Your Sell-Through Rate Is Wrong While You're Still Buying Domains

Sell-through rate — the share of a portfolio that actually sells in a year — is the one number domain investors use to answer "is this working?" It is also, for most active investors, calculated wrong, not because the arithmetic is hard but because the simplest version of the arithmetic assumes something that is almost never true: that every domain in the portfolio has had a full year to sell.

If you are still buying names, it hasn't.

The Naive Calculation, and Why It Moves Depending on Which Day You Run It

The obvious formula is domains sold divided by domains held. The problem is "domains held" is not one number over the course of a year for a portfolio that's actively acquiring — it's a moving count, and which snapshot you pick changes the answer.

Take a portfolio that starts the year at 2,000 domains, acquires 500 more over the year, and sells 150. At year-end it holds 2,500 domains.

• Divide by the starting count: 150 / 2,000 = 7.5%
• Divide by the ending count: 150 / 2,500 = 6.0%

Same portfolio, same 150 sales, and the "sell-through rate" moves by a point and a half depending on nothing but which denominator you grabbed. Neither number is wrong, exactly — but neither is a fair measure of how well the portfolio performed, because the 500 domains bought partway through the year didn't get a full year's chance to sell. Counting them the same as a domain held since January understates how the older names are actually performing, and skipping them entirely (using only the starting count) ignores that some of them may have already sold.

The Time-Weighted Fix

DomainInvesting.com's Darpan Munjal published the correction: instead of dividing by a single headcount, weight each domain by how long it was actually held during the year, then annualize against that weighted average.

For the same portfolio — starting at 2,000, ending at 2,500, with the 500 new acquisitions averaging roughly 200 days held by year-end — the site works the example this way:

"average portfolio age for the year = (365*2000+200*500)/2500 = 332 days"

That 332-day average age is then used to annualize the raw sales count:

"Annualized STR = (150/2500)*(365/332) = 6.6%"

Notice where 6.6% lands: barely above the naive ending-count calculation (6.0%) and clearly below the naive starting-count one (7.5%). That's not a coincidence — the time-weighted figure is pulling the naive numbers toward the portfolio's real, blended performance instead of letting either boundary case speak for the whole year. For a portfolio buying steadily throughout the year, the ending-count naive calculation will usually understate slightly and the starting-count one will overstate more, because it's dividing this year's sales by a denominator that ignores 500 domains actually in the portfolio.

The bigger the acquisition pace relative to the base portfolio, the further apart those two naive numbers spread — and the more the time-weighting matters. A portfolio holding steady at 2,000 names all year doesn't need this correction at all; sold-over-held is already the right answer when the denominator doesn't move.

What Counts as "Good," and Why Even Domain Investors Disagree

MetricName's own Bulk Domain Appraisal tool prices a projected annual sales count into every list you paste, using the figure both NamePros and Namecheap have separately published as the working industry benchmark:

"Typical investor portfolios sell 1–2% of names per year"

That's a floor plenty of experienced sellers push back on. In a DomainInvesting.com comment thread on the STR-calculation article above, one long-time seller put it flatly:

"domain portfolio STR average should be 2-3% in the domain Industry IMO. 1-2% is too low."

Both figures come from people who sell domains for a living, and they disagree by a full percentage point — which is itself useful information. It means "1-2%" isn't a law of the market; it's a documented, commonly-cited baseline for a portfolio of ordinary quality and effort, and a better-curated, more actively promoted portfolio can reasonably outperform it. Read your own time-weighted STR against that range rather than against a single number, and treat a result meaningfully below 1% as the signal worth investigating — pricing, category quality, or how much the portfolio is actually being promoted — rather than treating 1-2% as a target you're entitled to hit by default.

Putting It Together

1. Pull your start-of-year count, end-of-year count, and total sold for the period you're measuring.
2. If the portfolio didn't grow or shrink meaningfully, sold-over-held is already accurate — skip the weighting.
3. If it did grow, estimate the average days-held for the domains acquired during the year (200 days is a reasonable placeholder for names bought roughly in the middle third of the year; adjust to your actual acquisition pace) and run the weighted-age formula above before you annualize.
4. Compare the result to the 1-2% published range, not to a single number, and treat "2-3%" as achievable rather than exceptional if your listing and promotion effort is genuinely above average.
5. Run the current list through Bulk Domain Appraisal to see the wholesale total and the tool's own 1-2%-based projected-sales figure sitting next to your actual, correctly time-weighted STR — the gap between the two tells you whether this year outperformed or underperformed the baseline, not just whether it hit an arbitrary target.

This guide is informational only and does not constitute investment or financial advice. Sell-through rate figures are industry-published estimates and benchmarks, not guarantees of any individual portfolio's performance.

Last reviewed: September 2026

Frequently asked questions

Why does dividing sold domains by held domains give two different answers?

Because "domains held" isn't a fixed number across a year in which you're also buying — it changes from your starting count to your ending count. Dividing the same sales figure by either endpoint gives you two different, equally defensible-looking percentages, and neither correctly accounts for the fact that domains bought partway through the year had less time to sell than domains held since January.

What is a time-weighted sell-through rate?

It's a sell-through rate calculated against the average number of days each domain in the portfolio was actually held during the measurement period, rather than against a single snapshot count. A domain bought in October and a domain held all year both count toward "domains held," but the October domain should count for less time-weight, since it had far fewer days in which it could have sold.

Is 1-2% actually a good sell-through rate?

It's the published baseline both NamePros and Namecheap cite for a typical investor portfolio, and it's the figure MetricName's own Bulk Domain Appraisal tool uses to project expected annual sales. Some experienced sellers consider it conservative and put a well-run, actively promoted portfolio closer to 2-3%. Treat 1-2% as a floor to compare against, not a ceiling to be satisfied with.

Does this correction matter for a small, stable portfolio?

Less so. The time-weighting correction matters most when a portfolio's size is changing meaningfully during the measurement period — heavy acquisition, a bulk sale, or a large drop. A portfolio that starts and ends the year at roughly the same size doesn't need the adjustment; the plain sold-over-held calculation is already close to accurate.

How does this connect to a bulk appraisal?

A bulk appraisal tells you what a portfolio is worth today. Sell-through rate tells you how much of that value is actually converting to real sales over time. Running the same list through both — a valuation total from Bulk Domain Appraisal and a correctly time-weighted STR calculated by hand — gives you both halves of the picture: what the portfolio is priced at, and whether it's actually moving at a rate consistent with the published benchmarks.

This guide is for informational purposes only. It is not financial, legal, or investment advice, and it is not a certified appraisal. A domain’s real price is set by what a specific buyer actually pays — no article or model can know that in advance, and we say so instead of pretending otherwise.

Last reviewed: September 2026 · Against primary sources cited in the body.