demographic sales problem

[julian]

I know some of you here are hardcore statisticians so you can help me with this question.

It occurred to me whilst doing a particularly hard front crawl session in my local pool that there are only 63million people in the UK to sell a .uk domain too. When I got home I did some low level research and calculated that there are 37million people between the age of 25 and 60 years old (an age group that would most likely want to buy a domain name).

Roughly of that 37million 65% of men and 49% of woman are employed. Just for arguments sake lets call it 20million people are in work/self-employed/run a business etc and broadly speaking are in a position to 'invest/buy a domain' name.

I then looked at the fsb site (http://www.fsb.org.uk/stats) and found that there are 4.9million businesses in the UK employing 24.3million people so in round about sort of way my above figure of 20million was not too far off.

So what's this rambling mental cases point you ask?

My question is: what is the potential market to resell your domain in? The 25million people with 'means' or 4.9million businesses or both. Either way, obviously it doesn't seem that big a potential market compared to say America.

 

[Edwin]

Both statistics, while interesting, are red herrings if we're talking about generic rather than brandable domains.

You could say that the "maximum possible market" for a good generic (one that's the most obvious fit for a particular product, service or niche) is the number of businesses in that market.

For example, if there are 100 companies who sell X service in the UK, then you have 100 chances to sell X.co.uk to them.

As long as that number is high enough and/or those within the market are web savvy enough, then the odds look pretty good for a sale at some point and at some price point.

If on the other hand you have a very specialised name that applies only to 4 companies in the whole of the UK (could happen) then if all 4 of them have no interest there is a 0% chance of making that sale, now or in the future (unless of course you decide to hold out for a hypothetical 5th company choosing to enter that market).

Generally, I'm pretty happy once I've seen that 15-20 companies are all doing the 'X' that a particular domain name refers to.

Now if we turn the discussion back to brandables, then the numbers are completely different, but again we need to be considering other factors than your original two statistics. Namely: how many companies are looking for completely NEW brands at any given time vs how many brandable domains are there that might fit the bill?

For example it might be that 4.5 million of the 4.9 million businesses have totally fixed, immutable brands (they're smaller, family businesses, sole proprietorships and the like, with no need or ambition to rebrand). So there might only be a few hundred thousand business even theoretically on the hunt for brands.

And that means that most brandable domains will never sell. That's not incompatible with making a decent living out of brandables, so long as the prices being achieved compensate for the lack of sales (and if you have an above average eye for what makes a decent brandable, and therefore an above average chance of winning the race to catch some company's eye for their next product or service)

Realistically, we'll never be able to put accurate figures on the above as that sort of data simply isn't available, whereas diligent research can put an almost exact figure on the number of potential candidates for a given generic domain (the figure will be different for every single one).