You’ll find links to the current and previous LLLL.com price guides here.

June 2009 LLLL.com Price Guide

April 2009 LLLL.com Price Guide

Short Domain Name Guide

Older LLLL.com Price Guides

This LLLL.com Price Guide considers all reported LLLL.com auction sales between April 01, 2009 and June 04, 2009. Domain name marketplaces having a presence include Sedo, Afternic, GoDaddy Auctions, eBay, NameJet, and SnapNames. Many short domain investors who buy domains on eBay have noticed that on the low end, LLLL.com prices are down — they’re down a bit elsewhere as well, however it’s most obvious on eBay, where LLLL.coms have sold for as little as $0.55 and others have gone unsold with starting bids of $0.99 (including some of my own LLLL.coms put on eBay). I was quite surprised by the domain which went for $0.55 — QYGU.com.. It’s quite pronounceable and even in this depressed market, it’s an excellent short domain investment at that price. The difficulty when looking at the LLLL.com market, just like the LLL.com market and other short domain markets, is that it’s often difficult to separate outlier sales from those which aren’t. In the case of LLL.coms for example, a bad LLL.com selling for $7000-$8000 today is unlikely to have sold to a domainer unless there is something beyond being a 3 letter .com domain going for it, however go back one year and short domain investors would have been prepared to spend $7000-$8000 on such a domain. With LLLL.coms, it’s more of a different story.. With the 2000+ reported LLLL.com sales (and no doubt countless unreported LLLL.com sales), it’s often difficult to determine whether LLLL.com sales are outliers or representative of the minimum wholesale. If we take QYGU.com as an example, any short domain investor worth their salt knows that isn’t a $0.55 domain. On the other hand, if an LLLL.com with 4 bad letters sold for $0.55, we might have difficulty deciding whether this is an outlier sale or representative of a falling minimum wholesale on bad LLLL.coms. My conclusion regarding the low end LLLL.com market is that it’s a bit of both — prices have certainly fallen, however they appear to have fallen far more than they actually have if you place too much weight on eBay LLLL.com sales.

Short Domain Prices

Would you believe there hasn’t been any reported LLLL.com sales (and that includes non-auction LLLL.com sales) for under $4.00 since February on any venue other than eBay? That doesn’t of course mean they haven’t happened, however there is no documentation of them happening. Despite not having any reported LLLL.com sales under $4.00 since February, I know that saying the minimum wholesale on the worst of the bad LLLL.coms is $4.00 would be overly optimistic — indeed, one must not only look at what short domains have sold for but also at whether short domains are selling at that price. That’s something which many short domain investors in the LLL.com market have struggled with in past months as well — It’s one thing to have reported sales data on LLL.coms, LLLL.coms, LLLLL.coms which suggests a certain percentile, an average, or a median LLL.com, LLLL.com, LLLLL.com sells for a certain price, however it’s quite another to say with certainty that an LLL.com, LLLL.com, LLLLL.com will sell for that price. When I speak of the minimum wholesale, be it in any of those short domain markets, I’m not referring to the lowest price a short domain has sold for — rather, I’m referring to the most expensive price a bad short domain could have while being able to sell within a limited period of time. Take a bad LLLL.com as an example — you might be able to get $10 for it, however if it takes you 3 months to get $10 for it, then it’s liquid value is not $10. I’m of the opinion that if you can’t get the short domain sold within 72 hours, it’s because you’ve overvalued the liquid value of your short domain — this might not necessarily be the case if you’re like me and have thousands of LLLL.coms available for sale, however if you have just a handful of LLLL.coms for sale and you can’t get them sold, it’s probably because you priced them too high. The liquid value of the worst LLLL.com is what I consider the minimum wholesale and the liquid value of the weakest LLLL.com having a certain letter quality or pattern in turn represents the minimum wholesale of that LLLL.com segment.

Short Domain Renewals

Another very important factor to consider when dealing with LLLL.coms and other short domains is what I like to refer to as the renewal premium. By the very definition of minimum wholesale I set out above, we can think of a minimum wholesale LLLL.com as an LLLL.com which receives no traffic, produces no revenue, has no potential end users in sight, and which short domain investors can’t make acronyms out of for the life of them. I’ll refrain from giving an example, as I always tend to pick domains someone owns and then I get nasty emails asking me why I just had to pick on their domain. Anyway, I think you get the point — a minimum wholesale domain should be a short domain which is as bad as a short domain can get per it’s character combination/pattern.  Even when we talk about the worst of the worst domains, a short domain investor finds that (in the LLLL.com and other short domain markets where domains sell for relatively low prices) knowing how good or bad a domain is isn’t enough to accurately price the domain. Indeed, one of the key factors impacting LLLL.com valuations at this time is the annual upkeep (renewal fee) associated with keeping these cheap short domains. It’s not very hard to see that so long as the worst LLLL.com has some value, then a comparable quality LLLL.com with more time remaining until it needs to be renewed is in effect a better domain.

This is something many short domain investors bring up and I think many have trouble understanding. Look at it like this — if it’s going to cost you $8.00 to renew the domain, then every day that the domain is closer to needing to be renewed is a day closer to the day which will cost you $8.00 (should you choose to renew the domain of course). If you take that $8.00 annual domain renewal fee and split it down into days, each day is worth about 2.2 cents, meaning if a domain expiring tomorrow is worth X, a similar domain expiring in 30 days should be worth X +30($0.022) = X + $0.66. If the domain was initially worth say, $1, this second domain should be worth around $1.66. Now most people in the domain world are unlikely to price their domain with such an odd number — more than likely the price would be either $2 or $1.50. If both domains cost $1 (eg. both domains cost the same amount), you’re of course better off going with the second domain. You might still be better off going with the second domain even if it comes across as being more expensive by doing this analysis — there is of course an opportunity cost that needs to be factored in to spending money to renew domains – money that could otherwise have been invested into other domains. When investing in cheap short domains, such as bad LLLL.coms, it’s important to check what the domain’s renewal fees will be, in addition to checking when the domain’s expiration date is and whether there is still enough time to get the domain transferred to a cheaper registrar (in the event it’s currently at an expensive one).

Overall LLLL.com Prices

Minimum Wholesale: $2.00*

10th percentile: $7.20

25th percentile: $11.00

Median: $20.00

75th percentile:  $45.00

90th percentile: $210.00

*There have been 9 reported sales under $2.00 out of over 2500 LLLL.com sales since April 1st –  I have another 10 or so of my own unreported sales under $2.00 as well. The likelihood of a random LLLL.com selling for at least $2 is around 99 times out of 100 which seems like a fair number to use as a minimum wholesale. Nine out of ten randomly chosen LLLL.coms would sell for at least $7.20 and one in two would sell for $20.00. We see once again in this LLLL.com price guide what I talked about recently involving a widening gap between minimum wholesale LLLL.coms and higher quality LLLL.coms.

Triple Premium LLLL.com Prices

Minimum Wholesale: $4.00

10th percentile: $9.00

25th percentile: $15.39

Median: $25.00

75th percentile: $42.00

90th percentile: $104.60

Quad Premium LLLL.com Prices

Minimum Wholesale: $110.00

10th percentile: $122.00

25th percentile: $143

Median: $210

75th percentile: $460

I wanted to release an LLLL.com letter guide to better help with letter-based pricing, however Excel unfortunately messed it up after I had put a good 10 hours into it, so I guess that’ll have to wait until some other time. For the most part, it’s the same as always – Q/X/Z are the weakest letters and F/G/H are your weakest premium letters. I don’t want to get into the whole Chinese end user debate on here — I’ve sold more LLLL.coms to Chinese domainers this past month than to Americans and Europeans combined, so yeah, there are certainly some buyers out there, however I’m going to continue with the bad letter terminology granted these letters still report lower selling prices on average, despite their premium status elsewhere.   Semi-premiums have always followed a pattern along the lines of: Y < J < K < V < U < W . You’re usually looking at $20-$40 on a triple premium + U and $30-$50 on a triple premium + W. Triple premiums + K are usually around $15-$30 and triple premiums + J around $10-$20. When percentiles are given, imagine a triple premium + Q as “on average” being the triple premium which will report a price nearest the minimum wholesale, whereas a triple premium + U/W will most likely sell above the median (50th percentile) — meaning it is “on average” better than the average triple premium LLLL.com.

This doesn’t of course always hold true and to a certain extent, it’s why I prefer to give broad percentiles rather than elaborating too much on which letters are better than others because there are no guarantees an LLLL.com with a “W” is better than an LLLL.com with a “Q” and if you read this guide assuming that, you may end up passing up some good deals or conversely, overpaying for what you thought was a domain better than it actually is. I often get asked to appraise people’s LLLL.coms (please don’t ask — I don’t have time!) and what I usually tell them to do is simple — start a thread on a popular domain forum in their “Make Offer” section and see what kind of offers you get. Usually the offers you get will be reasonably close to the reseller value of the domain — maybe a bit higher, maybe a bit lower. If you can then get that person to submit their top offer on Sedo, you should be able to get top dollar for your domain — I’m of the opinion that auctions generally do bring about a good indicator of the true reseller value of a domain. Sure, there are a few end user sales here and there that we’d need to weed out and there is the occasional domain which sells for less than it probably would have had it been auctioned again, however auctions are about as good as it gets for consistently achieving respectable sale prices. I would’ve liked to have reported on rare LLLL.coms in this LLLL.com Price Guide, however there were so few sales, there’s really no way to conclude what’s happened in the market since I last reported on it (see the April 2009 LLLL.com Price Guide). I covered pronounceables back in the April 17th guide as well — I haven’t seen much to suggest anything has changed sufficiently to warrant rewriting what I wrote there. Below are sales which have been compiled by Namepros members and LLLL Sales.com.

Please remember that whenever I give minimum wholesales or suggest a domain will sell within a certain range, I mean that it will sell for at least that as a minimum. Your LLLL.coms will most likely sell for more, especially if they’re a long ways from needing to be renewed. As mentioned earlier, an LLLL.com that would be worth $2 that is expiring tomorrow would be worth around $10 if it had a full year of renewal on it. Minimum wholesales mentioned in this guide assume the domain is near expiry.

End of Guide.

Released: June 06, 2009

Related posts:

1. Mid-February LLLL.com Price Guide
2. eBay LLLL.com Price Guide
3. Bad LLLL.coms: What does Minimum Wholesale Really Mean?