As we enter 2023, it is important to take a moment to reflect on our progress, accomplishments, and key insights from the past year.

Domain Sales and Macro-economic Factors

First things first, the economy has been a bit of a rollercoaster this year. Between the war, the recession, and the Crypto/NFT crash, it’s been a tough year to say the least for many businesses across the globe.

Many entrepreneurs have been waiting on the sidelines to launch their startups or raise funds. Therefore, if you’ve had a slower than usual year in terms of Domain sales, you are not alone. When we started seeing the signs of the slowing economy, we immediately put our focus on 3 key activities:

1. Increased Advertising

In 2022, we ramped up our marketing efforts across all major channels in order to drive more traffic to our Marketplace. Our Google Ads alone generated over 65 million impressions from potential buyers searching for business names.

In addition to our Google Ads campaigns, we also expanded our marketing in platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Quora, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These combined efforts resulted in an increase in our traffic to 3 million unique visitors on a monthly basis.

In addition to bringing visitors to our platform, we’ve also been working on listing our inventory on other websites and platforms which are used by entrepreneurs. In 2022, we entered into partnerships with several third party platforms and websites to list our catalog. The feed based promotions also include channels such as Google Shopping, which provide additional visibility and exposure to the domains.

We also focused on optimizing our ad technology and implementing advanced audience targeting and bidding strategies. These efforts helped us improve the efficiency of our marketing spend. Our work in this area was previously recognized by industry leaders like Google and SEMRush, who featured us in their own case studies. This year, we were also featured in a Quora case study highlighting our focus on ad tech and marketing optimization.

2. Dynamic Search & discovery tools

During 2022, we also made significant investment in improving our dynamic search as well as AI capabilities to help buyers discover the most relevant domains.

Our research has shown that buyers often include generic keywords in their searches, but are more likely to purchase names that do not include those keywords. Therefore, it is crucial for our search technology to be dynamic and able to understand the underlying intent of the buyer. Below examples of some of the keywords that buyers search for, and the names they ultimately consider for purchase, illustrate the importance of a dynamic search technology. Without this, it would be difficult for buyers to discover names that align with their specific use case.

3. More Selective Marketplace Acceptance Criteria

To maintain a highly curated experience, we have become even more selective in the names we accept into our Premium Marketplace. The more stringent acceptance criteria is necessary to ensure that the growth of our Premium listings keeps pace with our overall marketing growth. By being more selective, we are able to maintain a higher level of exposure for the domains listed in the marketplace and ensure that our collection remains highly curated.

Tech & Product Investment

Given our focus on rapid, iterative development, we added several new features that improve the overall experience for both buyers and sellers. Here are some highlights:

1. AI Capabilities

Our work in the AI space during 2022 will serve as a solid foundation for our growth in the coming years. From merchandising to search improvements, we have put together the key building blocks that leverage AI to improve the discovery and sell-through rates of domains.

a) AI Based Descriptions

We have combined the power of Generative AI with our vast pool of domain attributes to automatically generate highly compelling AI descriptions for our domains. These descriptions are designed to influence a potential buyer’s purchase decision and improve engagement with the domain.

While it is still early, the results so far have been very promising. Domain landers that use these new AI descriptions have experienced a 32% reduction in bounce rate and a 22% improvement in conversion rate. To see more examples of these AI-generated descriptions, you can check out our Twitter thread where we asked sellers to share some of their own

b) AI Based Domain Classification

We have also added new AI capabilities to automatically categorize the domains based on specific use cases that they may be well-suited for. This improves the relevance of search results for buyers who are searching for specific use cases, allowing them to see a more curated selection of relevant domains.

For example, in case of the domain StyleWand.com, our AI detected that this domain is a good fit for Clothing Personalization Service, Online Personal Stylist, Virtual Wardrobe organizer etc. When a buyer searches for any of these specific use cases, they will now be able to see much more specific and curated selection of domains that are relevant for their industry.

Many marketplaces categorize domains at a broad level (e.g. tech, clothing, medical) because it can be impractical to identify very specific possible uses for a large number of domains. This broad classification approach works well when the marketplace is small, but as the number of domains grows, it becomes increasingly important to allow buyers to also search for more specific use cases in order to receive highly relevant and targeted suggestions. We just started this level of categorization in December 2022 but we plan to fully implement this feature by Q1 2023.

c) AI Based Name Generator

Many entrepreneurs start the process of finding a domain name with business name generators. That’s why we recently launched an AI name generator powered by GPT3 technology. This tool allows buyers to describe their business in a single English sentence and receive highly relevant recommendations for potential names. We believe this will provide another level of exposure to the names listed in the Premium Marketplace since we can now present the most relevant names even with open ended, natural language business descriptions.

2. Improved Platform UX & New Landing Pages

We have also made significant investments in improving the UX of our core customer journey pages, such as the homepage and marketplace search page, as well as the seller listing management pages.

One of the major updates we made this year was the introduction of improved domain landing pages with significantly better UX. These pages have been optimized for mobile, SEO, conversion rates, and fast loading speed. Sellers now have the ability to choose from different landing page options for their Premium, Standard, and White Label (WLM) listings

Our initial A/B Testing data shows that the new landing pages are much more effective in encouraging the buyer to move to the payment step.

3. Domain Monitoring and Alerts: Other TLDs Registered, Website Developed, Crunchbase

To help our sellers better understand the market demand for their domains, we now automatically monitor the TLD registration activity for both premium and standard listings. This allows us to alert sellers when their domains have been registered or developed in other extensions, which can be helpful in pricing as well as renewal decisions. We have also recently expanded our automated monitoring to include Crunchbase, which allows sellers to receive notifications when a business listing is added in Crunchbase using the same domain in a different TLD..

According to our data, domains with websites developed in other extensions tend to have a higher sell-through rate.

4. Advanced Insights & Selling Tools

We’ve added many more features that ultimately can help sellers in improving the STR and make more informed decisions about renewals and acquisitions.

• Repeat Landing Page Views: We added a new framework to determine real end user interest on domain names by capturing repeat landing page visits from the same buyers within a short period of time. Based upon our analysis, domains that receive repeat landing page views result in a 45% improvement in the STR.
• Automatic Price Increases: We can now schedule automatic price increase on domains when we detect a serious buyer interest on domains. Since the price increase is scheduled for future, it works as a strong incentive for buyers to move forward with the purchase.
• Advanced Domain Insights: Our advanced domain insights can allow sellers to instantly get deep insights and an overall score on any of their domains (even if they are not listed on SH)

Atom Marketplace: Key Performance Stats & Insights

Let’s start with some high level Marketplace Stats in 2022

• Premium Listings: Despite a more stringent approval process, our active premium listings increased to 168,000 in 2022. We are grateful to our seller community for your support in helping us become the Largest Brandable Domain Marketplace in 2022.
• Standard Listings: Our Standard Listings have rapidly grown to more than 700,000 active listings. At 7.5% commission, the standard listings are packed with many unique features. In 2022 we also added the ability for certain standard listings to be searchable in the premium Marketplace, which provides additional exposure. In addition, we can now automatically promote the standard listings on Sedo and Sedo MLS platform as well.
• White Label Marketplaces: As of 2022, we now power more than 1700 White Label Marketplaces that leverage the SH White Label technology.

Top Industries in 2022

In 2022, the Tech, Agency, and Finance industries drove the highest level of end-user sales on our platform. Crypto, NFT and Web3 categories saw a decline in demand during the latter half of 2022.

Top Search Terms

In 2022, the following keywords were the most searched for on our platform. It’s worth noting that buyers who search for these keywords often end up purchasing domains that do not include these specific keywords. This highlights the importance of dynamic search and AI discovery tools in helping buyers find relevant domains based on their underlying intent, keywords, and associated emotions

Distribution of Sales by Domain Length

Domains with 12 characters or fewer made up more than 91% of our total sales in 2022. This indicates that short domains remain highly desirable among buyers, who may see them as easier to remember and more valuable.

Distribution of Sales by TLD

In 2022, .com domains accounted for about 90% of our total domain sales, followed by .io domains, which made up about 5% of sales. We have noticed a decrease in demand for .xyz domains during the latter part of the year due to the slowdown in the Crypto and Web3 space. On the other hand, the average selling price as well as demand for one-word .io domains has continued to be strong, with several sales reaching into the six-figure range

Looking Ahead

As we navigate the uncertain economic climate, it’s important for domain investors to focus on quality rather than quantity. The “spray and pray” approach of investing in large quantity of domains using a particular keyword (such as “Meta”) is no longer a viable investment strategy in the current environment. Instead, it’s better to focus on investing in higher quality, distinctive names, and find ways to maximize the exposure of your domains.

As we enter 2023, we plan to continue rapidly iterating and introducing innovative features by building on the strong foundation we have already established. We have a fairly substantial roadmap in terms of Tech as well as additional marketing exposure and I look forward to sharing more updates in the coming months. Thank you for all your support, and I hope that 2023 will be a successful year for us all.