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2022 Domain Sales Season Begins With a Bang Ignited By the New Year's 1st Reported Seven-Figure Sale

Welcome to our first bi-weekly report covering 2022 domain sales! If you have read our 18th annual State of the Industry cover story that was released Wednesday you know everyone is excited to see if the red hot domain aftermarket we saw in 2021 will continue to soar in the new year. One thing we already know is that 2022 has gotten off to a good start! As we told you in our Lowdown section January 12, BestWeb.com logged the year's first reported seven-figure sale with Unlock.com at $1,228,200. It will take over a dozen more at that level in 2022 to surpass the 14 seven-figures sales that earned placed on our 2021 Top 100 Domain Sales Chart (after just two the year before)! 

Our first 2022 YTD Top Sales Chart will be issued along with our next report on February 2. Since this is our first report on 2022 sales, our latest bi-weekly all extension Top 20 Sales Chart below also represents the top YTD sales at this early point.

 

In addition to that big Unlock.com sale at the top, three six-figure sales came in, including a blockbuster .org sale by Braden Pollock at LegalBrandMarketing.com who moved Z.org for $257,000. The deal actually closed in September but is just now coming to light (we credit sales to the year in which they are first publicly reported rather than the transaction date, as long as they have been completed within the previous 12 months. Older sales that qualify would go on the Top 100 Chart in our Domain Sales Archive for the year in which they took place). If Z.org had been reported in 2021 it would have ranked as  the #2 non .com gTLD sale of the year, behind only Poker.net at $750,000.

 

Also ringing the six-figure bell this week are #3 CryptoUniversity.com at $125,000 and Mannequin.com at $100,000. Foundation Domains sold the crypto domain through Afternic while veteran investor Manish Lunja at BrandPros.com made the Mannequin.com sale in the first hour of the new year. How is that for getting 2022 off to a fast start!

NameJet rounded out the first five with VIPs.com at $83,500 and put a second name in the top ten with #8 NUE.com at $75,500. The .coms went on to sweep 14 of the 20 chart entries, with seven of those coming from Sedo, who piled up 8 places on the honor roll overall. AbdulBasit also assisted the .com assault with a $75,000 sale of #9 SMKT.com through Afternic.

The non .com gTLDs also did very well, claiming five spots on the Big Board, three of which went to .xyz domains. The biggest of those was a $79,888 sale of Bolt.xyz via Swetha.xyz. The other two were both .orgs including a $26,000 sale of #19 Power.org at SnapNames.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           By Ron Jackson

By the way, while SnapNames and sister site Namejet released their December sales list this week, they decided not to release final results from their widely publicized Thought Convergence auctions yet. Elliot Silver at DomainInvesting.com posted a list of a dozen of those sales ranging from $26,000 to $290,000 that he got from a contact at the parent company of SnapNames/NameJet. We assume the official results will be released soon, at which point we will be charting those very significant sales.

We also want to tell you about a couple of historical sales that George Kirikos turned up in SEC filings last week. He found proof that DuckCreek.com was sold in 2016 for $100,000 and that  Measure.com was sold for $73,980 in 2017 (a remarkable bargain)! We have added both to their respective Top 100 Charts in our Domain Sales Archive. DuckCreek.com now ranks at #59 (tie) in 2016 and Measure.com is #82 in 2017.

Back to the present, I haven't forgotten about the ccTLDs this week. They were limited to one spot on the elite list this time around the track - Sedo's $27,500 sale of #18 Pagoda.co. Here is a look at how all of the sales leaders stacked up for the two weeks ending Sunday, January 16, 2022:

The DN Journal Top 20 
Highest Reported Domain Sales - Mon. Jan. 3 - Sun. Jan. 16, 2022
(Foreign currency to U.S. Dollar Conversions Based on Rates in Effect Jan. 19, 2022)
 

Domain

Sold For

Where Sold
1. Unlock.com $1,228,200 BestWeb.com
2. Z.org $257,000 LegalBrandMarketing
3. CryptoUniversity.com $125,000 Foundation Domains/
Afternic
4. Mannequin.com $100,000 BrandPros
5. VIPs.com $83,500 NameJet