While economic activity in most industries is stagnant, the domain market continues to show growth. A report recently released by a large domain auction house shows a 15% increase in its sales.

Other auction sites don’t always report their growth, so it’s hard to tell if this increase has occurred across the board. Given that the registration base of most TLDs and ccTLDs is increasing, I think its fair to say that there has been universal growth in sales.

The average name sale price has jumped 37%, too– from £1,031.17 to £1,412. This heavy market growth is the result of increased speculation among investors.

Photo | svilen001

Continue reading: Domain sales up by 15%

A popular domain auction site recently released a report detailing statistics about more than 9,000 auctions in the last three months. Surprisingly, the average sale price for a .net domain came out to $1,775 USD, a wee bit higher than the average .com value of $1,768. This is a sharp decline from the $2,527 figure calculated in the last reporting period.

If .com is supposedly king, why are .net domains selling for more? The answer is quite simple: all the good generic .com names are taken. According to the report, 75% of domain sales were .coms– mostly less desirable names, however. Now that the cream of the crop has already been sold, premium .net names are becoming more desirable.

Does this mean .coms are now worth less? Such a statement could be no further from the truth. People are simply buying .nets because there are no good .coms available. Since so few are out there, .coms are now worth more than ever before.

Source | DN Journal

Continue reading: Report: average .net auction price exceeds .com

It seems as though data center operators and ISPs aren’t the only ones lagging behind in IPv6 adoption. Recent data provided by ICANN shows that 41% of the existing 280 Top-Level Domains have no IPv6 support whatsoever.

With IPv4 addresses still slated to run out some time in 2011, this finding is alarming. While it would be wise for these TLD operators to invest in the new technology before it’s too late, ICANN can do very little to make them do so. No doubt the problem will be exasperated even further when new gTLDs are introduced next year.

ICANN should not allow new TLDs to be created unless the owners invest in IPv6. While the organization itself cannot be held responsible for every Internet mishap, as a regulatory agency it has a duty to make sure a pragmatic policy is followed within the domain industry.

Source | CircleID

Photo | clix

Continue reading: TLDs slow to adopt IPv6

There are now 183 million domains registered on the web, according to The Domain Name Industry Brief (PDF), a quarterly report authored by Versign.

Last quarter, domain registrations rose 3%. So far this year, an average of 2.4 million new .com and .net registrations are made each month. These two TLDs alone account for a little under half (92.4 million) of all names registered.

There was also a 4% incease in ccTLD registrations, which account for 74.1 million of domains. The top 10 country extensions accounted for 64% of this number.

In all, 11.8 million registrations were made last quarter. A sign of the times, this was a 17% drop from the same time last year. Things are getting better, however, as the number marked an increase of 17% also from last quarter.

Continue reading: 183 Million Domains Now Registered