Park.io has always been very generous in sharing their auction data with NameBio and the community. Their data gives everyone great insights into what the most popular ccTLDs are selling for on the wholesale market. They recently took it a step further by launching an in-depth statistics page that data nerds will love.

Since 2014 Park.io has successfully registered more than 15,000 expired domains for users and auctioned more than $4 million in ccTLDs. They also partner with the .ai registry to auction expired .ai domains on the last Friday of every month.

A Look at the Top Flips

In the spirit of all this data sharing, I thought it would be fun to look at some of the biggest public flips that started as Park.io purchases. Keep in mind that these only include domains where both the purchase and the subsequent sale were public.

Sometimes purchases were not public because they were uncontested back orders that didn’t go to auction. Sometimes the sales happened in private. And sometimes both were private.

But without further ado, here are the Top 25 flips that we’re aware of:

Of these flips the average hold time was just 1.17 years. 48% of them didn’t even have to pay a single renewal before selling them on. The shortest hold time of these flips was Equals.io at just 27 days, which was purchased for $99 and then sold at Sedo a few weeks later for $4,159. The average hold time of all the flips we could find was just 1.03 years.

Twelve of the Top 25 flips were acquired for $155 or less. All but two of them were purchased for three-figures. That goes to show that in domaining you make most of your money on the buy side. That’s not to say that you can’t buy high and sell higher. But buying low and selling high is the safer play for most people, especially beginners.

The average ROI of these flips was 2,640% with the highest being nearly 8,400%. Of all the flips we could find the average ROI was 721%. The reason this number is so much lower (but still great) is that there seems to be a lot of venue arbitrage going on here, and selling wholesale generates lower returns.

Venue arbitrage means buying at one venue and quickly selling at another where the users are willing to pay more. Of all the flips we could find, 71.6% of them were flipped on a wholesale venue, with Flippa representing 88% of those. So it seems to be a solid strategy to buy on Park.io and turn around and auction them on Flippa, if you can pick the right names.

The Most Popular ccTLDs

We all know .io is one of the most popular ccTLDs out there, especially with startups. But considering Park.io catches 17 different ccTLDs, I asked them what the five most popular ones are both in terms of registrations and auction prices. It turns out they are: .io, .me, .ai, .to, and .ly. So if you’re looking to branch out into ccTLDs, those are the ones it would make the most sense to focus on. They go into a lot more detail on their new statistics page.

Welcoming Park.io

You may have noticed the large purple auction widgets at the top of every page featuring the hottest Park.io auctions. I would like to personally thank Mike Carson and Steve Webb at Park.io for becoming NameBio’s Platinum sponsor. Your generous support allows us to keep doing what we’re doing, and offering it for free to the community.

If you enjoy NameBio and you have profited from the data, please support those who support our efforts by joining Park.io. Or even if you just like making money 🙂

Park.io also has a great email newsletter that helps you stay on top of their latest auctions, you can subscribe here.

Michael Sumner

Michael Sumner is the CEO of NameBio.com. Previously he was the lead developer at State Ventures which owns and operates geo domains such as OceanCity.com and Maryland.com. Michael was also the co-founder of DN Media, a company that was involved in seven figures worth of domain name transactions.