There are over 435 registrars in the market, with GoDaddy accounting for 14% of the market, followed by NameCheap (13%), Alibaba (6%), and NameSilo (5%).
There are around 432 million domain names currently registered, and both generic TLDs (.com, .org, .net, .biz, .info, etc.) and ccTLDs (country code / geographic TLDs, such as .de and .fr) expected to grow around 6-7% annually over the next 7 years. Of the ccTLDs, Asia-Pacific is losing stock at the fastest rate (14%, largely in .cn and .tw domains), and Latin America and the Caribbean (+18%) and Africa (+15%) are growing the fastest.
The US market size of web domain name sales in 2022 is estimated at $8.1B, with growth of 2.2% this year. One aggressive growth projection, with a CAGR of 11% for the next 8 years, projects the global Domain Name Registrar market to be valued at $5.9B by 2030. (A paywalled report projects the global domain registrar market to reach $1,025.00 billion by 2027, and I would need to learn what is being measured differently to account for this massive differential.) In either case, and whatever growth rate pertains (2.2% or 11% growth), the opportunity is sizable.
A quarter of that market share is represented by the secondary retail market, led by Sedo (60% market share), with other large players such as Afternic, Flippa, and Namepros. They do not publish their sales data, and the Boston Consulting Group report backed into the data through surveys and interviews. But while the report estimates a secondary retail market size of $2.1B with an average price per domain of $1,660, the published stats do show a sizable secondary market: Sedo lists 18 million domains and 2 million customers, and Afternic touts 5 million domains and that they have more than 75 million domain searches each month.
I will assume that for web2 domains, that the interest in distinct websites, handles, and destinations will be more robust than it has been of late (with some years of more modest growth in the domain name market of 0.9% in 2021 vs. 4.7% in 2019).
Still, there is nothing to indicate that new growth will necessarily come in particular from nTLDs (post-2014 "new" top-level domains, like .country). Recent interest in them has been more modest, and may be flat or waning: they are falling in market share (to 8%), vs. .com domains (47%, up by 3%) and ccTLDs (36%, down by 1%). Still, buyouts of nTLDs have been robust, with 23 nTLDs sold by UNR in April 2021 alone for $40M (including .country).
This points to the urgency of first focusing on utility for the purchaser, so we do not have a solution in search of a problem, and to look at our future business as if we were creating a deck and focusing on the Problem and Solution slides, even more than the TAM and Underlying Magic ones.
Se know that there is an increased penchant for premium domain names, especially by luxury brands, hoping to define their authority and expertise in their industry and optimize for search. We also know that people keep domains for four reasons: because it is used and important for the holder, because they are squatting on it for future projects or anticipation of future value; because they want to protect a brand, and because they are lazy and just renew all of the names and variations they want. Now we have to find a problem and stoke an urgent need for people to buy a nTLD on our chain.
