.net was created for network providers and has long been the second choice when the .com is taken. Our corpus holds 3,578 recorded .net sales. That is enough data to find real comps, but the market behaves differently from .com in ways that matter for pricing. This page explains those differences and how to use comps for a .net name.
Who buys .net names
Owners of the matching .com are often the most motivated buyers. A company that owns brand.com may buy brand.net to protect its name, stop email misdirection or keep a competitor off it.
Technical and network businesses such as hosting providers, internet service providers and infrastructure companies sometimes choose .net on purpose, because the extension fits what they do.
Long established projects that registered on .net years ago and built a brand there, from forums to open source communities, occasionally buy related names or sell their own.
Investors buy .net names at expired auctions and investor venues such as DropCatch, NameJet and Namecheap, and across GoDaddy, which carries the largest share of recorded .net trading. BuyDomains is also a significant seller of .net names to end users.
What drives .net prices
Single words and short names
As in .com, single dictionary words lead. Recorded examples include super.net at 150,000 USD (LegalBrandMarketing, 2024-09-23), profile.net at 108,897 USD (DAN.com, 2024-02-06) and spring.net at 100,000 USD (LegalBrandMarketing, 2024-08-06). These are rare in the .net market. Most recorded .net sales are in the low thousands.
Short letter and number names
Two and three character .net names, and short numeric names, have a market of their own. mh.net sold for 57,566 USD (GoDaddy, 2023-07-30) and 19.net for 52,088 USD (GoDaddy, 2026-04-12). These are priced on pattern and scarcity more than meaning.
Established names with history
Some .net names carry an existing audience or reputation. groklaw.net, a long running legal news site, sold for 64,000 USD (GoDaddy, 2025-01-13). Names like that are valued partly on their history and inbound links, which makes them poor comps for an ordinary .net word.
Who owns the .com
The single biggest factor for most .net names is the .com of the same word. If an active company owns it, that company is the obvious buyer, and also the reason other buyers hesitate. If the .com is unused, a .net buyer takes on less confusion risk.
Wholesale and retail in .net
The .net market leans wholesale. Many names change hands between investors at moderate prices, while end-user sales are less frequent than in .com. That is why the extension's recorded sales cluster at the lower end, and why a few large sales can look misleadingly typical if you only read the top of the list.
Renewal costs for .net are close to those of .com, so holding .net names is cheap compared with .ai, .io or .co. That lowers the pressure on investors to sell quickly, and it means many .net names sit in portfolios for years with asking prices well above what the recorded sales support. An asking price on a .net name is therefore weak evidence. The recorded sale is what counts.
For a .net name, the honest question is usually who the realistic buyer is. If the answer is the owner of the matching .com, end-user comps are relevant but the buyer pool is one company. If no obvious buyer exists, investor venue comps are the safer basis.
GoDaddy, which handles most recorded .net trading, mixes auctions and end-user sales, so we label it a mixed venue. BuyDomains, Sedo and DAN.com sales are clearer retail evidence. DropCatch and NameJet sales are clearer wholesale evidence.
How to use comps for a .net name
- Stay inside .net. The same word in .com sold to a different kind of buyer. Use the .com price only as an upper bound, never as a comp.
- Match length and type. Separate dictionary words, short letter and number names, two-word phrases and names with an existing site.
- Separate venues. Decide whether you are estimating an investor bid or an end-user price.
- Discount the trophies. A handful of six figure .net sales tells you the ceiling, not the typical price.
- Think about the .com owner. A comp whose .com owner bought it may have sold higher than the open market would pay. Our guide to domain comps covers how to weigh such cases.
How SoldComparables handles .net names
SoldComparables searches all 3,578 recorded .net sales and gives same extension comps a relevance boost with the reason "Same .net extension". Each comp is scored from 0 to 100 on extension, length, style, term class, singular or plural, digits, hyphens, venue tier and meaning, where meaning comes from an embedding language model that has precomputed which words are close.
Each comp shows up to three plain reasons, its venue tier, date and a link to the public report it came from. The estimate gives low, likely and high values, separate wholesale and retail figures, a confidence level and a rationale that cites comps by name, price and date, along with what would raise or lower the number. If fewer than three good comps exist, the report says so and widens the range. It is a data-backed estimate, not a certified appraisal.
Compare with .com domain sales and .co domain sales, or browse sold domain names across the full corpus.
Check your .net name on the domain appraisal tool, or see what each plan includes on the pricing page.