Acronyms played an important role in business long before the Internet came around.. It’s really no surprise that a short domain name is often more memorable than a longer domain. Which do you think is easier to remember: ICANN or Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers? Sedo or Search Engine for Domain Offers? WIPO or World Intellectual Property Organization?

I’ll take the acronym pretty much every time, especially if it’s easily pronounceable as these examples are. Even if your business has a memorable name, like Wordpress in example, there are other reasons in this Internet Age for going with a shorter domain — I can’t say I was surprised to learn that Wordpess recently acquired the domain WP.com. If we look at the soaring popularity of URL shortening services like TinyURL, one thing becomes pretty clear: Short domains aren’t just better, in many cases, they’re absolutely necessary. Consider this: If short domains weren’t better than longer domains, why would we both having domains at all? Why wouldn’t we all just use subdomains and save some money by not paying into the VeriSign/ICANN domain name registration monopoly? A lot of bloggers start off using subdomains — back when I first started blogging about LLLL.coms in November 2007, this blog was hosted over at Wordpress — which do you reckon is easier to remember: 4letternoob.wordpress.com or LLLL.com? Why do most bloggers eventually do like I did and move to a real domain? Real domains are shorter, real domains are more professional, and real domains allow you to brand them however you see fit.

One of the things I like most about short domains is the same thing many domainers not investing in short domains criticize about them — many short domains don’t mean anything at all! If keyword domains lived up to the hype they once had or that some people say they still have, you’d be using SearchEngine.com for Internet searches rather than Google and Auctions.com instead of eBay. Now don’t get me wrong here — keyword domains have a certain set of advantages, namely in the type-in traffic and SEO departments, however they also have one very obvious disadvantage – Keyword domains place invisible barriers on what you can do with your domain. When it comes to choosing which type of domain name will best suit you and/or your business, it’s important to think about where you (or your company) plan on being in a few years time. Girls.com sounds like a great domain for starting up a website selling clothing for young women.. If the business proves to be successful however and you decide to move into men’s clothing as well, I think you’re going to have a hard time selling us men on buying clothing from Girls.com

Yeah, this is another one of those “is the glass half full or half empty” speeches.. One can choose to look at a short domain as meaningless or one can choose to look at short domain as domains with infinite possibilities. It can mean whatever you want it to mean or even nothing at all.. Do you really think anyone cares that Google is an incorrectly spelt term (”typo”) for ten to the one hundredth power and do you think having Googol instead of Google would have made a world of change for the better? I don’t think so. Matter of fact, I like Google better than Googol.

Another benefit of short domains composed of “meaningless” letters (like XJYQ.com) is that you often won’t have to worry about what your domain means in other languages as you’ll have to if you go with a pronounceable domain (including short domains) or dictionary word and plan on going global. As an example, ”FAN.com” might make a great name for a sports site (and looking at their homepage, that may very well be what they plan on developing the domain into), but you may not want to promote it in Sweden (where it means “Devil”) without registering a different domain name. I can think of a few more examples involving domains whose English/Foreign translation would be inappropriate to mention here…

I don’t want to dwell on the merits of short domains anymore today, so let’s get to some sales data we can all appreciate.. This week was another solid week for 3 and 4 letter short domains, especially for short .net domains, which had 5 reported sales over $1000. MML.net stole the show, selling for $18,000. On the short .com domains front, we saw 14 more sales since I last reported on their performance on April 28th. This time however, CVCVs only captured but one of the top 5 spots, with 3 of the others falling into the “very pronounceable” category. Most large short domain sales this week occurred at Afternic. One short .org, L-LL.com, and CCC.com also managed to make the cut. All told, there were 22 reported short domain name sales of $900+, as listed below:

MML .net $18,000
YCG .com $14000
FITR .com $5100
JUW .com $4600
PQT.com $4000
ZJP .com $3869
XFT .com $3669
QUS.com $3601
LATS .com $3500
MIRL .com $3500
ZNM .com $3317
UVML .com $2500
CEES .net $2186
LTIC .org $1988
GIDO .com $1871
A-EL .com $1700
TEZA .net $ 1417
SIYO .com $1400
PNCI .net $ 1288
PSAS .net $ 1200
HOFS .com $1000
LE8 .com  $990

Related posts:

1. Keyword Domains vs. Short Domains
2. Wordpress 2.8.1 Released
3. July 2009 Short Domain Sales