How DomainTier values a domain

A domain is worth what a buyer will pay, and the best predictor of that is what comparable names have actually sold for. DomainTier anchors every valuation to real transactions wherever they exist, and falls back to a calibrated structural model only when they don't.

The estimate is always presented as three figures forming one band: a liquidity floor (a fast, motivated-seller price), a market value (the realistic mid-point), and a strategic premium (what a category-defining acquirer might pay). A confidence score states how much evidence stands behind the number.

The evidence stage draws on a database of 1.3 million recorded sales spanning public marketplaces, auction houses and aftermarket venues. The set is deduplicated across venues, price- and date-normalised to one canonical format, and screened for mis-records before use. A smaller, cleaned corpus is worth more than a larger noisy one. For each query the engine assembles several classes of comparable:

• Exact same-TLD: a prior sale of the exact domain. The strongest evidence; used as a floor when the sale is representative.
• Cross-TLD: the same name on other extensions, price-normalised to the queried TLD.
• Similar-pattern: names of the same length and structural class, recency-weighted so stale sales don't dominate.
• Semantic neighbours: names with related meaning, surfaced by vector similarity.

A skepticism pass filters dust (drop-catch noise, mis-recorded prices) before the set informs the blend. A recency-weighted median, robust to a single out-of-distribution sale, becomes the anchor that the evidence factor pulls the intrinsic value toward.

The liquidity floor and the price-to-time-to-sale read depend on how often a name in a given class actually finds a buyer, and completed sales alone can't reveal that: sold names are only the numerator. So the sell-through signal is trained against the denominator too: hundreds of thousands of names that were listed or sent to auction and drew no bid. Modelling both outcomes, sold and unsold, is what lets a sell-through estimate mean something rather than being read off the winners alone.

Confidence is reported alongside the value, never multiplied into it. It rises with the strength of the evidence: a documented sale of the exact domain yields high confidence, decaying as that sale ages; a deep set of close comparables yields a strong-but-lower figure; a purely model-derived estimate is capped, because the engine cannot honestly claim certainty without market evidence. And when two independent reads of the same name disagree widely, confidence drops with the disagreement; the factor breakdown shows that discount as its own row. Live auction activity on the exact name is treated the same way evidence should be: sustained competitive bidding can lift the figure toward the current bid, but only within a cap anchored to the name's own fundamentals and the depth of the bidding. A lone bid, or any bid on a name without fundamentals, moves nothing.

Junk-shape names (long unpronounceable strings, random long numerics) are capped lower still. The goal is calibration: a stated confidence should mean what it says.

A valuation is an estimate, not an appraisal or an offer. Thinly-traded categories carry real uncertainty, and the engine surfaces that rather than hiding it. Trademark exposure, registrant intent and live negotiation all sit outside the model. DomainTier flags brand-locked names but does not give legal advice.

And because a methodology is only as good as its results: every valuation filed on a live auction is graded against the price the name later fetches, daily, in public. The running scoreboard is on the track record page.