In this article we examine more than 175,000 domain name auction results to reveal the best day of the week for your auction to close on. In much the same way that email marketers consider the best day of the week to optimize for opens, the day your auction ends on can have a dramatic impact on the closing price. People are busy on Mondays catching up on emails from the weekend, and on Friday they are thinking about anything but work. So which day of the week is the best for your auction to close on? Let’s jump in and find out.
GoDaddy Auctions
GoDaddy is far and away the most active domain marketplace with more than 500 auctions closing every single day. The chart below shows the results of more than 60,000 auctions and the clear winner is Wednesday with an average sale price of $1,341. Surprisingly, the weekend is the next best option with Saturday having an average sale price of $631 and Sunday having an average price of $613. The start and end of the work week were the worst days for sellers.
NameJet Auctions
Most would agree that NameJet is the venue with the highest quality inventory. They opened up their platform a while back to private sellers with large portfolios and now they allow everybody to list domains. For NameJet we reviewed more than 25,000 auctions and the clear winner is also Wednesday with an average sale price of $2,703. However, unlike GoDaddy the weekend was the worst period for an auction to close.
Flippa Auctions
Flippa is the new kid on the block, but they have a great audience of developers and affiliate marketers who are generally willing to pay more than domain investors. We don’t have nearly as much data for Flippa as we do for other venues with only a little more than 1,000 sales to analyze. Therefore the results aren’t as statistically significant because one huge sale could throw off the results. That ended up being the case as StockPhoto.com sold for $250k on a Wednesday and so did Rides.com which went for $120k.
I’m sure you guessed that Wednesday was the best day of the week for Flippa as well with an average sale price of $5,123. Even if we throw out those two outliers Wednesday is still the winner with an average sale of $3,661. Sunday was the next strongest day at Flippa, with Friday being the worst.
Sedo Auctions
For Sedo data it is important to note that a majority of sales are reported to us, not recorded by us on the day they happened. I believe Sedo reports the date the transaction closed escrow, not the date an auction ended or a sale agreement was reached. Also a majority of Sedo sales are negotiated or purchased through a BIN, so unlike the other venues in this article many of the sales aren’t actually auctions. That said, they are a huge marketplace and it is worth taking a look at their data. We analyzed almost 95,000 sales and found, yet again, that the best day of the week was Wednesday with an average sale price of $4,874. Sunday was the worst day of the week for Sedo followed by Monday.
So there you have it, when you’re scheduling your domain for auction it is in your best interest to make sure it closes on a Wednesday. Unfortunately we don’t have data on auction closing times, but needless to say you should generally avoid your auction closing during times when people are commuting or are asleep. You should also consider your audience, if you are selling a numeric or short domain which lately are dominated by Chinese investors, you should probably schedule your auction to close at a reasonable time in Asia.
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.
Good post and interesting to discover that wednesday is the most profitable day to close auctions as a seller.
At ClosingAuctions.com I have the time all auctions closed for Godaddy, Sedo, Flippa and Cax for the last 5 years so I will check stats and will let you know what hour of the day is the most profitable.
Thanks Francois, that’s very generous of you to offer to share such valuable information! I look forward to your findings.
Any update on time differences? Would love to see which time periods are best to target for buying and selling.
You could have just said Wednesday is the best day to end auctions 🙂 Good post
Fascinating stuff! I appreciate the research and info – it will definitely help me in my future auction listings.
Today is also Wednesday of but today’s deals will be mostly of the April fool Deals
HI,
Very Good Post and highly informative.
I have often wondered many times how to time my listing according to the day of auction ending. I never thought that Wednesday would be the winner.
I have previously read elsewhere that Saturday was the best to end your auction especially for godaddy. But this is proved to be grossly wrong by your post.
Thank you very much for this helpful information.
This was one of the questions I had regarding the closing time of my auctions. And the data is very clear about that! Of course I would also like to know about the best hours… Maybe this could be the topic for a next post?
Thanks for the research, Michael! 🙂
Looks like camels buy domains also! :d
It is almost unfathomable that there is on avg approx. $200,000,000 in domain name sales each and every Wed, and $431,000,000 each and every week, and $22.5 Billion each year.
Has this data really been verified???
I didn’t say the data was just from the past week. This is a look at all of our sales records for each venue, some going back a decade.
Michael – Ok thanks for the clarification. Your data analysis provides a good data point. It would also be interesting to see these same data comparisons over a monthly basis, and for the most recent 3 and 1 year periods. – NJ
Really interesting. Would domains listed from the weekday workplace be different in kind and value from those listed on the weekends? What would be the end-day bias? What are the results when we look at median prices rather than mean prices?
I think the bias is more about the buyer than what sellers are listing. Take NameJet where most of their inventory consists of expired auctions, I don’t think people are choosing what to drop based on the day of the week. I think weekends don’t do as well because people are running errands and spending time with family rather than watching domain auctions all day.
Here are the median sale prices for NameJet by day of week:
Sunday: $496
Monday: $510
Tuesday: $654
Wednesday: $2000
Thursday: $545
Friday: $531
Saturday: $449
Still clearly points to Wednesday.
Thanks for the info. Stunning numbers…Any idea why Tuesday’s median price would be so small relative to Wednesday’s?
Thanks for the valuable info, Michael.
It seems to me that buyer types might be revealed by whether weekends end strongly or not.
I am thinking that Flippa and GoDaddy get more people that have jobs (weekends off).
And, NameJet and Sedo have more self-employed (work weekends) and entrepreneurs (no set schedule).
What do you think?
Very useful information, great research!!
Best regards.
I’ve read somewhere may be on NamePros that Wednesday is the best closing auction time. But here data speaks itself. I’m going to try this very soon and will see the difference. Thanks Michael for your research and useful information.
Thanks
Great piece of information indeed very useful, i want know how can i make my domain name active on godaddy?
It would be great to see a new analysis now that we are in 2017. If everyone learns to start to end the auctions on Wednesday, then it might over-saturate that day and backfire ??? maybe ???
WHat you think is teh best time of wednesday?
morning-evening or late night?
There’s a window where most marketplaces have their auctions ending, starting in the early afternoon in the US (for example 3pm Eastern for DropCatch, NameJet, etc) and lasting for several hours. Some are a little earlier than that like Park.
I would personally try to land it in that window, as that is when the most people will be around and actively paying attention. I would lean towards the earlier part of the window as well, so people won’t have spent their money on too many other auctions and tap out sooner.
I don’t have any data to back that up though.
I think best time to add any domain for auction is Saturday Evening. Everyone has off and next day Sunday. Double chances for bids.