com res .co.uk survey

[namealot]

The results of the recent com res co.uk survey shows only tiny 4 % actually buy domains from Domainers /resellers… pretty dismal amount ? It also says a high % of buyers found the domain name they wanted was free to reg ?? (there’s a high amount of rubbish being regged then )

http://www.nominet.org.uk/digitalAssets/52398_Registrant_Survey.pdf

Why do other's think the amount bought from domainers is so poor, Is it there over priced, There's still plenty left, badly marketed, too lazy to find buyers, unapproachable to end user... Seams to be pretty untapped market ?

 

[willbon]

I'd go for awareness as the primary problem... when people look for a domain name and it's taken I'd expect most will not even put it into their browser and see what it goes to... and see if it is actually being used by someone else....

Then, if they do get to the stage of finding out that it might be available from a domainer, negotiations are often over complicated with the owner seeing what he can squeeze out of the purchaser and all too often the domainer will ask a silly price.

Also... the general public has expectations that the domain they want should be sold to them at a few times reg fee rather than a realistic 'market' price. Like any economic model we're looking at demand and supply and eventually the market will find it's feet.... However, 'rogue' domainers who seem to live on a different planet as regards market value do brand the whole industry as a bunch of thieves.

 

[Edwin]

There were 158,927 new registrations in August 2011 according to Nominet. If the 4% figure was genuinely scalable across all their their registrations, that would mean that 6,357 .co.uk domains were purchased off their previous owners in August 2011, which sounds pretty decent. That's an annualised pace of over 75,000 aftermarket sales (again, extrapolating from the survey data).