What are the domain sales figures for January 2005?

What’s been going on in the domain sales front since the beginning of the year? We spoke, I think the first week in January on the air and I guess there’s quite a pick up in domain sales and average sales prices. Tell us what you’ve seen so far.

Ron: Well, I think the most important trend that we’ve seen, we’re now five weeks into the new year, and when I looked at it at the end of January, we last--for the Year 2004, we had just over 300 sales reported to us that were in five figures, so that averaged out to about 25 a month. So after the first month of 2005, I noticed that we had already had 37 sales at the five-figure level reported, so that’s a 50% jump in those high-ticket sales, and again, that’s just what’s reported. Honestly, I think we all know that the lion share of sales aren’t even reported, so this is just a sampling, but this sampling gives us an idea of what’s going on in the overall marketplace. And when you look at the new TLD [ph] charts, the same thing, we’re seeing about--on that particular chart, we track sales $1,000 and up, and we’re about a 50% increase over what we average per month in 2004. So 2004 was a great turnaround year that we were all really excited about, and 2005 we’re off to even a better break out of the gate.

Monte: Right. And like you said, it’s--although you can’t really correlate it directly to what’s really going on in the industry, it certainly it does show some enlightening effects. And, you know, obviously there’s companies like ours that can’t report hardly anything that we sell.

Ron: Right.

Monte: But when we do have the chance, we do like to do that to help set some of the industry standards and make sure that people do know that there’s some large transactions occurring and some of the ones that are not confidential. But there’s a lot more confidential deals out there than there are--I mean, there’s a lot more confidential deals out there than there are non-confidential deals out there, in my opinion.

Ron: And those are usually your higher ticket sales, also, so it would be even more impressive if we can put those out there, but those are the ones that generally don’t make it out.

Monte: Yeah, definitely. Regarding--well, we had quite a week and some firsts. First of all, I guess the first Super Bowl ad that’s ever run from a domain company happened over the Super Bowl, GoDaddy had a Super Bowl ad this week. What’s been the general feedback on that so far?

Ron: Well, I just saw that they are saying their traffic went off the chart. I noticed the site was slower than usual, too. It did bring a lot of people to their site, and, of course, that kind of exposure’s got to be great for all of us in the industry, as more people come in and realize what domains are and register some of their own. It’ll be interesting, I’m not even sure they’ll release the figures or not, but I’m curious to know how much of a spike it’s going to have, in terms of actual registrations.

As a public relations move, they got so much mileage out of that, beyond the 30-second commercial, and to me it was really a godsend for them that Fox pulled the second running of that spot out, they only let it run once, but that just made more news. So now all of a sudden, you’re in News Week, The New York Times, every newspaper in the country because you had a spot pulled, so naturally people want to know, “Gee, what was that that got pulled,” so they go to the website, and GoDaddy, being the smart marketers that they are, have that available for you to see there.

Monte: Right.

Ron: So they’re getting a ton of mileage out of their $2 million-plus investment.

Monte: Hey, Ron, hold on just a second, we have a message from the producer about some technical issues that are happening.

P: Yeah, a bunch of people just dropped out of the chat room and it looked like there was a net split there. You guys can try and jump back into the chat room, just add a number to the end of your name that you were logged in with, and that should help you guys be able to jump back into the chat room. Otherwise, go to the front of the site and there’s IRC information on how to jump in with an IRC client.

Monte: All right, great, thank you. Yeah, they-- GoDaddy definitely spun this thing well before and is still spinning it well after, trying to find out, you know, how they didn’t get the second spot pulled and, you know, what the real issue is. I just read today that the GoDaddy girl that was in the commercial is gonna be on Howard Stern and so they’re really rocking it up.