- Typical prices held steady. The median domain sold for $18.87 in Q2 2026, almost exactly where it sat a year ago.
- Value sat at both ends of the market. Nearly nine in ten orders closed under $50, and that group contributed about as much total value as the top tier did.
- Structure beat subject matter. The quarter's most expensive names were short, clean, and unhyphenated, and they were already registered across a lot of other extensions.
- It's all from real sales. The report covers more than 54,000 completed aftermarket sales on the Dynadot marketplace.
Top-sale lists get a lot of attention, and for good reason. Whether you're registering a name, buying one, or selling one, those headline results are useful to see. They're only part of the picture, though, so we went through our own marketplace data to find out what the market did across every sale, not just the big ones.
The Q2 2026 Domain Intelligence Report is now live. It covers more than 54,000 completed aftermarket sales on the Dynadot marketplace from April to June 2026, measured against the same quarter last year, and looks at pricing, extensions, name structure, and the quarter's biggest results. Here's a quick tour of what we found.
What domains actually sold for in Q2 2026
Prices for everyday domains barely moved. Value stayed clustered at the very bottom and the very top of the market, and the expensive names had far more in common with each other structurally than they did by topic.
The typical price held steady
The middle of the market was remarkably stable. The typical domain sold for $18.87, almost exactly where it sat in Q2 2025 at $18.85.
The average moved on a different path, landing at $46.93 against $63.85 a year earlier. That gap between a steady median and a moving average is the interesting part. It tells you the mix of what sold shifted toward lower-priced inventory, while the price buyers paid for a comparable name held where it was.
The listing types that were observed were:
- Expired domain orders
- Buy-It-Now
- User auctions
- Backorders
Value came from two ends of the market
Sales volume and sales value live in completely different places.
Under 1% of orders closed at $1,000 or more, and those alone accounted for close to a third of everything the marketplace was worth in Q2. Narrow it further to sales above $5,000, which was around seven orders in every ten thousand, and you're still looking at nearly 12% of total value.
At the other end, nearly nine in ten orders closed under $50, and together they made up a similar share of value to the top tier.
The practical takeaway is that the aftermarket is two businesses at once, and which one you're in, changes how you should think about pricing.
.COM led on volume, .IO led on price
354 different extensions traded during the quarter. .COM took about seven in ten of all orders and priced close to the market average, which makes sense given it's where most of the everyday volume happens. The extensions with the strongest pricing were all small by volume, each under 1% of orders.
.IO was the standout. Its typical sale was $61.49, more than triple the market median.
Short names win at the top, hyphens priced lower
Very short names, one to five characters, averaged well above the market. Yet the typical sale price was the same in every length bucket. In other words, a short name doesn't reliably sell for more, it just has a much better shot at selling for a lot.
Hyphens went the other way. Hyphenated names traded below the market average through every price band, and they were completely absent from the top of it. Not one sale above $5,000 had a hyphen in it.
The clearest signal at the top: cross-TLD registration
This was the most useful finding in the report for anyone valuing a name. Cross-TLD registration counts how many other extensions the same name is already registered in, which is effectively a measure of how many other people wanted that string.
The median sale above $5,000 was already registered in 26 other extensions. Market-wide, the median was 2. Names registered in more than 100 other extensions sold for nearly twice the typical price.
It also behaves like a threshold rather than a smooth curve, so the report walks through where that threshold sits and how it compares with domain age and backlink counts, both of which showed much more limited correlation with price than you'd expect.
The quarter's biggest sales
The top of the market was led by tenvels.com at $25,000 and betzz.com at $15,210.88. Most of the names were 5 characters or shorter, and two were pure numeric.
The report lists the full top ten alongside the listing type and month for each, so you can see exactly which channel the biggest sales came through.
Read the full report
The Q2 2026 Domain Intelligence Report covers all of this in detail, with full tables, charts, and methodology. Every figure is reported as shares, medians, ratios, and index values.