How do .IO domain prices compare to .COM?

io-vs-com

Recently I was talking with another startup founder about domains (yes this happens quite a bit) and she asked a really good question – how do .IO prices compare to .COM. I didn’t have a great answer so thought I would do a little bit of research and find some comparable sales. Here’s a few examples that I found:

  • HB.com sold for $100,000, HB.io sold for $16,000 (.IO valued at 16% of .COM)
  • Beauty.com sold for $800,000, Beaty.io sold for $15,000 (.IO valued at 1.8% of .COM)
  • Payment.com sold for $250,000, Payment.io sold for $8,888 (.IO valued at 3.6% of .COM)
  • RSS.com sold for $135,000, RSS.io sold for $8,823 (.IO valued at 6.5% of .COM)
  • Bucket.com sold for $30,000, Bucket.io sold for $7,000 (.IO valued at 23% of .COM)
    (Source – NameBio)

Okay so first things first…this is very far from a statistically significant survey, I just spent ten minutes trying to find five different examples of names that sold in .COM and .IO to compare. So the results here are probably almost completely meaningless, but hey I wanted to have some data to look at.

With these five sample sales, .IO indexed in on average at roughly 10% of the .COM price. If I was going to really get to the bottom of this I would have to look at probably 1,000+ sales or at least a few hundred to get a more meaningful sample size.

So I thought I’d turn this question over to you. Do you think 10% is a fair estimate of .IO value when compared to .COM? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton