In last week’s NamePros Blog article domain name sales data from the first six months of 2025, I commented that while there is significant investor interest in the relatively new .now domain name extension, there had only about $26,000 in sales volume over the first six months of 2025.
What a difference a week makes! From July 1 through July 8, 2025 NameBio recorded 6 sales, including two 5-figure sales on the same day. Dollar volume in .now domain sales for this 7 day period was about $113,000, more than 4x the total for the previous six months. While that is still tiny compared to dollar volume in .com or .ai, it was more than for .net, .co, .io or .xyz over the same one week period, in fact close to the combined total for all four.
.Now Sales July 1 through July 8, 2025
Here are the .now domain names that sold July 1-8, 2025, arranged by decreasing price, all data courtesy of NameBio:
love.now $79,499
sign.now $15,359
rare.now $11,359
respect.now $4399
MD.now $1250
reborn.now $1000
The links take you to the NameBio listing where you can obtain more information on each sale.
Not One Seller
It appears that there were six different sellers involved. The highest value sale was by TOP Domains, that also had the previous highest sale in the extension, wow.now that sold for $37,500 in November 2024.
By the way, in these sales there seems a new trend emerging of sales being listed with both the seller name and the marketplace venue, e.g. Rebrand.now / Atom.com or Top.Domains / Atom.com. This is really informative, and I hope more sellers will begin reporting NameBio sales this way. You can report to NameBio your completed domain name sales here.
Mainly Sold At Atom
If we look at the entire list of 15 domain name sales in .now recorded on NameBio, 11 of the 15 .now sales happened at Atom. There was one sale at Spaceship and one at Sedo. I believe that currently .now domain names cannot be listed at Afternic since GoDaddy has not yet started handling the .now extension.
Why is Atom so popular for .now domain names? I think there were three factors at play:
Very early on, Atom began accepting .now domains in their Premium marketplace. This gave the names both visibility and respect. A domain name is known, partly at least, by the company that it keeps.
The launch of the Atom Sapphire marketplace made it easy for potential buyers to browse an attractively presented collection of single-word .now domain names (or any other extension). For example, the link https://www.atom.com/sapphire/all/tld/.now will show you all .now Sapphire listings, just over 2000 at time of writing, a huge increase from a few days earlier. Tip: just change .now to any other extension to show Sapphire listings for that extension.
Many investors who went into .now in a big way were already established sellers on the Atom Premium marketplace.
Why Now?
Is it just chance that a number of high-value sales all happened in one week? Probably.
When sales are announced, it does spur other potential buyers that are on the fence to make a decision. However, these sales all happened so near together in time, and by different sellers, that I think this factor was not present. Nevertheless, these sales will probably help keep momentum in the extension going.
I think we are simply seeing small number statistics, coupled with a maturing aftermarket and registration of most of the quality words, as explained in the next section.
Registration Numbers and Impact on Aftermarket
While the early acceptance of .now by Atom, and the Sapphire Marketplace, were key factors, it is also true that we are now getting to the point that many of the best words are registered in .now, making the environment for aftermarket sales better.
Aftermarket high-value sales in an extension will largely wait until there are not high quality words available to hand register. In the NamePros Blog article Scarcity of Domain Names for Company Use, I pointed out that although the full Merriam-Webster dictionary has about 470,000 words, the number of English words that are valuable to a company for naming purposes is much smaller, probably not much more than 30,000. Until the registered domain names in an extension begin to approach that number, aftermarket sales will be hampered.
According to DomainTools TLD Count, there are currently just under 14,000 .now registrations. We are just beginning to see most, not yet all, ‘good’ words gone. That registration number is well below most extensions discussed on NamePros: for example .co has almost 3.5 million registrations, .org more than 11.2 million, .io and .me just over a million each, and ..app about 816 thousand, according to the same source. The .now and .bot registration numbers are similar to each other, currently.
By the way, I usually use nTLDStats for new gTLD data, e.g. nTLDstats.com/tld/now, but for some reason the .now data seems not updated since late January on that site, even though other extensions are updated.
The .now registration data, if the trend on nTLDstats is relevant to current time, suggests that more than half of .now registrations take place at just two registrars, NameCheap and Dynadot, and if we add Spaceship and Porkbun, well over three-quarters of all .now registrations are at just these four registrars.
Acquisition and Holding Costs
While some terms were registry premium in .now, many were not. You can check out current best pricing using sites like TLDES. Registrars Porkbun, Spaceship, Unstoppable and Dynadot were the least expensive the day I checked, with registration, transfer and renewal around $32 per year at these registrars, and $50 and up at most other registrars.
Active Discussion At NamePros
In Sept. 2024, just prior to the public release of .now domain names, @MiamiDomainer93 started what has become a very active discussion at NamePros: .Now Showcase and Discussion.. At time of writing there were about 3000 replies and more than 95,000 views.
Now The Word
I consulted a couple of dictionaries to confirm my understanding of the word ‘now’. Merriam-Webster list the primary use as an adverb, although now is also a noun or adjective, and is sometimes used as a conjunction or acronym.
Given the positioning of the TLD after the dot, the adverb use is the more logical for the extension. Therefore, strictly speaking verbs are best suited for use with the .now extension.
Something I learned from the dictionary, that I had not thought about previously, was that now can mean exactly the current time, or just after, or just before, the current time.
How Often Is Word ‘Now’ Registered?
I used dotDB to look into registration statistics for the term ‘now’. ’Now’ is registered as an exact term in 445 extensions, and overall domain count of 798,019. I think this data may be deceptive for ‘now’ however, as when we simply require that it contains ‘now’ all words including terms like ‘snow’ will also be counted. If we restrict the search to when ‘now’ appears as the ending term there are 362,824 domain names, and when the beginning term 64,553 times.
For what it is worth, the quotation mark Google search tells me that the term ‘now’ is found about 6.97 billion times in global websites.
Now In Business Names
I used the OpenCorporates database of global company and organization names to see how many active entities have ‘now’ in their current, or former, names: 27,821.
What Does .NOW Have Going For It?
I have not followed .now closely, have only a couple .now domain names personally, but the following points, made by various proponents, resonate with me.
Now is one of the best possible calls to action. A simple, common word with a crystal clear meaning. As such, I think it is possible that we will see more use of .now in high-end marketing campaigns than in the single brand domain name, but we will see.
The fact that the .now registry is run by Amazon, one of the best known companies in the world, helped bring instant respect.
It might not seem a significant difference whether an extension has 3, 4, 5 or more characters, but I think new extensions with 3 characters have the advantage that they are the same length as the best known legacy extensions, .com, org and .net. It is perhaps no coincidence that .xyz and .app, the best performing new gTLDs, are 3 characters long.
Many new extensions only work with a subset of possible terms. Extensions like .shop, .store, .app, .bet, .homes, .rentals, .club, .design, etc. need to be coupled with a term that fits that particular sector/niche. Just like .xyz, .now is an extension with broader potential application. Most quality dictionary words, especially verbs, make sense with .now.
As mentioned elsewhere, it was fortuitous for .now that the Atom Sapphire Marketplace came out just as the extension was finding an audience.
Atom only accept a small number of extensions in their premium marketplace. By accepting .now domain names in the Atom Premium marketplace, the extension was seen alongside the best domain names in the aftermarket.
It seems to me that a number of experienced and successful brandable domain name investors were early adopters of .now. By registering the best terms, and setting pricing high, they set a standard for the extension.
The .now extension was never cheaply discounted. So many of the new extensions have poisoned their own product by offering highly discounted first year registrations that encouraged abuse of the extension.
Developed .NOW Sites
I did not do a rigorous examination of .now developed sites, and with the extension only available about 9 months, use would be expected to be limited, but here are a sampling of developed sites:
Math.now is an AI-powered math solver. It comes in both free and subscription versions.
Send.now is a service to securely send large files.
Time.now is a worldwide time conversion utility, supported by ads.
Taska.now is a Mac app for GitHub and GitLab.
Anywhere.now is a business communication environment.
Update: There are additional developed .now sites listed by @NameGroove in one of the comments to this article.
There are a number of cases where the .now extension is used to redirect to a developed website:
Synaptic.now redirects to Synaptic.build, an AI agent service.
Matter.now redirects to the MatterContentAgency.com.
The first big sale in .now, Wow.now redirects to an underwhelming linktr.ee listing for Wow, a robotic micro-warehouse that claims it can deliver 25,000 products to millions of customers in 60 minutes or less.
Sky.now redirects to NowTV.com.
CodeFast.now redirects to CodeFast at codefa.st, a service to help build SaaS products quickly.
Mention in this section is not intended as an endorsement of any of the sites or services.
The day I checked the Google site:.now command yielded about 850,000 sites. For reference the corresponding number for .ai is about 111 million, for .co 1.2 billion, for .vc 14 million, and for .io 348 million. Clearly still very early days for .now in terms of adoption.
Sales of TermNow.com Structure Names
I used the NameBio As A Suffix command to see how many domain names with the structure TermNow.com had sold. There are 304 sales of $1000 and more on NameBio, although only 8 at $10,000 and more. The top sale was ConnectNow.com that sold for $120,000 at Sedo in 2013. The top sale so far in the .now extension is higher than all but 2 of the now-suffix .com sales of all time.
Here is a link to all NameBio-listed sales of ExampleNow.com, arranged by descending price. It contained 735 sales at time of writing, but will update automatically when new sales are added to the database.
What Now?
I don’t know what the future holds for .now. Perhaps this week of significant sales will just be an outlier blip. Perhaps it will be an impetus for other significant sales and adoptions. The extension still needs to see orders of magnitude higher adoption rate before it can take its place amongst the strong extensions. That said, .now has already achieved more 5-figure sales than many of the new extensions. The time to acquire quality .now domain names was last fall, however.
It will be interesting to see the retention rate in .now as we come to the first renewal period in a few months time.
I am sure there will be reactions on both sides, so have your say in the comment section below. Please do not use the comment section of this article to share the brilliant .now domain names that you have acquired: the place to do that is the .Now Showcase and Discussion.
Fun Fact: According to this list, 'now' is the 73rd most common word in the English language.
