How Much Domainers Earn
I did a bit of Friday reading, including NameMedia’s S-1 and various investor presentations from DarkBlueSea, an Australian based domain portfolio holder, looking to answer a simple question: How much does an average domain earn per year?
NameMedia owns 750,000 domain names and earnt $40.56 per domain name in revenue in the first 9 months of the year. That ends up at around $54.08 per domain name per year.
DarkBlueSea has 150,000 domain names and earns about $12.82 per quarter or $51.28 per year per domain.

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Just wondering if those numbers are “only” parking revenue or if they include sales of domain names and the like, since those two companies also sell names from their portfolio.
/Frank
I’m pretty sure that Dark Blue Sea has over 500,000 domain names.
Dark Blue Sea has over 500,000 domains.
According to their September Quartely update:
Profitable domain portfolio:
number: 153,000
revenue: $7,692,000 (annualised based on Sep qtr)
Revenue per domain before renewal cost: $50.27
Revenue after renewal cost: $43.53
Cost of renewal $6.74
Unprofitable domain portfolio:
Number: 347,000 (based on a total domain size of 500,000, probably more)
Revenue: $348,000 (annualised based on Sep qtr)
Revenue per domain before renewal cost: $1.00
Revenue after renewal cost: -$5.74
Total domain portfolio:
Number: 500,000
Revenue: $8,040,000
Revenue per domain before renewal cost: $16.08
Revenue after renewal cost: $9.34
Revenue from Sept qtr domain sales: $857,000 which included a single domain sale of greater than $250,000 (bedroomfurniture.com).
@Frank: That’s correct, I only compared ad revenue yielded from domains.
@David: Yep in the case of Dark Blue Sea, from what I can tell, they are keeping their unprofitable domains in the hope someone may buy them through their ‘premium domain’ registration network. But for the sake of analysis I confined it to just the profitable ones.