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Structure of the domain aftermarket

The aftermarket is not a single exchange. It is a set of venues, brokers and drop catching operations that share inventory feeds but not pricing conventions, buyer pools or standards of disclosure.

Supply in this market is unusual. Every unregistered string is available at a published registration price, so the resale market only begins where that supply stops: with names somebody already holds. Inventory reaches it from hand registration by investors, from expiry and deletion cycles, from companies disposing of names left over after a rebrand, and from portfolios sold on when a holder stops paying renewals.

Demand is far narrower than supply. A given name usually has a handful of plausible buyers, sometimes one, and often none who are actively looking. That mismatch is the single fact that explains most of the market's behaviour: long holding periods, wide spreads between asking prices and closed prices, and a small share of inventory producing most of the turnover.

What the section covers

The pages here describe the mechanics rather than the pricing. That means the split between primary registration and resale, the routes a listing takes to reach a buyer, the categories of buyer and how each negotiates, and the signals that indicate whether real demand exists behind a term rather than an owner's hope.

Extensions are treated as separate markets, because that is how they trade. A legacy generic extension, a national country code and a new generic extension have different buyer expectations, different registry rules and very different liquidity. The European country codes deserve particular attention: in their own markets they routinely outsell the matching generic name.

How it connects to pricing

Structure sets the boundaries within which a price is negotiated. A name in a thin extension with no identifiable end user is not cheap because of a valuation model; it is cheap because the buyer pool is small and the seller has no leverage. The factors that determine a number, once a buyer exists, are covered in what drives price, and the reporting problems that distort published sale records are covered in comparable sales.

Anyone reading this section with a portfolio in hand should pair it with screening for trademarks, because market structure says nothing about whether a name is safe to own.

Market

01How the domain aftermarket worksThe aftermarket exists because domain names are unique and non-reproducible. Once a string is registered, the only route to it runs through whoever holds it.02Marketplaces, brokers and auctions comparedA listing, a broker and an auction solve different problems. Choosing between them is a question of how many plausible buyers exist and how reachable they are.03Who buys domain names and how they buyThe identity of the buyer changes the price more than any characteristic of the name. Four groups dominate the aftermarket, and they behave almost nothing alike.04Demand signals for a domain nameMost names in a portfolio have no buyer at any price. A small number of observable signals separate those from the ones an end user will eventually need.05The TLD landscape and how groups tradeExtensions are not variations of the same product. Each group has its own supply, its own buyers and its own resale behaviour, and prices do not translate between them.06European country codes: nl, de, uk, fr, be, euSix European extensions account for most country code resale activity in the region. Each has its own registry, its own transfer mechanism and its own eligibility rules.07New gTLDs and where they actually tradeThe expansion of generic extensions created a great deal of registration volume and a much smaller amount of resale. The difference between the two is where the money is lost.