"According to data from three leading independent companies tracking the
domain name marketplace, DNJournal, Domain-Spiegel.de and Sedo.com, the
secondary domain marketplace--the marketplace where already registered
domain names are bought and sold -- experienced strong gains both in
terms of the volume of sales and the overall sale prices for domains
compared to the previous years. According to Domain-Spiegel.de, a
German publication that closely tracks the sale of domain names, the
domain name marketplace experienced explosive growth with more than
1,400 transactions reported -- compared to only 500 domain transactions
reported in 2003 and with just 400 domains sales reported in 2002. In
addition, the average sale price of a .com domain increased more than
$1,400 from 2003 to 2004, with the average domain selling for more than
$9,700."
Full Press Release
When looking at the data one should keep in mind that Sedo and "domain-spiegel.de" originally were very much focused on the German marked. While this has changed over the years, the increasing popularity in .INFO names could be related to this fact. However adaption of the new gTLDs (info/biz) has certainly improved.
Since the part of the secondary market covered in the press release mostly is limited to the public auction markets, it would be very interesting to also see numbers from the drop-name catchers such as pool.com.
