Beyond that: 84%. Companies try a premium name, and the longer they hold it, the less they can imagine giving it up. An 84% renewal rate isn’t a registration stat. It’s a confession: the name became the company.
And then there’s IQM. The quantum computing company just listed on Nasdaq at roughly a $1.8 billion valuation — on iqm.tech. They upgraded from meetiqm.com to the exact-match name before going public. That’s the pattern I watch for: the upgrade. Startups begin on a compromise domain and graduate to the real one when the stakes get serious. The smart ones skip the compromise and buy the real one early, when it’s cheap.
Registrations are growing, and the map is shifting. Dynadot’s Q1 numbers show registrations up 40% year over year. .com is still number one, but .digital climbed from rank 56 into the top 10 in a single quarter. Asia holds roughly half of all registrations; South America grew 269% off a smaller base. The demand isn’t just growing — it’s spreading. Every new founder in São Paulo who needs a name is one more bidder you’ll never meet.
So what do you do with all this? Honestly, it simplifies the strategy I run for clients:
One — decide fast. Three-quarters of buyers pay buy-now. If a name passes the gut check — a stranger could guess the business from the domain alone — waiting doesn’t get you a better price. It gets you a “this domain is no longer available” page.
Two — buy the middle, not the moon. The median .com sells for under $600. You don’t need a seven-figure budget to own a name with authority. You need to know which $600 name is worth $60,000 to the right company. That’s the whole game I play.
Three — renew like it’s permanent. Every renewal is a portfolio decision: keep, develop, consolidate, or release — with a reason for each. The 84% renewal club isn’t sentimental. They did the math and the name won.
The headlines will keep chasing the million-dollar sales. I’ll keep working the market where the other 99% of transactions happen — because that’s where companies actually get named.