A Chinese buyer paid up big for the hg.com domain name, paying CNY26,000,000 ($3,770,000), to make it the biggest domain name sale for 2016 according to the Domain Name Journal chart of top reported sales. There were 4 a million dollar plus sales – the other 3 being vivo.com – which was sold by Real Networks to china’s Vivo Communication Technology for $2.1 million-, jade.com ($1.250m) and la.com ($1.2m).
On the all-time biggest sales list as compiled by Domain Name Journal since 2003, hg.com is the 12th biggest sale. The biggest sale was sex.com, which sold for $13.0 million while fund.com comes in second, selling for $9,999,950 and porn.com third ($9.5m). There are undoubtedly bigger sales, but there are many that go unreported and undisclosed.
Short domains dominated the top sales with 2 to 4 character .com domains taking out 10 of the top 11, with furniture.co.uk tying in 11th place making it the first ccTLD sale on the chart, selling for $650,000.
However compared to 2015 when short .com domains of 2 to 5 characters made up the top 17 sales, the big sales were much smaller in 2016. Back in 2015 porno.com topped the sales chart selling for $8,888,888 followed by we.com ($8.0m), the 4th and 5th biggest sales of all time.
New gTLD domain sales are starting to make their mark on the sales chart with 1.xyz and 9.xyz being the biggest sellers, coming in 30th and 31st positions, selling for CNY¥1,180,000 ($181,720) and $170,250 respectively while sex.live came in 35th selling for a very handy $160,000 through a premium sale by the registry Rightside. Back in 2015 there were 4 new gTLD sales and in 2016 the number doubled to 8 among the top 100.
Among ccTLD sales there were 9 in 2016, and their numbers don’t seem to have suffered from new gTLDs as there only 3 in 2015. This includes ccTLDs such as .co, .me and .tv that search engines classify as gTLDs.
