How to find a trend in auction results

Volume, median close, four-figure depth and the change on the period before, read without mistaking a different sample for a different market.

By Greg Priday · Published 16 August 2026 · 10 min read

Start with the question

Market summaries are easy to read and easy to over-read. Four figures move every week, and the temptation is to narrate whichever one moved most: median up, market up. That is almost never what happened.

Before looking at anything, decide what you actually want to know. "Are two-word .com names selling better than last month" is a question these figures can partly answer. "Is the domain market up" is not, and no summary anywhere is going to answer it honestly.

The record right now

Recorded volume -8% on the previous period: $2.1M
Auctions closed -3% on the previous period: 3,071
Median close -5% on the previous period: $502
Closed at $1,000+: 426

Live, from the same read the auction record uses. Longer periods appear on the record itself once there is enough history behind them.

What each figure says

Four numbers, and each of them answers a narrower question than its label suggests.

Figure	What it can show	What it cannot
Recorded volume	Roughly how much money moved through the part of the market we read, and whether that is more or less than the period before.	The market's total. It is a sum over a bid-weighted sample above a floor, and one exceptional close can carry it on its own.
Auctions closed	Activity inside the published, contested, above-threshold set.	Total inventory, total sales, or demand independent of which sources we read.
Median close	Where the middle of the observed set sits, undisturbed by one big result.	The median of all domain sales. It is the median of what is above the floor.
Closed at $1,000+	How deep the demand went. The count answers "how many", the share beneath it answers "out of how many", and the share is the one that compares between periods.	A stable definition of "strong". It is a fixed nominal line and it will mean less over time.

Why volume moves and the median does not

These two figures sit next to each other and they are built on opposite principles. Volume is a sum, so every close pulls on it in proportion to its size. The median is a position, so every close counts once regardless of what it went for.

That difference is the most useful thing on the strip. Take a week of 400 closes with a median around $500, and add one $80,000 name to it. Volume rises by roughly a third. The median moves by one place in the ordering, which is to say not at all. Nothing about ordinary names changed, and one of the two figures says so.

So the pair is read together, and the interesting case is when they disagree. Volume up with the median flat is a story about a handful of names, not about the market. Go and find them: sort the record by price and open the top few rows. It is usually either a genuinely excellent string or a domain carrying a long-running website, and neither one tells you much about the name you are holding.

This is also why the strip does not headline the biggest close of the period. It is the figure most easily moved by a single result, and it is the least able to explain itself without the domain name attached to it, which the table has and a summary tile does not.

Volume, and what the record leaves out

The figure is labelled recorded volume, and the word is load-bearing. It is the sum of the closes we hold, and what we hold is a sample chosen on purpose: closes above a minimum price, at the marketplaces we read, and within those, the most contested auctions first up to a fixed ceiling per run. All three of those shape the number, and none of them is the market.

The floor is doing more work than it looks like. The zero-bid and near-zero-bid tail is most of any marketplace's inventory, and it is worth nothing, so it is excluded. That makes every figure here a description of the contested end of the market. It also means both volume and the count are sensitive to what happens near the floor: a week where slightly more names scrape over it shows as a rise without a single price having changed.

The source list matters just as much. If a marketplace we read has a quiet week, or an adapter breaks and one source stops arriving, volume falls and nothing about the market has moved at all. That is the first thing to rule out, not the last.

What the figure is genuinely good for is direction over successive periods, on the assumption that the sample stayed the same shape. That assumption is worth about a week at a time, which is why every percentage here compares against the period immediately before rather than against a quarter ago.

Comparing one period with another

The percentages compare the selected period against the period immediately before it, of equal length. Last 7 days against the 7 before. It is not year-on-year, and nothing here adjusts for seasonality, because there is nowhere near enough history to know what the seasons are.

Two consequences. A period containing a holiday is being compared against one that may not, and neither is labelled. And a period that is only offered once the record can also fill the period before it, which is why longer windows appear on their own over time rather than being available from day one. A 90-day label over nine days of collection would be a fact about us rather than about the market.

Source mix moves figures on its own

Different marketplaces carry different inventory. Registrar expiry auctions, drop-catch auctions between backorderers, and aggregated listings from other platforms are three different populations, and the mix between them is not constant week to week.

So a median can rise because one source with cheaper inventory contributed fewer rows. Nobody repriced anything. The composition changed.

The same applies to duplicates, which is why the record deduplicates before it counts. When an aggregator lists another platform's auction, the same close arrives twice at an identical price and time; counting both would report one auction as two and inflate volume in exactly the weeks the aggregators were busiest. Reading a single result covers how that works per row.

Names against former websites

Here is the trap that no amount of statistics will catch for you. A week in which several domains carrying long-running websites happened to close will show a higher median and a higher top quarter, and it will look exactly like a week in which the price of names went up.

They are not the same event, and only one of them tells you anything about the name you are holding. Before writing a conclusion about a period, open the archive on a handful of the top closes and on a couple around the median. Checking what a domain was before takes two minutes per name, and it is the only way to tell those two weeks apart.

Three readings, worked

Three shapes that come up constantly, and what each one is more likely to mean than the obvious reading.

Example

What moved	The obvious reading	The likelier ones
Median up, closes down	Prices rose.	The weaker names were not there. A source contributed less, or fewer names cleared the floor. Check the source mix before anything else.
Volume up, median flat, $1,000+ share flat	The market is heating up.	A few large closes carried the sum. Sort by price and read the top rows; if two names account for most of the rise, there is no trend here to write about.
Volume up, closes up, $1,000+ share up	The market is heating up.	This one might actually be it: more names, clearing higher, with the strong end growing faster than the set. Still rule out a source that started contributing more than it did last period.

Writing a conclusion with a confidence level

If you are going to say something about the market, say how sure you are in the same sentence. Three levels are enough:

Observed. The figure moved, and the sample did not. Say what moved and by how much.
Suggested. The figure moved and there is a plausible market explanation, but the sample also changed. Say both.
Not readable. The sample changed enough that the figure cannot be attributed. This is the most common answer on a short record, and saying so is worth more than a guess.

Nobody has ever regretted a market note that said "not enough data to tell". Plenty of people have regretted the other kind.

The trend-reading checklist

In order, because the early steps kill most conclusions before you invest in them:

Does the record cover the period, and the period before it?
Same minimum price on both sides of the comparison?
How did volume move?
Did the number of closes move with it, or did volume move on its own?
How did the median move, and in the same direction?
Did the $1,000+ share move, or only the count under it?
Sort by price and read the largest closes separately, one row at a time.
Did the source mix change?
Are you comparing bids against bidders anywhere?
Check the archive on a sample of the top and middle rows.
Write the conclusion, with its confidence level attached.

Then go and look: the record is updated hourly, and the period control sits on the header.