Listed below are all short domain name sales greater than $449 in .com, .net and .org reported in DN Journal, DN Sale Price, and on Namepros. A few sales from May 2009 may have accidentally slipped in. These are only reported short domain sales that I’ve come across — like all domain market segments, only a small portion of sales are reported.

70.com $87000
63.com $75000
Ego.com $75000
434.com $18500
JABA.COM $18000
UIX.com $12900
4AD.com $10200
IVOW.COM $10215
ILED.com $10000
XS8.com $9999
XGR.com $9995
HJZ.com $9850
FABO.com $9600
BUNK.com $9300
DCW.com $6500
Spao.com $6300
aceb.com $6115
STTI.COM $5556
YCI.com $5094
Yiss.com $5012
Nubi.com $5000
YLA.com $5000
XTT.com $5000
07X.net $4794
YPSO.COM $3800
KRAR.COM $3788
EDWY.COM $3750
OPZ.com $3703
WXA.com $3669
QXZ.com $3620
ALVS.com $3570
DNAP.com $3500
Aydo.com $3500
GS1.net $3500
YCCS.com $3500
TIEL.COM $3500
Koç.net $3493 (IDN)
KRCH.COM $3440
1836.com $3000
ITCA.com $3000
Toat.com $3000
OOTD.COM $3000
nafx.com $3000
BCMC.com $2900
KRFR.COM $2706
KRGO.COM $2553
FSTV.com $2500
vieo.com $2410
Vsys.com $2375
M8S.com $2300
J-W.com $2134
ATMJ.com $2088
wevu.com $2003
VKNA.COM $2000
U2O.com $2000
hofu $1800
001.org $1650
NHL.info $1551
Cinz.net $1511
evis.com $1466
BTB.info $1410
ABC.biz $1403
ommy.com $1315
SSF.info $1269
XOL.biz $1200
8581.com $1116
jiny.com $1111
kkei.com $1053
f-a-b.com $1000
Gooc.net $1000
YLA.org $1000
ddjj.com $861
Alvs.org $800
BHS.net $761
A3X.com $739
dyca $730
Alvs.net $700
nabl.com $700
aduo.com $679
RH7.com $650
WH0.com $572
C0W.com $549
lfff.com $511
8TW.com $510
0JJ.com $510
KOX.net $505
6LB.com $500
6AQ.com $460
U3P.com $460
43G.com $460
PA8.com $460
T9A.com $454
XPL.org $451
7IE.com $450

Ian from Scotia Domains was kind to let me share his analysis of eBay LLLL.com market trends. Ian’s market analysis follows below.

—————–

This isn’t exactly breaking news, but in case you don’t already know, average sale prices on eBay during June were pretty disastrous. Here’s an analysis of trends over the past eight months. I’ve excluded domains selling for more than $100 as I consider them outliers on eBay. All averages below are based on trendlines calculated from weekly figures, so smoothing out irregularities.

Mean prices have fallen over the last 8 months at an average rate of about $1.79 a month, a total of $14.33 over the period. The trend was a drop from $24.39 to $10.06, which is a drop of 83% based on the midpoint.

The average drop over the last 3 months was about $3.25 a month.

The best week of the period was November week 2 with a mean price of $28.47, and the worst week was June week 3 with a mean price of just $6.53.

Monthly means were -

November $23.25
December $20.14
January $21.41
February $20.13
March $17.47
April $14.83
May $13.39
June $8.57

So apart from a slight recovery in January, it’s been downhill all the way since November, and June was particularly bad.

Average remaining registration continued to fall. The overall November-March average was about 7.7 months, the overall May-june average was about 4.0 months. This fall accounts for about 51 cents of the monthly price drop, bringing the effective price drop down to about $1.28 a month.

Average domain quality also fell off during June, although it had remained fairly static over the preceding 7 months. The overall effect of this over the past 8 months accounts for about 15 cents of the monthly price drop, bringing the effective price drop down to about $1.13 a month.

Here are the percentile trends over the 8-month period -

The 5th percentile fell from $10.49 to $1.63, a fall of 146% based on the midpoint.

The 25th percentile fell from $13.90 to $4.31, a fall of 105% based on the midpoint.

The 50th percentile fell from $19.78 to $7.14, a fall of 94% based on the midpoint.

The 75th percentile fell from $29.46 to $12.42, a fall of 81% based on the midpoint.

The 95th percentile fell from $57.49 to $29.12, a fall of 66% based on the midpoint.

The 95th percentile figure shows that the price drops aren’t restricted to the lower quality domains, although these have certainly been falling a lot faster than the higher quality domains.

According to theinvestor on DN Forum, at least 245 NNN.ca domains will be dropping next week (most/all on July 22nd). I didn’t count them myself however I did take a quick look and that number seems about right. With only 1000 NNN.ca domains in existence, that’s almost 25% of the NNN.ca market which is dropping next week. Might be worth keeping your eyes peeled if you’re a Canadian domainer.

We now know that NBC paid a whopping $250,000 for SYFY.com. Full story available on The Domains.

As much as you all know I’m a fan of pronounceable LLLL.coms, I can’t see the logic in replacing SciFi.com (a domain NBC already owned) with SYFY.com. I know some people will use this as justification for why they should quote their domains at 100 times what a domainer would pay… Do keep in mind that we only hear the success stories — I haven’t come across many domainers happy to tell the world how they blew a potential sale by asking far too much. This sale was quite different from Rick’s sale of iReport.com in that CNN had already began iReport before acquiring the domain, whereas NBC didn’t give any hint that they would be interested in the domain SYFY.com and were smart enough to approach the seller without even making it known that NBC was the buyer. Pure chance that it worked out for the seller — I’m happy it did and hope he won’t beat himself up too much about “only getting $250,000″ for it.

Daniel on Namepros posted a real shocker of a sale. Looking over the 26 LLLL.coms in this lot, we find 6 regular quad premiums, 1 quad premium VVVV.com (EOEI.com), 1 CVCV, a dictionary word (EKED.com) and a 2 rare LLLL.coms (FHFF.com, SQQQ.com). The other 14 LLLL.coms in the lot are of negligible value — let’s just consider them worth $0 for simplicity.

Since April 1st, 2009, there has only been 1 quad premium LLLL.com sale below $100 (OTRF.com sold for $85 on April 7th). There have only been 11 reported quad premium LLLL.com sales below $110 this year out of 768 documented LLLL.com sales on LLLL Sales. It would seem fairly safe to assume a minimum wholesale of at least $110 on each of these 6 quad premium LLLL.coms. That puts us at $660 so far.

Looking at quad premium VVVV.com sales data, we see that all 21 sales since January 2007 (over 9 months before the LLLL.com buyout) have been for $210+ and 19/21 being for $300+. Knowing this, it’d be fairly safe to assume EOEI.com is worth at least $250. That puts us at $910 so far.

The lowest double premium or higher quality CVCV.com sale this year was QOXO.com which sold for $206 in February, however it was resold in April for $600.  No other CVCV.com sale with 2+ premium letters (and there’s been 98 of them) has been below $261, so let’s be conservative and call this a $260 CVCV. We’re now at $1210.

SQQQ.com is a triple repeat LLLL.com following a BAAA letter pattern. The lowest recorded triple repeat BAAA-LLLL.com sale this year was LQQQ.com which sold for $103.50 on April 30th (second lowest was BQQQ.com at $125 in March). Seems fair enough to suggest a minimum wholesale of $100. So we’re at $1310.

FHFF.com — a quad premium triple letter LLLL.com, this time following a BABB letter pattern. There have been 12 quad premium triple letter LLLL.com sales this year, all of which were for $140+. Let’s just assume FHFF.com is worth at least $140, bringing us to $1450.

Now, how about EKED.com — a dictionary word, a highly pronounceable triple premium VCVC.com… This lot on eBay sold for $1365, so we’re well over that even if we assume EKED.com is worth $0 which it obviously isn’t. Very little effort was put into coming to these prices — I tried to put myself in the shoes of a potential buyer and what I would do if I were interested in them — look at what similar LLLL.coms have sold for recently and intentionally priced everything out as if it was near the minimum wholesale in it’s market segment, saving me the effort of googling the domains, checking for acronyms, search queries per month, traffic, etc.

If you’ve read up to this post, I probably don’t have to tell you the lesson to be learnt from this post — bulk LLLL.coms sell poorly, bulk LLLL.coms of varying quality sell far worse. I made a post on putting good and bad LLLL.coms in the same bulk lot a few months ago, however after seeing this recent sale, I thought it’d be best to post about it again for anyone who may have missed it the first time. Short domains are no different in this respect than keyword domains — would you put a domain such as Laptops.com for sale in the same bulk lot as Laptops-4-U.com? It really makes no sense to do so — the people interested in Laptops.com aren’t going to be interested in a such a domain and most people interested in such domains don’t see the value in or can’t afford premium domains.  One of the things I hate most as a domainer is having to buy domains I don’t want. If I’m interested in a particular LLLL.com, however it comes accompanied by 10 or 20 other LLLL.coms I’m not interested in, chances are I’ll pass unless the lot is selling for so much under it’s reseller value that it’ll more than be worth my time to buy the lot and resell the LLLL.coms I don’t want.

There are definitely more LLLL.coms which are being available for handreg lately and many backordered LLLL.coms which quite possibly could have otherwise been handregged. Those running LLLL.com domainers running automated scripts have been far less active lately and it hasn’t been uncommon lately to see an LLLL.com remain available for several hours.

How this impacts you and your LLLL.com investments largely depends on what you’ve invested in. If you’ve invested in the weakest LLLL.coms, having LLLL.coms available for regfee won’t likely impact their value much — the large majority of the time, these LLLL.coms are already selling for well below regfee. Where I do see a larger impact however is with higher quality LLLL.coms — in particular, quad premium, rare, and weaker pronounceable LLLL.coms. I could see the weaker CVCVs taking a hit as well, however the stronger CVCVs and other pronounceable LLLL.coms often tend to sell more on their own merit than because they have anything in common with regular LLLL.coms. There does seem to be a certain premium with pronounceable LLLL.coms that is placed on them due to the fact that they’re 4 letters long and pronounceable LLLL.com prices did rise in the months leading up to and shortly after buyout, however their performance since that point has been very different from that of weaker LLLL.coms.

It’s time to get a bit pickier with what you buy in the LLLL.com market and like a few LLLL.com investors have mentioned, a much wiser strategy would be to look for deals rather than buying domains off other domainers for full or near-full reseller value, in which case all you can hope for is that prices go up. Just because LLLL.coms are available for registration — something which hasn’t happened until very recently in a long time, does not mean they’re worth registering. LLLL.coms with 12 months until renewal usually aren’t going for more than $8 already, so paying $8 to register an LLLL.com that nobody wanted to backorder and even those running automated scripts passed on isn’t likely end up being a good investment unless you expect the value of your LLLL.com to outpace renewal fees — something which if it were to happen, would be most likely to happen on domains where the renewal fee is a very insignificant portion of the LLLL.com’s price. On a $800 LLLL.com, an $8 renewal fee accounts for just 1% of the LLLL.com’s value — if you have reason to believe the LLLL.com is a better investment for you than other alternatives available and makes sufficiently more to cover renewal fees, then by all means invest in LLLL.coms if you want. If you can find some LLLL.com deals, you’re obviously much safer paying $800 for an LLLL.com you currently estimate as being worth $1500 — even if the LLLL.com were to fall a full 50% in value, you’d have only lost $50 + the renewal fee = $58 over the course of a year of your initial investment, compared to $408 had you paid $800 for an $800 LLLL.com.

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

Hello my name is Joshua Hunt-Smith, I am an expert level eBay seller (raredn) who possesses extensive knowledge on selling domain names on eBay.com. This post should help you optimize your eBay.com short domain name auctions and at the same time, also help you become a better eBay seller in general.

My home page is yeswebdesign.com because I have a passion for more than just domain names.

Ok, lets dive in.

Information Suitability:

For both new eBay sellers and Established eBay sellers wanting to optimize their eBay auctions to attract more bidders.

Why is my focus on the eBay.com website in particular?

Any country that’s able to make a domain name listing on the eBay.com site should list domain names there instead of your home country eBay website, as eBay.com is searched by more people looking for domain names (there may some exceptions, such as if you are selling a .co.uk domain or .ca domain name, which may sell better on eBay.co.uk and eBay.ca. Honestly though, any eBay site is probably not the best place to sell country code domain names). Note: If you’re selling other goods that are not domain names, this is a different story and listing auctions at your home country’s eBay website is often a good way to sell physical goods. If the physical goods you are selling are much cheaper in your country than in another country (or countries), you can target those countries for potential sales as well.

These first 4 steps below are for people have not sold on eBay before, feel free to skip reading the first 4 steps if you want:

• The main method for accepting payment on eBay is Paypal (You can visit Paypal.com to sign up for an account. You will find a sign up link both at the very top of the Paypal website and below the Paypal user login submit button), although some sellers see this as a concern because of potential for chargebacks, where a customer takes back the money they have put into your Paypal account through another Paypal account. Chargebacks are unlikely to be of concern from eBay buyers with reputable feedback ratings (a feedback rating is the number shown to the right of every eBay username, you can click on the number to see what other sellers or buyers have said about them).

• The first thing you need is an eBay account — you can sign up at the eBay website that relates to your home country (Simply typing the two words Register eBay into Google’s search bar should bring up the eBay sign up page for your country as the first search result displayed by Google).

• If you already have an eBay account, you may want to start selling. To do so, click Sell on the top of the eBay page menu from within your eBay account. If this is your first time selling on eBay, you will be prompted to enter a credit card or debit card into your eBay account (eBay also says in ’some cases’ they will require your checking account information). Note: if you really don’t want to put a credit or debit card on file, search google for the words eBay id verify and sign up for that – do note that it has a small fee.

• Once you have registered for an eBay seller account and are ready to sell a domain name, click on the Sell tab at top right hand corner of your eBay account. Then click on Start selling, and now enter the words domain name (and I would suggest entering your extension after the words domain name, such as .org) into the input box you are given. Ebay will suggest the computers and networking category, then tick the box shown below where it says computers and networking and tick the box that matches your domain name extension (.com or whatever). Now click continue down the bottom of the page. Read the rest of this blog post to see what to do from here.

Note on seller fees: eBay says it won’t charge your credit card for seller fees unless you accept for it to be used for paying seller fees. That said, I prefer to use Paypal to pay my seller fees. Doing it this way, the eBay and Paypal expenses are all paid for by the auction revenue alone, so long as you have enough funds in your Paypal account. If you do not, Paypal will withdraw money out of your bank balance that you have connected with your Paypal account.

Making an optimized eBay listing:

Put all your main keywords in your eBay title: Why, you ask? Both subtitles and the auction body text don’t have the advantage in eBay search results like the title of your auction does. The keywords you were thinking about putting in your subtitle and also the eBay auction body text only show when somebody ticks the ‘Include title and description’ check box that is sometimes shown as a tickable option under the main eBay search input bar.

So what keywords should you be putting in a short domain name auction? For an llll.com you should definitely be putting llll.com in your title (put it in capital letters, as LLLL.com will stand out more while still using the small amount of characters) You should also put the letters LLLL followed without .com somewhere in the auction title, in what order it doesn’t matter to eBay’s search algorithms. If you have both LLLL.com and LLLL (remember, I said both), you’ll get in eBay’s search results for people typing in and searching for LLLL.com, LLLL .com (notice the space between LLLL .com you need to account for people searching like that) and also plain LLLL.

The title is where it’s at:

What else could we put in the search title? How about the word ’short’ and the words ‘domain name’ — this will get people searching for Short Domain Name, as well as people searching for llll.com. Hey, what about the the number ‘4‘ and the word ‘letter‘ ? Yes, people will search eBay for the term ‘4 letter domain name’, so make sure you put ‘4 Letter’ into your LLLL.com eBay auction title (you still have room, even if you entered all the search words I mentioned above into your LLLL.com auction title. Also, always remember to put  ‘domain name’ in the title). If your domain name is a genuine CVCV (Consonant Vowel Consonant Vowel), AABB or VCVC style letter combination, please put that in the title too – yes, you still have room. If your domain name is not a CVCV, do not put it in your auction title, as all you’ll do is make domainers angry and quite a few people will not want to bid on your auction because of the misleading title.

What about LLL.coms and other domain names like keyword domain names and also country code domain names? As mentioned previously, put all keywords in your auction title. For a keyword domain name like say, EcologicalCars.com (I don’t own it), I could make the following eBay auction title: “EcologicalCars.com 2 Word Eco Green Car Domain Name“. This way, I have related the search terms eco and green as being related search keywords in the title, along with domain name. As for ‘2 word’, it probably isn’t the most searched term — if you can think of something better, by all means use that.

Gallery Image:

Always put a gallery image in your eBay auction, it takes up far more room in search results than a listing with no gallery image, making your auction far more noticeable to potential buyers. Making something colorful and fancy looking can draw attention but be careful what color and text styles you use, as eBay’s gallery pictures get compressed to a very low resolution, blurring what you thought might look good into a mess. Play around with gallery images with your domain name written on them until you find something that looks good once inserted in an eBay auction. Also if possible, don’t use the same gallery picture for each listing, variation makes the listings look less boring, but keep in mind varying gallery pictures is more time consuming, you weigh your options and decide whether it is worth your time. On the flipside, using the same gallery image lets everyone know you are the same seller, so this could have some benefit if you have made a good selling reputation for yourself.

The body of your eBay listing:

Presentation: Make your eBay auction look neat. I personally like to center my eBay auctions (you can use the styling options in your eBay auction). I like to say what the domain name is — for instance, something like ‘Quad Premium 4 Letter LLLL.com Domain Name’ if that is what it is, then I like to make the domain name itself written in large bold and clear writing. I like to put the domain name renewal date under the domain name, including what registrar the domain name is registered at. Note that I said renewal date (Not expiry date) – it lets new domain investors know that a domain name is renewable and that it does not just expire and disappear forever. Next, I mention that moving the domain name from registrar (insert yours) to the same registrar, will be free. Mentioning that there are no hidden fees associated with your domain name auction is a good idea too. I also mention if the buyer wants to initiate a transfer to a different registrar to please only do it if they understand the process involved (believe me, something along those lines is the best way to say it). There are people who think you can just push a domain name from one domain registrar to another domain registrar for free. Put spacing between lines in your auction, as it looks better on the eyes. Also, put a link cross promoting your other eBay auctions in your auction if you have more than that one auction.

If you have Dreamweaver or an alternative visual code editor, you can make some pretty fancy looking eBay auctions and then paste in the HTML into your eBay listing, although I don’t think this really is necessary for an eBay auction. A neat layout combined with basic presentation will get the job done in most cases.

If your domain name is available to people worldwide, write in the auction details, something like: International bidders welcome, as otherwise this can be unclear in your eBay auction.

Finish off the listing page:

After you have entered the domain name information into the body of your auction under where it says something like: Describe the item you are selling, scroll further down the page and enter your starting page. I most often start my auctions at $0.99 but if you want a certain price, start your auction at the minumum you would be willing to accept and take into account that eBay and Paypal (if you are using Paypal), are going to add seller fees on top of that. Next, set the duration of your auction. I like my auctions to go for 7 days and end late Thursday night USA time, as I have a feeling that there are more bidders then, but things could change.

Now scroll down the page a bit further and you will be asked about payment options you will accept. On eBay.com, the options at the time of writing were:

• Paypal
• Credit Card
• Money Bookers
• Paymate
• Propay

You can choose more than one option if you wish. If you are going to use Paypal there is an input box where you can enter your Paypal registered email address for accepting of payments

• Under payment, you will find shipping options
• First up US shipping
• Choose flat rate shipping under the select box
• From the services select box choose other
• In the cost input box dollar amount, put in 0.00 and make sure to tick the free shipping check box show to the right
• Now you have set up free shipping for the USA

If you are going to offer your domain name to potential customers world wide, you will find international shipping a bit further, under US shipping.

• Choose the flat rate shipping option
• Then choose world wide under the ship to select box (If you want to sell your domain names to only certain countries, choose custom location and tick the countries you want your auctions available too)
• Now under the services select box, choose ‘Other Int’l Shipping
• In the cost input box you must put 0.00 as in $0.00 dollars

Now if you have your shipping as shown above, you will have the words free shipping show up in front of your auctions in eBay search results that contain your particular domain name (or domain names).

Any other sections under shipping, I think people should be able to fill out and work out on their own without many issues. Now you should end up at the bottom of the page — click the continue button.

On the next page you can choose things such as making your title bold and featuring your listing.

If it is a domain up season, I will choose to have a better domain name that I am selling ticked under featured in search results. I would also then make the writing bold and choose a border out of the selections.

If it is not a domain up season, I will not choose any of the extras on that page – I will just click the list my auction button and my auction will immediately become live. If you want to set an automatic start time for the auction, you can choose that option on the previous page of your listing for a small fee. Be sure you understand the time zones and eBay time in relation to what you are doing there if choosing automatic listing time.

After the auction:

After the auction if I do not already have the customer’s details from them winning a previous auction of mine, I will ask the customer for their account number and email from the registrar you are moving the domain to. I will then add this to a list of customer details in a notepad on my computer (Do not ask customers for any passwords, you never need a password to move a domain name to someone else). When the customer pays, I search the notepad for the customers username and registrar details, move the domain name to them and leave them positive feedback.

Safe trading and use of eBay

eBay communication safety:

Number one rule of eBay communication: Always use eBay messages whenever possible for communicating with anyone on eBay. This way you can avoid scam emails that pretend to be eBay pages (they often look the same but are actually there to steal your eBay details that you enter in what usually is a fake login page). So that said, never answer an email that asks for personal information of any kind, most especially passwords and credit card details. If you have to login for something to do with eBay, you can do it by logging into your eBay account and checking if eBay has left you a message. Never enter a password to a supposed eBay page from a link in an email!

Fake second chance offers — second chance offer emails for popular items on eBay was once a popular eBay scam. Still may be but I have not seen any emails like that for a long time now.

About eBay accounts that have been hijacked:

Hijacked eBay accounts: Weak eBay login passwords and email phishing scams that ask for you to enter your eBay password are some of the methods used by people to hijack and enter someone else’s eBay account, along with the collection of data from spyware compromised machines.

What do people do with a hijacked eBay account?

• List extremely popular selling items on the hijacked eBay account for very cheap prices compared to retail. The hijacker would put an email address specifically for you to contact them to buy more of the item outside of eBay — the email address would be shown somewhere that could be easily seen in the auction details, usually saying something like: contact me at (their email address) to buy a brand new Cannon EOS 1D mark iii SLR camera for $600, or something else like that. This may be their current method but I have not come across these scams in quite some time. This could also be because I have not been searching for popular goods on eBay in awhile though.
• Could someone use a hijacked account to bid on a domain name? This is possible. There exists also the possibility of eBay accounts being created with stolen credit cards. But how does this relate to eBay chargebacks in Paypal back to the buyer once they have acquired your domain name? I’m not an expert on Paypal chargebacks but I do know they were happening frequently enough during the time of high llll.com sales prices in early 08 to cause quite an upset amongst domainers.

So you may think, “Should I use something like Moneybookers or an Escrow service to accept payment instead of Paypal?” You can if you wish but you will get very few bidders unfortunately — that is the reality of the present situation. Especially if you are starting an auction at $0.99 (side note: Did you know it costs a lot more to list an auction from $1 and a lot less if you start it at $0.99? Well that’s true, same goes for if you start an auction at 24.99 — listing fees costs almost half as much as starting at $25, and once again, the same goes for $49.99 and $50 ). Even if you start an auction for a much higher price and the domain name is worth it, using anything other than Paypal is off-putting. Of course with the value of some domain names, you would be silly not to offer the domain name with Escrow as the only payment option. If your domain name is valued up to a few hundred dollars at most, I would still go with Paypal personally. You can always say something like “Please only bid if you have reputable feedback reputation” if you want to be extra cautious.

Note: If you can’t find something you want to do in your eBay account, try the sitemap at the bottom of every eBay page.

Thank you

Joshua Hunt-Smith

Despite being a short domain investor, I’ve never completely understood the attraction many domainers have to 1 letter domains in exotic ccTLDs. I can think of a few logical uses, such as URL shortening or perhaps a web hosting company offering hosting on subdomains of their main domain, but why would someone pay thousands for a short domain in some exotic ccTLD that even most domainers haven’t heard of? Who remembers what the .la registry did not so long ago to owners of their short domains? That’s one of the main reasons I don’t like these registries — there is no accountability. If VeriSign told owners of 2 letter .coms or of generics that they were taking their domains away (eg. that they wouldn’t be allowed to renew them), all hell would break loose, and rightfully so. But with a ccTLD like .la, they can pretty much do as they please — I sure as heck wouldn’t be placing my domain dollars anywhere near there. I’m a big fan of ccTLDs — real ccTLDs like .ca, .co.uk, .de — not garbage like .ws, .la, .etc.

Besides the lack of accountability, another shocker are the very steep renewal fees these domains have — it’s not uncommon for the renewal fee to be $500, $1000, or even more per year for one letter domains. At $1000 per year, you’ve spent $10,000 on this one letter domain, plus whatever you paid to acquire it in the first place after 10 years. You can get a pretty good domain for $10,000… If you have your mind set on a short domain, why not go with a good LLL.com or if you want something shorter still, why not go for a 2 letter domain in a popular ccTLD such as the ones I mentioned above (provided you meet the ccTLD ownership requirements of course)? I just don’t see the rationale behind these 1 letter domains..

The reason a 4 letter .com sells for less than a 3 letter .com is twofold. One is of course the fact that there are 26 times more LLLL.coms, however the much bigger reason isn’t the amount available (afterall, even 456,976 domains isn’t that large of a number when you think of how many businesses are out there) but rather the fact that there are far more businesses with 3 letter acronyms than 4 letter acronyms. The same can be said about 2 letter domains — type in 2 random letters and chances are a few potential end users jump right out. There are practically no limits on how a good LL.com can be branded…

So let’s move on to one letter domains now… What do one letter domains have going for them?

You can’t buy 1 letter domains in any decent TLD/ccTLD — the few one letter domains which are registered are owned by people who aren’t going to be selling anytime soon unless you’re prepared to fork over one heck of a lot of money. As for rarity, I’ll give one letter domains that.. But how the heck do you brand a one letter domain? There are a few ways I can think of, however nowhere near the amount of ways I can think of branding a good 2 letter domain. If you had a one letter domain in .com, then yes, I can see the value — as we shift more and more towards a wireless and mobile society, many companies such as Google (who owns G.cn) will no doubt want shorter domains. The thing is, we’re not talking about short domains in “end user” friendly extensions here, we’re talking about exotic ccTLDs which even the PhDs at Google have probably never heard of.

I ask — what is the value of a domain which end users don’t want and which is very difficult to brand? When you can get a 2 letter domain in many of these same extensions for $40 per year or so, does it really make sense to spend all that extra money for a one letter domain? I certainly don’t think so.

Let me start this post by saying I am not suggesting people go out there and register 1000 domains like this - merely trying to show a few ways you can find a meaningless pronounceable domain for regfee. Why might you want a domain like this? If it’s meaningless, it should be pretty easy to trademark, incorporate as a business, or build into any type of site as you want. As one example I gave in the past, premium .coms are great for many reasons, but a name like Girl.com is never going to fly with male customers, no matter how good your prices are. That meaninglessness also means if your first domain development project is unsuccessful, you can always restart with a completely new development idea on the same domain. Here are a couple sites to help come up with short, brandable domains — think of these as the poor man’s CVCV:

• MakeWords.com
• Domain Name Soup

There are some sites which do a really great job of doing this with keyword domains as well, such as:

• NameCombo.com
• DomainsBot.com
• Bust A Name

If you have a general idea of what you’re looking for, you might find a site like DomainTyper useful, it having instant availability results. You can of course find expired/expiring pronounceable domains using the various drop venues and sites such as Freshdrop.net or Stuck Domains.  Joel over at Domain Superstar has a very impressive set of domain tools worth mentioning as well, with a brandable domain finder coming soon. Lastly, there are sites such as Picky Domains which offer services to help you find the right name at prices still most likely lower than you’re going to find on the aftermarket, aside from wholesale threads on domain forums. This is by no means an exhaustive list, however I think it’s long enough to help get the job of finding a brandable domain done.

All of us invested in the short domain world spend a lot of time talking about letter quality. What is letter quality anyway? Does a short domain having an ‘X’ in it automatically make it less valuable than a short domain having an ‘F’ ? Of course not — that’s just silly. Letter quality is nothing more than something people writing short domain price guides use to suggest which letters are better on average.

If you’re completely new to the short domain world, you can rest assured (so long as the short domain price guide is accurate) that buying at the minimum wholesale a certain letter pattern goes for won’t result in an immediate loss on your investment. That’s all it means and that’s all it’s ever meant. Rather than buying short domains based on how many premium letters a short domain has, domain name investors should be looking at what end user potential the domain has. Traffic, revenue, and a lot of the other metrics one would use with longer domains can pretty much be thrown out the window here, as very few short domains are valued for their performance in these metrics..

So what gives a short domain a better chance of fiding an end user? On average, it would be having stronger letters, however, we’re not talking about averages here, we’re talking about how you should determine whether a single short domain is worth buying or not worth buying. One easy thing you can do right from the start is a google sarch on the letters in the domain. Do several companies use the same acronym as you short domain’s letters? How about company products? Using AcronymFinder.com or another acronym listing website of your choice, what can you say abou the probability that a future end user might be out there for your domain? If the domain’s letter pattern isn’t English-friendly, would it be desirable in another country? Is there anything special about this short domain which might make other domainers more interested in it for themselves (such as having a rare letter pattern)? Even though most short domains make receive little traffic and make little revenue, you might as well ask the question — I had a single premium LLLL.com which made me $25 parked last year (more than I paid for the domain), so while unusual, some short domains do receive traffic and make money.

And when I write this post, I’m not simply referring to avoiding short domains with bad letters because they might actually be good — I’m implying the converse as well that some ‘premium’ short domains really aren’t so premium when you start thinking of who could be a potential end user for your short domain. It’s not all that uncommon to see a double premium or triple premium with more end user potential than a weak quad — why would you want to pay 10 times more for an inferior domain, all because you just took the domain at leter value? Every quad premium LLLLcom is most certainly not a better domain than every triple premium, double premium, etc LLLL.com — same goes for LLL.coms. Just like the minimum wholesale, letter quality should be nothing more than a guide — something useful to use when considering which short domain to buy, but absolutely not a deal maker or breaker.

They say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover - you most certainly can’t judge a short domain by it’s letters.

A look in this post about why eBay may not be the best place to list your LLLL.coms (or other short domains for that matter) unless you place a reserve to ensure you get what you’re after. We’ll look at some of the past eBay prices versus the median LLLL.com sale over the months.

November 2007 had a median LLLL.com price of $35, yet LLLL.coms sold on eBay had a median selling price of just $22.50. December 2007 saw the median LLLL.com sell for $41.00, yet on eBay the median LLLL.com price was only $31.00. What about November 2008? We have a median LLLL.com price here of $21.00, however the median LLLL.com price on eBay was but $14.20.

Enough months looked at to be statistically significant? Probably not — it’s too bad I hadn’t compared eBay LLLL.com performance to that of the overall LLLL.com market more often than in the past. Nevertheless, I’m reasonably confident from my experience in the LLLL.com market that we’d see similar differences between LLLL.com sales outside eBay and LLLL.coms sales on eBay in the other months as well. I’ve discussed reasons for this many times in the past — type “eBay” in the search bar for more information.

Domain name forums have also historically been a weak market for LLLL.coms, except right at buyout when they were selling like hotcakes on NamePros and were even of reasonable popularity on DNF. Today, most DNFers aren’t interested in a whole lot of LLLL.coms other than the very high quality ones and most NPers are looking for good deals rather than to pay full market value because, unlike ahortly post-buyout, they’re reasonably confident prices are going to rise dramatically in a very short period of time.

Looking at some real numbers now, let’s look at LLLL.com sales since March 1st, 2009 — I think prices have been reasonably stable since then, however do feel free to suggest a different date if you think I’m not being fair here. There have been 3087 reported LLLL.com sales since March 1st, 2009. Of these, 138 occurred on Sedo, 364 occurred on NameJet, and 137 occurred on SnapNames. Subtracting the LLLL.com sales that occurred on these 3 venues from the 3087 reported LLLL.com sales leaves us with 2448 LLLL.com sales. Roughly 21% of domains were sold at NameJet, SnapNames, or Sedo.

Let’s remember that many of the LLLL.coms sold on SnapNames, NameJet, and Sedo, would have sold for significant premiums regardless of where they were sold, so I don’t see it being fair to exclude them as being outliers on the high end any moreso than doing the same to eBay on the low end. I’ve sold about 300 LLLL.coms now from a lot I’m brokering and I haven’t yet sold anything under $5 per, with the average around $12 per so far. All of the LLL.coms have been anti-premium through triple premium in quality, with most of the LLLL.coms between anti-premium and double premium. I haven’t been pushing the sales particularly hard either — just been letting them naturally come about, along with a bit of promotion which anyone would do if they were trying to sell such a large number of LLLL.coms.

So far on eBay, I’ve sold between 20-25% of the LLLL.coms I’ve listed, all of which have had starting bids of $6.99 and ending prices between $6.99 and $7.51. Many of the LLLL.coms which did sell for $6.99+ were not of noticeably higher quality than the ones which didn’t.

Ray (equity78 on Namepros) made a great post just a few minutes ago in the .tv forum, part of which I thought I’d talk here on LLLL.com. As I’m sure many of you know, the premium .tv market is in many ways quite comparable to the low end LLLL.com market, with premium .tv domain name renewal fees often being 50%  and sometimes over 100% of the domain’s reseller value. So the question was asked whether a $1000 per year premium .tv domain was worth it. If you think about it the way a lot of .com domainers would, you’d probably say “Hell no” and make some reference to how much that .tv has cost you over 10 years.

Ray goes on to suggest that one ask themselves 3 questions before investing in a premium .tv:

1) Why do I want to own the domain?

2) What will I do with the domain?

3) Will I be able to continue to renew the domain at $1000 per year?

If you notice #3, it’s something I’ve brought up many times with cheaper LLLL.coms — invest in them if you want but make sure you have money set aside come renewal time to renew them. As for numbers 1 and 2, notice the difference between what one wants to do with a domain and what one will do with a domain. Raise of hands, how many people haven’t at least planned on developing a few domains they never got around to.. I know I certainly have — new projects come along, you get too busy to find time, etc. Is that going to happen this time around (this last comment is of course more applicable to a $1000 per year premium .tv than a $8 per year LLLL.com)?

This is the final part of a 3 post series looking at the LLLL.com market since January, 2008. If you missed the other 2 posts, they can be found here:

Short Domain Name History: LLLL.coms I
Short Domain Name History: LLLL.coms II

So where did we leave off in part two of our short domain series on LLLL.coms? We left off talking about what essentially was the short domain name world’s equivalent of the Prisoner Dilemma, where the actions taken that were rational for the individual short domain name investor proved to not be so rational when we considered their actions on a group level encompassing all short domain name investors.

LLLL.coms sure have been an interesting market to follow. In the 2+ years I’ve now been actively following and investing in this market, I’ve seen it compared to everything from tulips to tech stocks in the late 90s from those who didn’t believe in the LLLL.com market’s fundamentals, and domainers investing in the LLLL.com market saw it as anything from a good place to invest money to the biggest domain name opportunity in years. I never was extremely “hyped” about LLLL.coms myself and it was a medium to long term focus I first came into the market with. Pre-buyout, I certainly didn’t think we’d see prices rise as quickly as they did and I was actually hoping to maybe turn a 100% ROI after a couple years of holding my LLLL.com investments — something quite a bit lower than what actually ended up happening. For some of us, our initial expectations were far exceeded, others had much greater visions for the near future of the  LLLL.com market and others still have had expectations which have changed along with the market (eg. me).

The only short term method I’ve ever recommended of investing in this market for the short term has been to look for deals which you can quickly resell at a profit. One LLLL.com for example recently sold on eBay for I believe it was $0.52 — it was reasonably pronounceable as well and could quite likely have been sold for $10 or so had it not been sold on a day where there were 200 other LLLL.coms on eBay instead of the usual 20 or so. Similarly, some people in the past have had luck getting CVCVs cheap by contacting owners via WhoIs that weren’t domainers — you can of course do that with any type of domain, however it works with LLLL.coms just like other domain name markets. Alternatively, you could of course choose to seek out end users, however make sure you properly factor in the value of your time in determining whether this is worthwhile for you or not.

I’ve been criticized a few times in the past for changing my position on short domain name markets, however my belief is that one has to adapt to change and new information which presents itself. I still maintain the optimistic long term view that I initially had when first entering this market — I never thought we’d see $7 LLLL.coms turn into $60 ones inside of 4 months, and I never thought we’d see those $60 LLLL.coms with under $7 by the time that year ended. That’s what I find pointless about long term “predictions” — they really are nothing more than a guess. We can predict with reasonable certainty what will happen tomorrow based on what happened today, but any data we have today is completely useless for trying to predict what will happen 1 year, 2 years, 10 years, etc years from now. There really isn’t a right or wrong answer to where the LLLL.com market is going — perhaps the only right answer would be that we just don’t know. One Namepros member said it best a couple years ago when he suggested that the LLLL.com market would be full of ups, downs, and uncertainty until it establishes itself. Whether it establishes itself as a worthy investment remains to be seen — I’ve never been particularly high on short term speculation in the LLLL market, mainly because I’ve seen many people lose their shirt doing it. The LLLL market (be it LLLL.com, LLLL.net, or otherwise) just isn’t the kind of market you can pick a day in the future and decide that you’re going to sell out on that day and expect to come out ahead or with a small loss. I showed some data a few days ago about how CVCV sales for the exact same CVCV had varied by sometimes over $1000 from one month to the next — sometimes up $1000, sometimes down $1000. If you’re going to get into that market and try to cash in when the market is up, my suggestion would be that you use your money to play roulette — bet on red or bet on black, because you’re either going to be right or wrong, and I don’t see this depending on skill to near the extent I see it depending on luck.

What will future end users be interested in? Some of these potential end users see a good domain very differently than the large majority of current end users. The big issue as I see it right now is the cost of renewal fees versus the value of the cheapest LLLL.coms. If the renewal fee wasn’t there, there’d be very few people arguing that cheaper LLLL.coms wouldn’t increase in value long term, however it is there and so long as prices stay low, it continues to play an important role in the value of the cheaper LLLL.coms. The more LLLL.coms get above regfee, the less they’ll be affected by renewal costs — that’s just common sense right there. So, what’s going to get those LLLL.coms above regfee? What’s going to get those LLLL.coms so much over regfee that they’re no longer or negligibly impacted by renewal fees?

I try to remain relatively neutral on this short domain blog — I’ll praise a good sale but I will at the same time acknowledge a bad one or when the market is performing poorly. There’s no denying that much of the LLLL.com market has been performing poorly lately — poorly for quite some time, matter of fact. Will that change? What will make it change? Why would or could it change? When will it change? Those are some good questions to ask yourself before investing a sizable amount of money in this market. Speculation is fine, but if you’re going to put a lot of money into a speculative domain name market, do yourself a favor and understand both the risks and opportunities as best you can. Risk is a reality of any investment — there is no such thing as a completely safe investment and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. We live in a world of imperfect information, one where we don’t and never will know the complete picture. All we can try to do is assemble as much of the puzzle as possible so we can make an investment that we’re comfortable with, understanding to the best of our abilities what the risks and potential benefits are with the  domain name investment we’ve chosen to make.

Andrew Miller, a long time investor in short domains and author of 3Character.com said it best in my opinion in response to a Namepros post in May 2008 asking about whether every LLLL.com may someday reach $5000+ as LLL.coms had at the time. His response was that it’s of course possible but then questioned  how likely it would be — there really is a chance anything could happen probabilistically speaking, and so we need to determine what presents the right risk/reward profile for us. What’s your need for liquidity? How much uncertainty and fluctuation in the value of your investments can you comfortably live with? Do you have money set aside or know you’ll have money around to pay for LLLL.com renewals now and in the future? If short domains become more popular, who’s to say that popularity will create additional investments in short LLLL.coms and not short domains in other extensions (such as ever increasing in popularity ccTLDs) or market segments (such as brandable LLLLL.coms)? What will make for a better investment long term — cheap LLLL.coms or expensive ones? Questions, Questions, Questions… I’m sorry, but I don’t have any more definitive answers. One more thing I’m reasonably certain about is that the performance of the LLLL.com and short domain name markets as a whole will largely depend on the economy. LLLL.coms are an interesting market when it comes to the economy because the market has some very different investors — from the little guy who has a few LLLL.coms and is worried about losing his job, to rich domainers and domain name companies, some of which own 10,000+ LLLL.coms. What about everyone between those 2 extremes?

To quote a post made by accentnepal in June of 2008, “Times like these the long-term investors sleep right through while the flippers think the world is ending. Wake me if they get down to $10.” The prices for the weakest ones are of course below that today, however that was clearly not the point of the statement. The bottom line is that there are 2 very different types of LLLL.com investors — the flipper and the long term investor. Most people fall somewhere in between and the ones who need be worried most about what the near future holds are those investing today hoping to resell tomorrow, something which has never been a great strategy for most domainers to adopt in any domain name market and has only worked well for short domains in the past because their values were going up so quickly. So are prices today a bargain — a chance for domainers who missed the boat the first time around to hop on and go for a ride or do prices today serve as a warning to domainers interested in investing in this market that we may not yet have seen the end of the LLLL.com bust? This is a question I’m sure a lot of Americans are asking themselves at the moment with respect to housing prices down there. Houses really do make for a pretty good comparison because there are plenty of costs associated with owning a house. Are U.S. housing prices a good deal at present or were they so overly inflated that they’ve now merely been brought back down to earth? Your answer might depend on whether you’re interested in buying your first house or are considering the possibility of buying a second house as an investment. Anyone actually using what they’re buying will be happy with the current prices — now is a better time to buy than it’s been in a long time. Similarly, now is a great time to buy LLLL.coms if you’ve been planning on developing them or seeking out end users — the prices have never been better.

LLL.coms have over the years slowly gotten out of the budget of many (if not most) end users. Prices are better now that they’ve dropped around 55% on the low end, however they remain expensive. Most domainers think LLL.coms will eventually begin rising in price yet again once the economy improves — trophy domains aren’t a luxury many can afford in a recession after all. Will companies adopt LLLL.coms that end in corporation-friendly letters such as C, I, and L? I’ve always been a fan of those kind of LLLL.coms myself, mainly because from what limited research on the matter I’ve done, they do seem to have higher usage with end users.

If you’re unsure what to do with your LLLL.coms — you’re in one of those hold  positions where you’re not sure if now is a good time to buy but at the same time aren’t sure if now is a  good time to sell, why not develop a few of your LLLL.coms? This domain (www.LLLL.com) was getting about 60 uniques per day before the previous owner developed it into a blog. By the time I acquired it, it was averaging around 100 uniques per day and now with a bit of work, it averages around 300-400 uniques per day. How many domains out there get 400 uniques per day of targeted traffic? Not a whole lot of undeveloped ones, that’s for sure… If I had to sum this market up in one sentence, it would be that anything is possible and that nothing is impossible. You can put a positive or negative spin on that line however you see fit

I’ve talked about the past performance of short domains and the LLLL.com market many times before — mainly based on what I remember. But if we want to have a real good look at what it was like at the time — the raw emotion, the future expectations, popular opinion at the time and more,  there’s no alternative to going back and reading the thousands of posts written on LLLL.coms and other short domains at the time. This will be the first in a series of posts I hope to cover over the next few weeks on the history of different short domain name markets.

What better place to start than January 2008 — right before prices rapidly built up. I’m looking at an LLLL.com thread as I write this about what people predicted the minimum LLLL.com price was going to be in  January 2009.  Estimates varied wildly from Snoop who predicted $15 (and was closest to actual LLLL.com performance) to

As I’ve mentioned before, popular opinion at the time was that LLLL.coms should be worth 1/26th what LLL.coms went for due to having one more letter and yes, that’d imply a minimum wholesale well into the $1XX had that proven true. Ironically enough, most short domain name investors discouraged investments in CVCVs at the time because CVCVs were in their view already valued at or near what they should have been valued at whereas the argument with weaker LLLL.coms was that the availability of LLLL.coms for registration fee was holding back LLLL.com prices until the LLLL.com buyout took place.  Hindsight is of course always 20/20, however how many people who invested in cheaper LLLL.coms back at peak wish they could have gone back and invested in CVCVs instead?  Enough said on that — no reason to dwell on the past; something we cannot change.

Let’s examine now a few of the other comments that were made regarding both LLLL.coms and other short domain name markets back in early 2008… Who remembers the argument that the more domains you have, the more chances you have to possibly land an end user? That is of course true, however the more domains you have, the more renewal fees you also will need to pay. Is the probability of landing an end user sale and the expected value of that end user sale (after factoring in the opportunity cost of your time in making that end user sale) worth more than the sum of all the domain name renewals you’ll need to pay? That’s a tough one to answer because it’s difficult to assign a probability to the outcome of finding an end user for an LLLL.com or of predicting what you’ll be able to sell that LLLL.com for. If you sell an LLLL.com to an end user for say $X and you spent say, 10 hours between trying to find an end user for your LLLL.coms and finalizing the end user sale, we now need to know both how many domains it took you to accomplish that and how much you value your time at. If you value your time at $20/hour, that $Xsale is essential a ($X - $200) sale and at approximately $8 per domain (handregged), you’d need ($X - $200 + D) > $8Y, where $X represents the value of the end user sale, $200 represent the cost of your time at $20/hour should it take 10 hours to sell, “D” represents what you could recoup of your investment reselling the domains to other domainers before the LLLL.coms expire and “Y” represents the number of handregs/renewals we paid for to achieve what was on the left side of the equation. Not hard to read that off in plain English that if you paid more for for the domains than you’re able to resell them for between domainer and end user sales, then you’re in the red and if you’re able to sell them for more than you paid to acquire the domains, then you’re in the black. Low end LLLL.coms aren’t generally valued according to their end user potential, however that certainly is a nice bonus when buying a short domain. Yes, some domainers have been able to find end users, even many end users for low end LLLL.coms and I’m certainly not saying it can’t be done — it’ll just require more than waiting for the end users to come to you (unless you’re perfectly happy holding the domains until they do so).

So why invest in low end LLLL.coms? Well, as we all know, there are other things that give short domains value than merely their end user potential, one powerful factor being the “prestige” associated with owning a  certain domain (eg. LL.com, CC.com, LLL.com, NNN.com, CVCV, generic .com, premium descriptive keyword .com) and another being the collectible nature  and easy liquidity of LLLL.coms. Despite LLLL.com prices having fallen as much as they have, they’ve remained a very liquid market — if you’re willing to price your domains 20% or so under the going rate, you will find buyers for them rather quickly, whereas in many other domain name markets, that just isn’t the case.

We have the suggestion that the world will continue to be ever more connected and that Internet penetration will create further demand for short domains — but that would create more demand for all domains, would it not? Maybe some additional demand above and beyond that for numeric domains granted Internet penetration is occurring faster is some Asian markets than elsewhere and they’ve always liked numeric domains.  One thing I’ve always liked short domains for is that I see them as the best alternative for the mobile web. People can have qwerty keyboards and all the works, but the bottom line is that it isn’t an enjoyable experience for many (most?) people typing on a smartphone or PDA unless they’ve purchased a full size wireless keyboard for it. But let’s face it, the mobile web is a long term play — it’s not what’s going to influence the value of your short domain within the period of time most domainers expect to resell their short domain name investments within.

It quite incredible looking back to see how optimistic some people were. With 253 people polled, 23 people thought prices were going to be above $500 within a year. There were 41 more people who thought prices would be at least $250 per by January of 2009. Collectively, 64 people (25%) thought LLLL.com prices would be at least $250 per for the very worst LLLL.com by January 1st . It should be noted that the particular poll I’m quoting here was taken on February 11th, 2008 — pretty much exactly at peak. Is it not surprising to see that many domainers merely extrapolated past returns to predict future ones? Seeing as the LLLL.com market had gone pretty much straight up over the past 4 months, what else did they have to go on?

Of the 253 votes, 163 (64%) thought the minimum wholesale on LLLL.coms would be at least $100. It’s important to note here that many of the votes that came in for sub-$100 prices weren’t made at the time people were first asked to participate in the poll and were actually made roughly a month later when it had become very obvious that prices were falling. Now $100 is a much more realistic number than $250 or $500 and is understandable taking into account how things had been going up to that point, realizing that things are certainly going to slow down as prices get higher, yet believing that prices will continue to slowly increase granted up to that point there was no evidence to suggest otherwise. Wise words were spread in this post. I was way off myself in guessing what prices would be in 2009 back in February, guessing on the low end of replies at $100 exact. I correctly guessed that the gap between the lowest quality LLLL.coms and the higher quality ones would widen, however I never thought we’d see quad premium prices fall the way they did…

One of those “what if” paragraphs this one here, but one thing I have wondered about a few times in the past is what if the LLLL.com hype had lasted just a bit longer — long enough to make it so that big venues such as Sedo and Afternic would open up to even the lower priced sales… This certainly would have greatly helped with liquidity in the market. What would have been the end result had that been the case? No right answer obviously but something I do think about and that was one of the things that was bothering me when I decided to sell out of the LLLL.com market myself — I was just wondering what might happen if prices were to get to that point where people would be making offers on Sedo and Afternic. When you consider for a second the fact that Namepros has roughly 150,000 members today, yet Sedo has almost one million, it really does beg the question of whether we would have ever run into a liquidity crisis had LLLL.com prices just been able to rise another $20-$30 above what they did at peak. Being the speculative investments that they were, it’s not surprising that LLLL.com prices fell as quickly as they did.

Another reason LLLL.com prices were believed to be heavily undervalued were because of how high CCC.com prices are. To be completely honest, I still don’t understand today why many CCC.coms go for the prices they do and they certainly report less end user sales than higher quality quad premium LLLL.coms that fall into the same price range. Domainers back in early ‘08 were frequently comparing the LLLL.com market to the CCC.com market and suggesting that most LLLL.coms (even those with bad letters) were as good or at least close to as good as a bad CCC.com and to tell the truth, I have to agree with that. But just because one short domain name segment (CCC.coms) is in my opinion grossly overvalued does not mean domainers should go out and grossly overvalue other short domain name markets without a valid reason. The same can be said about bad LLL.coms — just because a bad LLL.com realistically has little more chance (if not less of a chance) of finding an enduser than a quad premium LLLL.com does not mean we should all start paying $7000 for quad premiums!

We have the “He’s just jealous he missed the boat” comment thrown at those expressing their belief that the LLLL.com market is overpriced at the time.. Everyone is so absorbed in LLLL.coms that people are talking about what an LLLL.com bubble will be like, with 99% of people not even realizing they’re already part of one! What’s particularly interesting is that many people were still predicting $250+ in 2009 even into March, by which time it was obvious the market was correcting itself.

What’s a bit ironic is that it was no one other than these same domainers predicting $100+ prices who managed to crash prices from the $55+ levels rapidly down to $20 inside of a few short months. People started panicking, questioning their originally strong faith in the LLLL.com market and decided to cash out while they were still ahead. Domainers are now selling out believing it’s in their best interest, however when they all decide to do that simultaneously, the end result is that the market gets flooded several times over what it could ever possibly support at $50+ levels and hence prices begin to fall as sellers get impatient with their domains not selling. Once prices started falling, it was pretty much the reverse of what we saw on the way up — instead of predicting that week after week LLLL.com prices would rise, people started believing that week after week LLLL.com prices would fall. All it has to do is happen for a few weeks in a row and all of the sudden people think it’s a pattern that’s going to continue on forever. Little do they know that by panicking and selling for whatever they can get, they’re only further contributing to the problem. While this was clearly the correct choice to make on an individual level when looking at LLLL.com prices today, flooding the market certainly wasn’t the optimal choice on a group level.

When it comes to short domains, I’d say that as a general rule the more letters you add, the more you’ll have to know what you’re doing if you want to turn a profit. At the same time however, there’s potentially more money to be made if a ballpark figure of a domain’s worth is difficult for the average short domain name investor to obtain in that market.

If we look at LL.coms, pretty much all of them (obvious some exceptions such as AD.com)  are going to fall somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 — essentially, the very worst LL.com is worth about 1/3rd of what the best LL.com would sell for. Basically, you could be utterly clueless about LL.coms, decide to pay $100,000 for one because it seems to be right in the middle of what people are paying for LL.coms and you’d lose at most 50% of your investment.

Looking at LLL.coms now, the lowest priced ones sell for about $3500 and the upper limit (again, excluding outliers) seems to be around $25000 — the worst LLL.coms here being worth about 1/7th the best ones. If we take a number right in the middle — roughly $14,000 when dealing with LLL.coms, it doesn’t take a genius domainer to figure out we stand a good chance of losing money on this purchase, granted that at present far more LLL.coms sell for under $14,000 than over it. If you were to pay $14,000 for an LLL.com that turns out to only be worth $3500, you’ve lost 75% of your investment.

Going one letter further to LLLL.coms now, we see that the very worst ones may sell for as little as $2 while the best ones (excluding outliers) go for around $10,000 — the worst LLLL.coms here are selling for around 1/5000th of what the best LLLL.coms are going for. If you decide to pay $5000 in this market for a completely random LLLL.com, you stand to potentially lose as much as 99.9996% of your original investment. Now I don’t think anyone would be stupid enough to pay $5000 for one of the weakest LLLL.coms unless they’re an end user, however I think this example did a rather good job of getting the point across that you can lose a whole lot more money with LLLL.coms than with LLL.coms or LL.coms, and what we’ll show at the end of this post is that more still can be lost with LLLLL.coms.

Pronounceable LLLL.coms are hands-down the most difficult LLLL.coms to appraise. Everyone has a pretty good idea of what an unpronounceable LLLL.com with at least one bad or semi-premium letter is worth.. We have enough sales comps to know it’s highly unlikely an ordinary LLLL.com will see $50 today. But with pronounceable LLLL.coms, there really is no simple benchmark to value pronounceables by. Some of the weakest pronounceable LLLL.coms (the ones domainers are “trying to make pronounceable”) won’t even sell at a premium to unpronounceable LLLL.coms.

Your average short domain name investor has a reasonable idea of what a CVCV is worth, but what about a pronounceable LLLL.com that doesn’t fit the CVCV or VCVC pattern like ZEEL.com in example? ZEEL.com sold earlier this month for $3201 — I’m willing to bet a lot of domainers would’ve thought this domain was more in the $1500-range and I also wouldn’t be surprised if other domainers felt it was a $5000 domain. With such disparity between how 2 different domainers size the domain up, it’s unsurprising that domains like this may sell for very different prices even if sold twice within a very short period of time.

Let’s head one step further to LLLLL.coms. The worst LLLLL.coms are essentially worthless — maybe you could get 10-25 cents for the domain, however I’d be surprised to see the worst LLLLL.coms sell for much more than that. With 11,881,376 LLLLL.coms out there (registered or waiting to be registered), these domains aren’t rare in any sense of the word. The acronym potential many LLLL.coms have is diminished to near-zero in this segment — very few companies have 5 word acronyms.

So if you were to invest in LLLLL.coms, how would you go about doing it? I would say, focus on pronounceability and don’t go reg-crazy. Just remember that there are about 10,000,000 currently available LLLLL.coms out there, so if you expect to sell yours for more than regfee, it’s going to have to be a whole lot better than average. With so many available LLLLL.coms, this is not a market you’ll likely be able to invest in successfully without first getting a very good grasp on what makes one pronounceable LLLLL.com better than another.

Have the past few years ever been full of ups and downs, hype, unpredictability, profit, and losses for your average short domain name investor! If you were into short domain name investing back in 2007, you remember how month after month demand increased for LLLL.coms — I mean, Namepros made a forum for short domains (and DN Forum not so long after) pretty much specifically because all the talk about LLLL.coms was clogging up the domain name discussion forum which was intended to be about discussions on all types of domains but was starting to turn more and more into what seemed like an LLLL.com discussion forum, with people asking questions such as where LLLL.com prices would be in the future, how much their LLLL.com was worth, when people thought the LLLL.com buyout would happen, etc. Those sure were exciting times to be involved in short domains!

People were so full of optimism in 2007 — not just for LLLL.coms but for pretty much all domains, especially short ones. People used to talk about LLL.coms almost as if it were impossible for them to fall in value and people questioned whether there was any connection between the stock market and offline economy and that of cyberspace and domain land… Those seem like pretty silly things to think in hindsight now don’t they? If someone loses their job, how exactly are they going to be able to pay what 3Character.com suggest they should pay for a bottom of the barrel LLL.com and conversely, what makes you think that now having lost their job they won’t be content to take less than the minimum because they need  the money and want a quick sale?

We saw 3 buyouts which were at the time rather significant for the short domain name world in 2007:

1) The LLLL.com buyout
2) The L-L-L.com buyout
3) The LLL.ca buyout

I could probably come up with more, however these 3 strike me as being the most important. With short domain name buyout after short domain name buyout resulting in massive profits for the owners and hype building up to epic proportions, short domain name investors were determined to find what would be that next big thing, something which short domain name investors had been conditioned to believe would be the buyout of another short domain name market segment. So we saw domainers start registering L-LL.coms and LL-L.coms, others went after C–C.coms (2 hyphens in between the characters), and others went after LLLL.nets, and NNNNN.coms…

The L-LL.com, LL-L.com, and C–C.coms never got off the ground. We saw both the NNNNN.com buyout and the quad premium LLLL.net buyout take place in February 2008 – right around the time when LLLL.coms were at their peak and with optimism about what the future held running high. Things quickly started to go downhill from there.

LLLL.coms began to decline in value month after month. With LLLL.coms falling in value now, still more speculative investments such as L-LL.coms, LL-L.coms, and C–C.coms started looking a whole lot less attractive. The NNNNN.com market was undeniably one of the quickest booms to busts the domain industry has ever seen — talk of an NNNNN.net buyout had started within days of the NNNNN.com buyout, yet interest in both were almost completely gone less than 4 months after NNNNN.coms were first bought out.

The idea around NNNNN.coms was that five numbers are used many places around the world for zip codes and that as new zip codes were added, more NNNNN.coms would have meaning. I’m not sure if they still do, however at least at the time, Marchex had significant holdings in both NNNNN.coms and NNNNN.nets, and this seemed to fuel the logic that these types of domains had real value. The NNNNN.coms Marchex had however were for existing zip codes, not speculative future ones. I never understood the whole zip code thing to be honest — I can understand that something such as 90210.com has value, however are we to believe that people everywhere will be typing their zip code into Google? I can see some possible development uses, however I really can’t see the reason there ever was speculative interest in this segment.

Another one of the arguments that probably convinced many was the fact that NNNNN.coms are about 4.5 times rare than LLLL.coms.. The thing is, and as any experienced domainer knows, there’s more to a domain’s value than rarity. We can have something one of a kind and if nobody wants it, then it has no value. If we look at NNNNN.coms in example, sure they’re 4.5 times rarer than LLLL.coms, however what do you think the difference in demand is? As much as many people like to talk about there not being a whole lot of endusers out there for LLLL.coms, can you honestly name a single possible end user for the large majority of NNNNN.coms (no naming Marchex!)?

It was rationalized that an NNNNN.com should be worth one tenth of an NNNN.com since it was ten times less rare — we had the same argument presented from LLLL.com investors that the worst LLLL.com should be worth at least 1/26th the value of the worst LLL.com (eg. present value of about $3500/26 = $135 for the worst LLLL.com). It’s not too hard to see today that these predictions didn’t pan out. Why? Because like I said earlier, there’s more to a market than rarity. If we look at NNNN.coms, we can see many numbers which would have historical importance — say 1792.com in example or 1492.com. When you consider all the countries out there, it’s unsurprising that a lot of numbers in the 1500-2009 range mean something to someone. Many other numbers still might be used for government to signify something — as an example, the number 1031 would mean something to an American, yet it means nothing to me here in Canada. An NNNN.com is the limit of what I can comfortably remember when it comes to numbers. Something similar can be said about LLLL.coms in that far more companies have 3 letter acronyms than 4 letters ones — so it’s not just about the supply, but also about the demand, and the demand in both cases doesn’t justify a value determine solely based on the rarity.

As for LLLL.nets, interests in quad premiums remained relatively strong for quite some time. Prices fell from the approximately $15 they were getting shortly after the buyout to $10 per and stayed there for I believe a couple months. Prices then slowly drifted downwards until where we are today with quad premium LLLL.nets near their expiration date being worth about $2.

As for L-L-L.coms, they went from at one point being a stronger market than LLLL.coms, to a market which now sees bad L-L-L.coms fetch around $3 (I just picked one up for that today). The only two short domain buyouts which have performed reasonably (in comparison to the performance of these other/past short domain name buyouts) were the LLLL.com and LLL.ca buyouts. LLL.ca have performed quite well since their buyout but are unfortunately restricted to Canadians. LLLL.coms on the other hand have been a rather mixed bag — one I’ve talked about many times which has seen percentage declines in value pretty much inversely proportional to the value of the domain in February 2008. It might almost seem counter-intuitive that the more expensive LLLL.coms would hold their value better in a recession than the cheaper ones, however that’s exactly what has happened — renewal fees are most certainly to blame for this.

And then we have today — talk about L-L-L.coms has really slowed down, most of the people investing in LLLL.nets and NNNNN.coms are doing so very cautiously, and pretty much everyone is completely avoiding L-LL.coms, LL-L.coms, and C–C.coms. And then we have the LLLL.com market which though it has seen some pretty steep declines since peak, has managed to keep a very loyal following. Many said the LLLL.com buyout wouldn’t hold — well it has for about 18 months now. Since LLL.coms bottomed out at $3000, they have started to recover a bit and now the minimum is somewhere around $3500.

And so short domain name investors ask themselves if now is the time to buy back in or if they should wait a little longer to see what happens next. Some people have already jumped in with both feet, others are getting their feet a little wet, and others still are watching from the sidelines.

Ian from Scotia Domains was kind enough to let me republish an analysis of eBay LLLL.com sales trends over the past 6 months which he’s done. Sales above $100 were removed from analysis — considered outlier sales according to Ian — that sounds like a good number to consider an outlier to me as well. When looking at this data, please keep in mind that this is eBay sales data, not an LLLL.com price guide. Prices on eBay are lower for a variety of factors I’ve covered in many recent posts. So without babbling on anymore, here’s what Ian’s comprehensive analysis of the eBay LLLL.com market revealed:

“All figures quoted below are based on trend lines calculated from weekly figures, thereby smoothing out irregularities.

Mean prices have fallen over the last 6 months at an average rate of about $1.31 per month - that’s a total of $7.86 over the period. The trend was a drop from $23.24 to $15.38, which is a fall of 41% based on the midpoint.

The corresponding figure for the last 3 months is even less encouraging. The average fall was about $1.94 per month.

Highs and lows were -

The best week - November week 2 - mean price $28.47

The worst week - March week 2 - mean price $13.24

Possible explanations -

1. Have average remaining registrations fallen? Yes, they have. This was particularly evident during April, when average remaining registration was about 4.3 months, compared to an overall November-March average of about 7.7 months. Overall the drop accounts for about 23 cents of the $1.31 monthly fall.

2. Has the quality of domains fallen over the period? I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that this is the case. Average quality has been pretty static.

3. Has the market been flooded lately? There were certainly a lot more domains on sale during April than previous months. Overall, the number of monthly sales has increased by an average 25 per month over the period, which is a whopping rise of 150 domains per month over the period. (The average monthly sales figure for the period was 466.) It’s impossible to calculate what effect this has had on prices. I feel it must have had some effect, but doubt whether it completely explains the fall.

Taking the above into account, that still leaves an average monthly fall of $1.08 at least partly unexplained.

Here are the percentile trends -

The 5th percentile fell from $10.02 to $4.54, a fall of 75% based on the midpoint.

The 25th percentile fell from $13.18 to $7.76, a fall of 52% based on the midpoint.

The 50th percentile fell from $19.16 to $11.22, a fall of 52% based on the midpoint.

The 75th percentile fell from $28.13 to $18.79, a fall of 40% based on the midpoint.

The 95th percentile fell from $54.27 to $40.89, a fall of 28% based on the midpoint.

It’s worth noting that the actual 5th percentile figure for the last week of April was just $1.18. However, the trend line smooths out such abnormalities.

In conclusion, it looks as though there has been a real price drop not completely explained by the recent flooding of the market. The fact that April week 4, when most of the flooding happened, wasn’t the worst week over the period bears this out.

Finally an acknowledgement. My previous posts in this thread were based on data I collected myself. However, the above analyses were mostly based on data posted by Nem0 both here and (I assume) at llllsales.com. Thanks for doing that Daniel. I’ve repped Nem0 for his considerable efforts gathering and posting all this information. If you find this post useful I ask that you do the same.”

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Addition from Reece: Daniel, who goes by the username Nem0 on Namepros, has to be thanked for all the eBay sales he’s tracked and reported over the months — without him, none of this would be possible and all price guides and suggested prices would be incomplete. Like Ian, Daniel also sells LLLL.coms on eBay.

Be sure to check out Zenergize Auctions and Scotia Domains the next time you’re looking for LLLL.coms on eBay!

The one .tel I would have liked to have gotten was LLLL.tel but it was taken before I could get around to registering it unfortunately.. Namepros has a fairly active .tel domain name discussion thread in which a lot of new domainers are optimistic about it’s future. I must admit, I’ve been too busy to really follow the extension and still can’t really understand how exactly it works and how one would go about monetizing a .tel domain. Apparently some of the better .tel domains are receiving traffic (from other domainers, no doubt) — I wonder if anyone’s been having success converting visitors to sales. According to a .tel thread on Namepros, it seems like LLL.tel domains are selling out pretty quickly (note: I am NOT saying they make for a good investment, merely making an observation), especially premium LLL.tels.

Over on the .mobi front, interest in LLL.mobi domains seems to have picked up since they became available for regfee — there’s even talk of another LLL.mobi buyout. I’ve always thought that if someone were a believer in .mobi, they should be a believer in short .mobi domains — who the heck wants to type a long URL on a cell without a qwerty keyboard? Dotmobi is still fighting an uphill battle against the great and ever-powerful m-dot which seems to be growing in popularity among corporations. I think .mobi will do okay for itself — at least with the people who decide to develop them, however I doubt we’ll see the high valuations we saw once upon a time some 32 months ago. According to some, .mobi is getting overtaken by .tel — I don’t really understand that argument as neither of the two extensions have anything in common, however it’s seems there’s a lot I don’t understand, or so say the people who I tell that their domains are worth regfee

The mobile web is still chugging along and the one thing that will certainly be a winner is short domains in established extensions. Short domains in CNO have all taken a pretty big blow over the past year, along with most of the domain name market, however there are still endusers out there for them and I don’t see the demand for short domains going anywhere but up as the world becomes increasingly mobile. The popularity of Twitter pretty much tells the story of where our world is heading… People are busy, they don’t have a lot of free time, and when they want information, they want it in a quick and concise package.

I can’t speak for other people, however I actually switched over from using Webcrawler to using Yahoo in the 90s because Yahoo seemed to deliver just as accurate of results and took less time to type-in. If you go out shopping and two stores have the exact same good for different prices, which do you choose? Time has value, I value my time, and if I can get just as good of information with less effort to get to it, I’m going to do just that and I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.

I mentioned yesterday that I’ve started a little experiment to get a better idea of how the eBay LLLL.com market differs from the rest of the LLLL.com market. With domains ending at completely random times, it’s not surprising we sometimes see low sales and with the millions of people on eBay, it’s unsurprising that we sometimes see sales well above what a short domain name investor would likely pay. Below you’ll see my experience using eBay over the past few days. It’s quite obvious I’ve been losing far more auctions than I’ve won — I place my bids based on both what I think I could get in the current market for the domain and how much work would be involved in selling it. Granted I am looking to resell these domains at a profit in the near future, I probably shouldn’t be winning many auctions (and indeed I’m not), as if I were winning most of them, that would probably mean I’m paying near or possibly even above fair market value. About half of my bids are quite close to the ending price, the other half are for the most part well below it. I have edited the pages a bit to make them fit below, however all numbers are the exact sale prices and bids I placed on those domains. There are 4 images below (hover over starting from the top down and observe the 4 different URLs) which you can click on to enlarge so the details will be a bit easier to read. The final image (the one which has green prices) are the domains I managed to win. Is it worth all that effort to get a few good deals on eBay? I guess that’s something you’ll need to decide, but it sure makes for something fun to do when you have a bit of downtime. Looking at the sales numbers, you’ll notice that I tend to be closer to the actual sales price on the bulk lots than on individual lots — as the number of LLLL.coms in a lot become larger and larger, the closer we’ll get to the expected outcomes we know based on past sales history. With a single sale, it’s hard to account for factors such as a particular domain being “perfect” for a development project someone has in mind or an acronym they like.

One argument I saw presented by a domainer on Namepros today sparked the idea for this post.. It went something along the lines of: “If more domains are registered, then less domains are available, so Economics 101 suggests domain name prices will increase as the supply of available domains decreases”..

The problem with this argument? This isn’t an Economics 101 class, this is real life. In real life, things are just a tad bit more complicated than Economics 101.  With domain names, the supply of available domains in any extension in essentially infinite — with ICANN allowing domains to be up to 63 characters long and there’s what, 37 possible characters (26 letters, 10 numbers, and hyphens)  you could use for each of those characters (of course no more than 2 hyphens in a row, nor can it start or end with a hyphen but I’m way too lazy to factor that in and it wouldn’t change the end result in a meaningful way), you’re looking at 37^63 possible combinations, which put into my calculator gave roughly 626 followed by 96 zeros.  So no, I really don’t see a supply and demand argument holding much weight here. One could say that the registration of good domains could drive up the price of good domains (eg. because they would now have to be purchased on the domain name aftermarket), however the total number of domains registered in a TLD is not why one TLD has more value than another, and ccTLDs like .ca are proof of this. Similarly, we can look at past bubbles like .mobi and observe that while the number of registered .mobi domains has decreased, it certainly hasn’t decreased by near the extent that aftermarket .mobi prices have.

Unlike Economics 101, we’re not talking about a supply/demand curve for a single good — every domain is unique and many endusers out there will only be interested in one or maybe a few names, regardless of whether there are 100,000 domains registered or 100,000,000 domains registered. Some people will choose to register a domain for regfee just the same — these people are clearly unaffected by the diminishing supply of what us domainers would consider to be good domains.

If I go out and buy 1,000 (good) domains related to real estate, it might drive up the value of some real estate related domains (supply and demand would be in effect here due to the fact there is a limited amount of good real estate related domains), however it would have no effect whatsoever on the rest of the domain market.

More registrations doesn’t necessarily mean more demand. In domain land, more registrations (and this is often the case with new extensions) may merely mean more speculation. Is that a real type of demand? Economics 101 largely covers consumable goods, not speculative intangible items like domains in new domain name extensions. Perhaps we should consider it a fake demand — a demand which is not built on one’s desire to purchase the good for oneself at such a price but rather to resell it at a profit to someone else, who will do the same,… Sound familiar?

So how do we relate this post to short domains? Simple. Domain name buyouts are not what give short domain name market segments real value, they’re merely something psychological which for one reason or another often causes domainers to behave irrationally (not unlike what we’ve seen in the past in the stock market…). Being realistic, why would LLLL.coms have been worth double what they were worth pre-buyout within a couple weeks of having sold out? Had they really become so rare that buyers now needed to pay twice as much to acquire them now? Threads buying and selling LLLL.coms were everywhere. Many of those who bought in pre-buyout expected prices to rise once LLLL.coms were no longer available for regfee. If enough people share this same belief and all decide not to sell, they’re limiting the supply of LLLL.coms available and now supply and demand does come into play and prices start to rise. The one thing about domains, stocks, and pretty much any other appreciating asset is that everyone has a price at which they’d be willing to sell. As LLLL.com prices rose so quickly, many people were encouraged not to sell their LLLL.coms, despite having had the possibility of selling at several hundred percent profits. As time went by, more and more people were buying and fewer and fewer people were selling. This lack of supply pushed LLLL.com prices to the $55 minimum wholesale I reported on in February 2008. What happened afterwards? I think $50 was the magic number for a lot of people. I know that back when I sold out, I was worried about what might happen above the $50 point, but felt if it got well past the $50 point, we probably wouldn’t run into problems until the $100 point. Either way, I cashed in my chips and many other people tried to. The thing is, when we have a whole bunch of people happy to sell at $50, all of the sudden there’s more sellers than there are buyers, and one seller decides to lower his price to $45, and soon enough another one is willing to sell his LLLL.coms for $40, and so on, and so on…

Moral of the story: Buy domains because you believe in them, not because you think you may be able to resell them to someone else for more. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying domain flipping is a bad idea or that there isn’t money to be made doing it — all I’m saying is that it’s probably not the best strategy to revolve your entire domain business around. As most domain flippers have found over the past year, successfully flipping domains at a profit to other domainers has become a whole lot harder today than it was a couple years ago.

My goal was to make 500% on my LLLL.coms and I ended up making a bit more than that. One thing that happens all too often in the domain business is that people get greedy — you see something rise, and rise, and rise and think to yourself “this is going to keep going on forever”, maybe even charting out the monthly growth and figure out how many months until you can retire… It doesn’t quite work that way unfortunately. When everyone is talking about a market and even those who didn’t believe in it are now actively investing in it… That’s when it’s time to think about getting out of the market.

There have been a few short domain name buyouts over the past few years which have collapsed due to the fact that more emphasis was placed on buying out the short domain name market segments than on examining the market fundamentals. At the end of the day, us domainers survive because of endusers and advertisers (”domain parking companies”). Most of us domainers couldn’t develop anything more complicated than a blog if you gave us a month to put something together and most of us are too lazy to learn. I don’t mean to give a bad name to domainers here, but how many people came into domaining because they were looking for a job harder than what they were previously working? I certainly wouldn’t do that. The money is good but what’s even better about domaining is that you can work whenever you want. Isn’t that the real reason most of us are so attracted to domaining? Who wants to work a 9-5 and punch a clock everyday for forty years? I certainly don’t. I was also attracted to domaining myself because I like doing what I feel like doing, not what other people tell me to do. I think a lot of domainers have this quality — if they don’t feel like learning web design, they’re not going to do it, if they don’t feel like answering emails one day, they’ll get to them tomorrow. Maybe they feel like spending the day chatting on Namepros. Whatever floats your boat, right?

One unfortunate quality I’ve noticed many domainers have is that they’re always looking for shortcuts to getting to where they need to go. This might mean taking uncalculated risks or investing more in highly speculative domain name market segments than they can realistically afford to lose. By far the worst quality of all in my opinion is greed however. Domainers are hungry for money — nothing wrong with that, but when that greed starts clouding your judgement and leading you to make irrational decisions, … That’s not a road you want to go down. Greed is what kills most domainers — be it with speculative bubbles, be it replying to interested endusers with way too high of prices or being too stubborn to realize that time is money and maximizing profit on every transaction isn’t necessarily the most profitable way of conducting business. People talk about their return on their investment, but what’s most important is the amount of time it took them to earn that profit. Consider an example:

Domainer #1 invests $10,000 in short domains, being careful about what he buys and being reasonable on what he sells for. For the next 6 months, he averages 20% profit per month.

Domainer #2 invests $10,000 in short domains, also being careful about what he invests in, however Domainer #2 has his mind set on making as much money as possible in as few trades as possible. So Domainer #2 decides that rather than waste time with a whole bunch of little domain trades for minimal profit, he’s just going to buy one expensive domain and try to resell them at a huge profit. After 6 months of trying, he succeeds and resells the domain for $25,000.

Who ends up ahead?

Let’s look at Domainer #1 again.. He has $10,000 on Day 1 and since he’s earning 20% per month, he’s going to have $12,000 ($10,000 x 1.2) at the end of month 1. By the end of month 2, he has $14,400 ($12,000 x 1.2). By the end of month 3, he’s up to $17,280 ($12,000 x 1.2). By the time the 6 months are up, Domainer #1 has $29859 — about $5000 more than Domainer #2.

That’s the power of compounding. Banks like to give you fancy little pieces of paper that say something along the lines of “If you this amount of money by such and such an age and earn an annual return of X% per year, you’ll be able to retire with…” I must say, banks do a pretty good job of not mentioning the difference between a nominal interest rate and a real interest rate. If you discount the inflation bit however, what they’re saying is true — provided you have enough time, a small amount of money can grow into a very large amount of money at a reasonable rate of return. Getting back to domaining now, we can see that in some cases, it may make sense to take smaller profits and reinvest them rather than holding out for that one big sale. If we were to keep running this little example, Domainer #1 would have just over $89,000 after just 12 months. Think Domainer #2 is going to manage to turn $25,000 into $89,000+ by selling only a couple domains at a large profit? I’ll place my bet on #1.

As Warren Buffett once famously said: “Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.” If you truly believe in the long term viability of a short domain name market, why would you have any problem holding your short domain name investments long term if that’s what it takes to realize your goals?

Jeff posted a comment in my previous short domain name post about how he saw the future unravelling for the .in and .cn extensions as Internet penetration continues to increase in emerging markets such as India and China. If Jeff were investing in short domains (and Jeff, please feel free to correct me here if I’m wrong), my guess would be that he’d be investing in short .in domains.

When it comes to short domain name investing, there may be a few obvious bad choices (eg. 4 letter .ws domains), however there’s also plenty of good choices — both in .com and in other domain name extensions. While I do spend most of my time blogging about short .com domains, these are by no means all that is out there and diversifying your short domain name investments into ccTLDs is not only a great way to add variety to your domain name portfolio and expose yourself to a new domain name market but also a great way to reduce the investment risk associated with your short domain names — some may say putting a few bucks in keyword domains may not be a bad idea and it may very well not be, however us true hardcore domainers are going to stick with using other short domains to make our short domain name investments safer short domain name investments. The converse of course also holds true — those short domain name investors currently invested only in short ccTLD domains would be wise to add some short .com domains to their portfolio — preferably some more expensive ones, such as a good CVCV or LLL.com. The nice thing about both good CVCV and LLL.coms is that they’re much more established and liquid short domain names than many of the other short domain name segments out there. If you needed money to pay off some debts, which would you rather sell: 1 premium LLL.com for $7500 or 500 weaker LLLL.coms for $15 each? Unless you’re lucky and manage to find a buyer for all 500 or a few bulk buyers, you’ll probably be spending a whole lot of time communicating with all the buyers and pushing or transferring the domains to their accounts..

Seeing as this website is www.LLLL.com, I’m of course not going to recommend you completely ignore an entire short domain market, however it should be pretty obvious to most short domain name investors that the cheaper LLLL.coms aren’t the best domains to offload in bulk at a whims notice. Knowing this, a thoughtful LLLL.com investor who’s invested in cheaper LLLL.coms will diversify his portfolio in such a way that he has both a collection of more speculative short domains, along with short domains which are much easier to liquidate for $XXXX should the need arise. Not only do more expensive short domains tend to be easier to liquidate but they also tend to have more stable prices — that may be a benefit or a downside depending on what kind of a ROI you’re looking for. You’re not going to get rich anytime soon putting money in LLL.coms or CVCVs and reselling to other domainers, but at the same time, you’re probably never going to have to worry about your investments being worth zero — they might decline in value, but it’s highly unlikely these 2 classes of short domains will be of no value at any time in the foreseeable future.

Cheaper short ccTLD domains experience this same liquidity problem as do cheaper LLLL.coms with regards to bulk short domain lots and hence are best kept to a certain percentage of one’s total short domain name investments. It should be noted that when I talk about liquidity issues with short ccTLD and LLLL.com domains, I’m referring to the difficulty in obtaining something near full reseller value if trying to offload thousands of dollars worth of them — the small short domain name investor or the person for which short domains make up but a small fraction of their domain name investments won’t have anything to worry about when it comes to liquidity in either domain name segment.

Liquidity of course need not come in the form of domains. As they say, Cash is King. Investing that money in stocks at this time probably isn’t any safer than putting it in domains (maybe less safe if U.S. bank stocks were on your mind ).. Having at the very least enough money put aside to pay for next year’s renewals is in my opinion a must and this isn’t something that will necessarily come easy to many short domain name investors — if you have 2000 LLLL.coms, you’re looking at an approximately $16,000 per year for domain renewals. As I’ve recommended in the past, it’s a good idea to start spending money renewing your domains ahead of time if you know you plan on renewing them. If you can’t touch the domain renewal money (because you put it immediately on renewals as it comes in), you won’t have anything to worry about so long as you stick to the plan. If your short domain name portfolio consists largely of buyout LLLL.coms, you probably have a disproportionate percentage of domain renewal fees coming due somewhere between July and November, so don’t pay your renewal fees month by month and then gasp in shock when you realize you should have been saving much more all along, as there are now twice as many domains to renew! Open your domain name accounts and figure out when all your domains expire. Put it into Excel or another program which allows for easy manipulation of data and sort them by expiration date. Figure out how much money you’ll owe in renewal fees for the year and then for each month. Figure out a budget plan on how you’re going to come up with that money — eg. If you have $600/month worth of renewals the first 6 months, followed by $1200 in the next six, it’d be wise to make it a goal to put at least $900/month aside for renewals from Day 1. VeriSign will likely be increasing the wholesale price on .com domains another 7% (which means most likely so too will be your domain name registrars) in October 2009, so paying for renewals early may very well be the best investment you can make at the moment.

It’s pretty incredible how often I’ll come across a short domain I’d have no idea how to develop making us of an acronym and find out that someone’s found a way to make it work. As many of the short domain investors in weaker lettered LLL.coms and LLLL.coms will tell you, English isn’t the only language the world speaks. A short domain name post on Namepros shows that while the English world may revolve around what us short domain name investors refer to as “Premium Letters”, other languages do not. I had my own doubts about the mythical “J/Q/X/Z loving Chinese enduser” until I ended up with one such enduser sale of my own. These foreign language short domain name markets are only going to get stronger as time goes by and worldwide internet penetration continues to increase. What was China from an economic standpoint 50 years ago? India? Look at them now and imagine their future. I see 2 billion more potential endusers for our short domains someday..

In the Namepros post linked to, we can clearly se that there are a multitude of high quality German words which can be made out of semi-premium letters like K, U, V, and W, and even the bad letter Z has surprisingly more acronyms than one (not knowing the language) might otherwise have expected. For the English speaking domainer, this short domain name post on acronyms for short domains, is mandatory reading, as is using AcronymFinder.com and, surprisingly, I’ve even found UrbanDictionary.com to be indispensable. It’s almost overwhelming how many acronyms are finding meaning or new meaning with someone, somewhere, each and every day.

As if this wasn’t a large enough market already, let’s now consider abbreviations contained inside short domains. RXD.com might seem like not the easiest short domain to make an acronym for — eg. what is that X going to stand for? But, what if we take “RX” and have it symbolise what is very well known to be an abbreviation for prescriptions? Now RXD.com can be understood to mean “Prescription Database” and could be made into a site similar to Drugs.com. Farfetched? I actually used RXD as an example because I know of someone who’s used RXD to symbolize just that.. Take a look at RXD.mobi. As can be seen, this short domain has been transformed into a prescription database intended to be viewed on cell phones — hence the use of the .mobi extension. You can get an emulation of what it would look like on a cell phone by visiting Ready.mobi. Do note that Alexa rankings for mobile websites are highly inaccurate due to Alexa not counting mobile visitors in their calculation of traffic rank.

So we see that short domains containing RX can often be made into meaningful short domains, even in English, despite the presence of the letter X which has very few English acronyms. Any other examples? How about NY for New York? That’s right, we can make short geo domains by taking city/province/state/country abbreviations and making them represent some of the letters in the domain. A 5L.com like say, NYMag.com can suddenly mean “New York Magazine” and HKAT.com might mean “Hong Kong At Night” (eg. might make for a great directory of Hong Kong night clubs). With 50 states and countless cities in the United States alone, there are far more examples than I have time to give. Aside from RX and geographical abbreviations, other popular acronyms include but are most certainly not limited to: HQ (common abbrevation for headquarters), MD (medical doctor), FX (foreign exchange or effects / special effects).

Some of my personal favorites are LLLL.coms have C, I, L, and lastly, O as a fourth and final letter in an LLLL.com. An LLL.com will usually cost somewhere around $3500-$15000, whereas an LLLL.com with 3 identical letter, followed by C, I, L, or O can often be had for 1/50th the price. So what’s so great about C, I, L, and O? Don’t they make for great abbreviations of Corporation, Incorporated, Limited, or Online? So we’re in a recession, right? Money is tighter than it used to be, the big boss doesn’t want to spend $4000 on a short domain like PQT.com (which is what it sold for on April 30th). Any alternatives? How about PQTO.com (PQT Online) which sold for $80 on April 23rd? GJR.com sold for $4199 at the latest GreatDomains auction, yet GJRA.com (GJR Associates?), sold for but $90 a few months back. While OFJ.com went for $3777 in April, OFJI.com (OFJ Incorporated) sold for but $55 back in February. Similarly, MQV.com sold for $3000 in April, yet MQVL.com (MQV Limited) sold for $70 back in July 2008.

It’s hard to find too many examples here, as both domains need to have sold within a similar timeframe at public venues or having been reported as sold. Nevertheless, I think you’ll find most owners of LLLL.coms happy to sell their LLLI.com, LLLC.com, LLL”L”.com, etc for much under the $3500+ you’ll be paying for the LLL.com. In the case of LLL.coms, do remember that these reported prices tend to be D2D (domainer to domainer) prices — it’s not like any sane domainer is going to sell their LLL.com to an enduser for $3500 when they know they can get $3500 from another domainer for it any day of the week.

And lastly, something which in my opinion doesn’t get said enough, a short domain need not have meaning. There is nothing wrong with building a website or starting up a company using a short domain without that short domain meaning anything at all – this is especially true in the case of pronounceable LLLL.coms. I recently discussed the FOOM.com $21000 enduser sale on www.LLLL.com, but What is Foom? Foom may once upon a time not had any meaning (eg. just like Facebook), yet today it most certainly means something to it’s users.

One thing I discussed in yesterday’s short domain name post was that sometimes a short domain not having any meaning can be a benefit, perhaps even a big benefit. FOOM.com could have been made into anything and the reason for that is because of the fact that at one point, it meant nothing.

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

With a whopping 329 reported eBay LLLL.com sales over just the past 3 days, I thought it was time to take another look at the eBay LLLL.com market. To put how massive a number this is into perspective, only 411 eBay LLLL.com sale were reported between April 1st and April 28th.

Of these 329 eBay LLLL.com sales since April 29th, 322 are of low enough quality to use in examining the performance of the low end LLLL.com market. When looking at the data below, please remember that only anti-premium, single premium, double premium, and triple premium LLLL.coms are being evaluated below. Furthermore, any pronounceable or rare LLLL.coms have been removed and only sales from eBay (which typically reports the lowest sales results) are being considered here. For this reason, this eBay price guide is not to be confused with the April 2009 LLLL.com Price Guide which presents a much better examination of the LLLL.com domain name market as a whole, rather than merely observing what happens on eBay for the weakest of LLLL.coms. I’ve been asked a few times lately what exactly these numbers given below mean, so I’ll try to provide explanations beside the values given.

Findings this time around are as follows:

5th percentile: $4.12 — I usually quote the minimum wholesale as being roughly around what the 5th percentile is. This means that 95% (or 19 out of every 20 sales) of all LLLL.com sales were greater than or equal to this amount.

10th percentile: $5.54 — This means that 18 out of 20 LLLL.coms sold on eBay sold for $5.54 or higher.

25th percentile: $8.50 — This means that 15 out of every 20 LLLL.coms sold on eBay sold for $8.50 or higher.

Median: $11.50 — This means that half (10 out of every 20) of all LLLL.coms sold on eBay sold for $11.50 or higher.

75th percentile: $15.50 — This means that 5 out of every 20 LLLL.coms sold on eBay sold for $15.50 or higher.

90th percentile: $27.68 — This means that 2 out of 20 LLLL.coms sold on eBay sold for $27.68 or higher.

Further interpreting this data, we see that 80% (16 out of every 20) LLLL.coms sold on eBay sold for between $5.54 and $27.68. Essentially, if you don’t have one of the worst of the weaker LLLL.coms and if your LLLL.com isn’t expiring within the next month or incorrectly listed, you are almost guaranteed to see it reach at least $5.00-$6.00. If this LLLL.com isn’t particularly strong (such as being a triple premium with a strong starting letter, ending letter, and/or having many possible acronyms), you shouldn’t expect to see your LLLL.com reach more than about $25 on eBay and it will most likely only reach that if 6+ months remain until the domain needs to be renewed.

Now if you read this blog everyday or even every week, you probably think that’s a silly question, as do I. Probabilistically speaking, anything which is possible (no matter how unlikely) could “technically” happen, however we need only be concerned with what is likely to happen. As an example, every time you get into your car, there’s a chance you’ll get in a car accident and possibly die — the odds are low enough that most of us aren’t going to resort to finding some other way to get around. Now that we’ve gotten the mumbo jumbo out of the way, let’s take a realistic look at the LLLL.com market today and as it’s been in the past.

As those who’ve been in the domain business at least a couple years will recall, the large majority of LLLL.coms were already registered before most domainers started taking any interest in them. The author of DYYO.com tried many times to convince the naysayers that despite all the hype around the LLLL.com buyout, it would have taken place eventually with or without domainers, as the link I enclosed just above will attest to. You can see that even in the months leading up to buyout, the number of LLLL.coms being registered was only roughly double what we had seen in past months.

When looking at the LLLL.com market trying to predict future events, there are a few things we must accept:

1. We must always consider the choice of venue. You will see that almost all low end LLLL.com sales are not only sold on eBay, but also incorrectly listed with “LLLL” and/or “LLLL.com” noticeably absent from the title for their domain name listing on eBay… It’s hardly fair to even call these sales when the large majority of domainers on eBay will never even have the opportunity to bid on these domains because they won’t even know they’re on auction and for that obvious reason, I would never consider an incorrectly listed outlier eBay sale to be indicative of a falling minimum wholesale on LLLL.coms.

2. We must understand that while minimum wholesales are interesting for domainers to talk about, they do a rather poor job of representing any short domain name market as a whole — and this is especially true in the case of LLLL.coms. If I told you that the current minimum wholesale on an LLLL.com was $4, would that help you determine what your CVCV is worth? Of course not! It might not even help in determining the value of an ordinary LLLL.com… There are so many factors that need to be considered when evaluating a domain — the number of premium letters, the number of wordtracker search, google search results, traffic/revenue, etc — it’s all nice but it’s still only giving us a better idea of where the market is at. How do we factor in that highly random pronounceability variable — it can turn a domain like FOOM.com from being a quad premium CVVC into a $21,000 enduser sale. Did the seller get lucky in finding an enduser? Maybe a little, however considering this domain was sold right at the very end of January — essentially right when the LLLL.com was about to peak, I feel reasonably confident he would have gotten 5 figures for this domain just the same. Only a narrow-minded domainer would consider all LLLL.coms to be part of one category of domains and assume for one second that the prices of all LLLL.com domains are somehow intrinsically linked.

Let’s take that example one step further to elucidate my point — do you think ZXQ.com selling for less today than it did yesterday would have any impact on the value of FLY.com? Obviously not. Yes, FLY.com is a dictionary word and shouldn’t be categorized with other LLL.coms and everyone will agree to that.. However, we then have CVCVs and other strong LLLL.coms like the FOOM.com example I gave previously which routinely sell for just as much as dictionary words — shouldn’t they too be considered as a category of their own. Why the double standard?

3. As I blogged about in my most recent blog post on short domains and minimum wholesales, we must understand that it is not the minimum wholesale which determines the strength of a short domain name market, but rather the results obtained from much more reliable metrics such as the average price (with outliers removed), the median, or the geometric mean. Knowing that one short domain with a certain letter pattern sold for a certain amount tells us nothing.. As explained in point #2, we need to consider the venue at which the LLLL.coms (or other short domains) are being sold at, if there are any listing errors being made at the venue, and if there are any extenuating circumstances. For judging the strength of a short domain name market, I greatly prefer using short domain name auction data rather than relying on reported short domain name sales in which the domain buyer and domain seller had no contact with the outside domaining community. One can observe the short domain name market from a whole bunch of different angles in order to present an incorrect reasons for why the short domain market is appreciating or depreciating. At the end of the day, the only thing that makes any real sense to use is something that takes into account all short domain names for which reported sales (preferably auctioned) data exists.

It’s impossible for a third party like me to sit here and understand the motives of a domain buyer and domain seller on domain name transactions I play no part in. How will I know if this was a domain the buyer wanted to have or if it was a domain that the buyer needs to have? How will I know whether the seller was in a rush to sell and accepted an offer lower than he may have otherwise received because he had debts to pay, or alternatively, that the buyer presented an offer right off the bat that more than satisfied the expectations of the domain seller. With short domain auctions, we can put the speculation aside. Granted there will need to be at least two domainers bidding on the short domain to drive up the price, short domain name auctions shows that more than one person is interested in this short domain and  better represents what we may refer to as a domain name market — this is a market where the price at which the short domain name is sold likely best represents the conditions likely to be expected in the domain name market should we repeat this experiment tomorrow. Some short domain name segments, such as LLL.coms, show remarkable consistency — if the same domain is sold on the reseller market multiple times within a very short period of time (no more than 2-3 months), we’ll often find results no more than 20% or so apart. As I’ve discussed in the past, other markets such as CVCVs tend to fluctuate far more, sometimes selling for 100% more at an auction than they had at a previous one which took place but one month earlier. The fact that there are no clear-cut rules on how to evaluate a CVCV likely has a lot to do with this. You can teach “Joe Domainer” quite a bit about LLL.com pricing and he’d probably be ready to go out and make his own LLL.com purchases within a few days.. I have yet to see anyone who’s progressed at such a pace in a market as diverse as the LLLL.com market — it’s been a couple years now since this market first established itself and even today, we’re all still learning.

4. We need to make a real effort to understand the psychology of LLLL.com and/or short domain name investing. What motivates a domainer to invest in LLLL.coms? Is it to have a few short domains to use for email addresses, web hosting, subdomains, etc (eg. areas where a shorter domain may produce a real world  difference)? Does it result from the fact that over the past few years, short .coms have become “trophy domains” — a domainer must-have to prove their worth to their fellow domainers? Do domainers who invest in LLLL.coms and other short domains place a greater emphasis on liquidity than investors who opt for more traditional markets such as keyword domains? Do the domainers who invest in LLLL.coms and other short domains have a higher appetite for risk than domainers who invest in other domain name market segments, and knowing that their investments carry greater risk and the opportunity for potentially greater reward, are these domainers more prepared to hold out through the tough times, focusing on the long term than other domainers avoiding the short domain name market may be?

Do you know the answers to these questions? From what I’ve seen, short domain name investors most certainly have a greater appetite for risk than domainers who invest in most other market segments, with the exception of perhaps very speculative ccTLDs/gTLDs. With that greater appetite for risk, short domain name investors understand that their investments will go up and down — at times haphazardly, at other times, in response to changing market conditions. As I distinctly recall saying in March of 2008, shortly after LLLL.coms had started to fall in price, the days of making hundred percent monthly  profits are now long gone — that certainly holds true to this day. LLLL.coms and other short domains are not for the faint of heart or those without the necessary funds to renewal fees and any other costs associated with ownership of the domains. Unlike keyword domains, most short domains are not going to make enough to cover their renewal fee — if you’re like most short domain investors investing in cheaper short domains, your revenue from domain parking isn’t likely anywhere near enough to cover costs associated with maintaining your domain name portfolio. That’s the one real risk with short domains — the unpredictability of the short domain name market means that one really doesn’t want to be selling short domains to fund the renewal fees of other short domains, because there just isn’t anyway to know how the market will be doing at that future point when your renewal fees come due. Even if your keyword domains collapse in value overnight, you likely are (provided you intelligently invested in them of course) still making through domain parking more than enough to wait out the bad times until the good times return — or so a lot of those investing in keyword domains think. I distinctly remember people paying 8+ years revenue on domains that likely have absolutely zero enduser potential but were receiving traffic and earning revenue. Now 8 years of 2007 revenue is probably more like 16 years of 2009 revenue (your experience will of course vary with the kind of domains you’ve invested in) — doesn’t seem like all that great of an investment anymore.. Matter of fact, if we were to sell this domain based on it’s earnings (which really is the only way to sell a domain which doesn’t have domainer or enduser appeal), this keyword investing domainer hasn’t done very well for himself…

Are there risks associated with investing in short domains? Yes, there certainly are. Do the risks outweigh what one would expect to find in most other domain name markets? Yes, in my opinion, they do. So why would anyone want to invest in short domains — more specifically, in LLLL.coms? In my opinion, one invests in short domains for the very reasons most domainers would avoid this segment — the market hasn’t yet matured, so one doesn’t know exactly what to expect and therein lies the risk and possibility of larger potential returns on investment than possible elsewhere. While the money to be made investing in LLLL.coms today certainly isn’t as easy to make as it was pre-buyout for those of us who sold out at peak, the bottom line is that this market still has the opportunity to produce very sizable returns. You’re much more likely to buy a $5 LLLL.com and resell it for $10 than you are to buy an LLL.com or keyword domain for $5000 and resell it for $10,000, despite the return on investment being the same in both cases. If you can consistently turn $5 into $10 with LLLL.coms, would you be able to turn $5000 into $10,000 with them — it’s basically the same thing, just this time with 1000 times more domains and if you think about it, this is pretty much exactly what those who invested in LLLL.coms pre-buyout did and the very reason they ended up with the mammoth returns that they did. Mature markets are great for money you can’t afford to lose, but if you want to make money quickly or make money without a whole lot of capital, you very well may need to take some risks — possibly big risks.  If we look at CVCVs, they’re quite stable and have outperformed LLL.coms over the past year. Moving down the chain, we have rare LLLL.coms, most of which have taken devaluations of 30-50%. Further down the list, we have quad premiums which are down about 70% over the past year, and finally the weaker LLLL.coms, most of which are down 75% to almost 95%, with the higher quality weaker LLLL.coms nearer to 75% and the weakest of the weaker LLLL.coms nearing 95%. Looking at what I’ve just written, what comes next should be pretty clear — the more and more you move down the LLLL.com chain, starting from the highest quality LLLL.coms, the riskier and riskier the investments become.

While not mutually exclusive, the super-premium CVCVs, rares, and other strong pronounceable LLLL.coms remain largely unaffected by the performance of the lower end of the LLLL.com market. There really isn’t anything to debate here — prices on minimum wholesale LLLL.coms fell almost 95% between their peak and their current price (which has largely remained the same since October 2008), while the higher quality LLLL.com segments mostly suffered losses in the 30-50% range — still large, but more in line with what a significant portion of the domain name industry has experienced resultant of this recession. There was clearly a positive correlation between CVCV and LLLL.com prices right up until the low end LLLL.coms hit peak, however the two short domain name markets have behaved quite differently in the aftermath. That said, I do share the same beliefs as some of the LLLL.com / short domain name skeptics that if the LLLL.com buyout were to fail, higher quality LLLL.coms would likely be greatly affected.

Like I said earlier, if you want to make money quickly, you’re going to need to take risks. Whether those risks pay off or not is going to be something you’re going to have to be able to live with, so investments in low end LLLL.coms or other short domains should ideally be money you can afford to lose (just like how most domainers treat speculative domain name extensions). One interesting observation that we see both in domain land and in the stock market is that for whatever some reason or another, people seem to get overwhelmingly excited when they see an investment start to rise quickly in value. All common sense (such as my often said comment to “do your own research”) soon gets thrown out the window and the domain name investor is buying domains at prices higher than he should be and spending more money on domains (which in this case happen to be in a speculative market segment) and represents more money than he can realistically afford to lose.

People often say buy low and sell high, but who honestly does that? I certainly know more people who bought high, panicked, and sold low. Even if you do want to “buy low” — how low is low, or perhaps more specifically, how low is low enough? The fact that there are renewal fees associated with investments in domain names make them in some ways completely different from the stock market — many people wouldn’t be able to afford to sit on a portfolio of cheap short domains until the market recovers, granted renewal fees are such a large component of the domain’s value and this alone most likely explains why the price disparity between minimum wholesale LLLL.coms and higher quality weaker LLLL.coms has widened to the extent that it has today — renewal fees are a killer. But are renewal fees enough to make a short domain name investor drop his short domains? Or, seeing as we’re talking about whether the LLLL.com buyout (which of course could also be applied to any short domain name market segment) will hold, it may be better to ask whether a sufficiently large number of domainers would be prepared to drop their short domains so as to possibly have an effect on whether the short domain buyout holds or not. Regardless of the activities of the current owners of short domains, the real test of time on whether a particular short domain name market will be able to survive is whether there are other short domain name investors out there prepared to purchase the domains that do get dropped, so as to essentially keep the buyout permanently in effect, and that’s something we certainly see today with lower quality expired LLLL.coms selling on SnapNames, NameJet, and TDNAM, often for many multiples of what the regfee is. And as I’ve said earlier in this post, in my previous post, elsewhere on this blog, and on Namepros — minimum wholesales on short domains mean absolutely nothing! Looking at the median price of even single premium and double premium LLLL.coms (see link in point #4) shows quite a different market from what others would have you believe — a market in which 50% of all anti-premium, single premium, and double premium LLLL.coms are fetching $15+. That’s a market that’s absolutely nowhere near failing!  I’ll say it one last time because it really does seem to need to be said a lot of times to sink in for some people (predominantly LLLL.com naysayers) — don’t judge the fate of the LLLL.com market and/or the LLLL.com buyout (and/or any other short domain name market) based on what any LLLL.coms (or short domains) happen to sell for in domainer to domainer transactions, as these are only good for predicting future outcomes of other domainer to domainer transactions.. Rather, look at what kind of prices are being paid in the expired short domain name markets. Are domainers willing to pay at least  the domain name renewal or domain name registration fee for these expiring or expired LLLL.coms? At present, the answer is an overwhelming YES. So long as it stays that way, the buyout will not fail.

When I speak of low end LLLL.coms here, I’m speaking of the lowest of the low — a ghastly LLLL.com that’s about to expire and perhaps has one premium letter. There are of course exceptions to that rule, however for the most part, these seem to be the type of LLLL.coms fetching the lowest prices. Between April 15th and 19th, we saw 4 LLLL.coms sell for between $1.54 and $2.26 (I’ll have to ask our Namepros resident eBay expert, however I’m willing to bet all or most didn’t have “LLLL.com” or “LLLL” in the title). April 21st saw UDXY.com sell for $3.24 and since then, all LLLL.coms have sold for $4+.

Despite all the flack low end LLLL.coms get for falling from the peaks of February 2008 (it’s domain speculators we should be blaming, not the LLLL.coms), the situation isn’t near as grave as some portray it to be. Let’s assume a minimum wholesale of $4 — it’s the number I’ve been using for awhile and seems to be pretty darn close to the minimum, at least for LLLL.coms sold anywhere but unintelligently on eBay.

Over the past two weeks (since April 17th), there have been 236 reported LLLL.com sales of anti-premium, single, or double premium quality. How do the numbers stack up? I put them into Excel and came up with the following:

10th percentile: $6.50
25th percentile: $9.50
Median: $15.50
75th percentile: $25.00
90th percentile: $60.00

The real numbers aren’t exactly as bad as many would have you believe. One thing which I don’t think a lot of short domain name investors noticed was the change in behavior of an LLLL.com buyer over the past 15 months. When LLLL.coms were at their peak, there was essentially no difference between a single premium or a double premium, and even triple premiums didn’t sell for a great deal more than the minimum wholesale (which maxed out at about $55). So while this may have been a minimum, I doubt the median at the time of single, double, and triple premium LLLL.coms sales at the time was much above $60. Today, we see pretty much the opposite, with buyers being ever more discriminating in what separates on LLLL.com from another. A terrible LLLL.com still saw about $55 at peak — maybe $50 if nearing expiration, while the very best of triple premiums (eg. triple premiums + U/W) typically saw prices of around $120-$140. Today, we see a minimum wholesale of around $4 on that same comparable LLLL.com that was previously fetching $55, yet a good triple premium that may have seen $120-$140 at peak still sells for at least $30-$40+ today.  It’s not hard to see looking at the February 2008 data versus the April 2009 data that the gap between the weakest LLLL.coms and the strongest triple premiums has widened substantially over the past year, with the price ratio going from about 1:3 to 1:10 on the minimum wholesale LLLL.com versus the strong lettered triple premiums.

Even with double premiums, we see 121 of the 169 (about 72% of) double premiums sold over the past 2 weeks sold for at least $10.00. Of those, 100 sold for at least $15.00, 81 saw at least $20.00, and 33 saw at least $30. Essentially, your double premium LLLL.com has about a one in two shot at selling for at least $20 (81/169) and about a one in five chance (33/169) of netting at least $30. That’s not so bad… Not so bad at all.

Okay, so triple premium and double premium LLLL.coms clearly refute “the sky is falling” theory of LLLL.coms. But what about single premiums? Of the 47 single premiums sold over the past two weeks, only 3 sold for under $5, 30 saw at least $10, 21 saw at least $15, and 11 sold for at least $20. Again here, you had about an almost one in two chance (21/47) of seeing at least $15.

Moral of the story: Minimums mean nothing. Examine the data and find what your LLLL.coms are truly worth. If they’re not minimum wholesale domains and they’re not expiring soon, they certainly won’t command minimum wholesale prices. As discussed earlier in this post, that has never been more true than now.

I usually write about LLLL.coms on this blog — perhaps unsurprising considering the url

Occasionally other domain name segments have been covered, such as LLL.coms and LLLL.nets, but what about all the other short domains segments out there? We see short domain name investors on domain name forums investing in everything from L-L-L.coms, LLLL.coms, and 5L.coms to CC.coms and CCC.coms and their equivalents in .net and .org. I hope to open this blog up to short domains in general, rather than just focusing on LLLL.coms in the future (of course plenty of short domain content will continue to be on LLLL.coms) or just CNO, as is often pretty much all we see browsing the popular domain name forums.

This post isn’t going to be about any of the short domain name segments mentioned above, rather, it’s going to be about one of the short domain segments which for one reason or another, have been overlooked by the large majority of domainers — I’m talking about short domains in ccTLDs. Outside .com (and sometimes even including .com), it’s not uncommon to see the ccTLD as the second (or even first) choice for many businesses in some countries.

I live in Canada, so I’ll talk about my experience with .ca domains in this post… People here don’t snub a .ca domain like they might a .info… Nobody here looks at a .ca domain and says “Oh, I guess he went with domain.ca because he couldn’t afford domain.com”. It’s a very well respected domain name extension here in Canada — one that pretty much everyone can associate with being Canadian (the fact that only Canadians or those with business interests in Canada are allowed to register them likely plays a role in that). Most Canadian businesses here that use a .com domain for their main site still have a .ca domain that either redirects to their .com domain or, if they’re a multinational corporation, provides a different version of their site on the .ca domain which is targeted at their Canadian clientele.

Despite this ccTLD only being open to the 33 million or so Canadians, total .ca domain registrations as I write this post are nearing 1.2 Million. Just think about that for a sec — If we extrapolate and compare that to the USA’s 300+ Million population, we’d be looking at about 11 Million registered .ca domains if Canada were the size of the USA. You might be able to get around the restrictions on .ca domains if you have a trusted domaining contact who resides in Canada (who could “hold” the domains for you) or if you’re an incorporated business, but don’t quote me on that and make sure you check that out because being Canadian, I haven’t. CIRA is one of the stricter ccTLD registries, so if you’re not Canadian make sure you get real answers to the questions you have before considering investing in .ca domains.

The .ca registry was started in 1987 and by the end of 2000, counted but 140,000 total .ca registrations — still a pretty respectable number when you consider that Canada is a small country and that there were a whole lot less domainers and domains being registered in all extensions back then. Since responsibility for the .ca extension was transferred over to CIRA, the .ca extension has seen massive growth, reaching 1 million registered .ca domains in April 2008. In the year since then, .ca domain registrations have continued to soar, seeing just under 200,000 new .ca domains registered as I write this post.

So, why invest just in short domains? Intelligently investing in keyword ccTLD domains is certainly another option — some inspiring past sales include Jobs.ca for $600,000 and that Big .ca domain portfolio sale awhile back. Seeing as this is a blog about short domains, I’ll leave it at that and continue to talk about how to make money investing in short domains. When we read about LL.coms, we often see 2 letter domains having sold for 6 figures.. Not a whole lot of LL.coms have been reported sold for under $100k the past couple years — all of those which have sold for significantly under that have had at least one bad letter (note: we don’t see a lot of LL.coms on the market.. I’m sure prices are lower now in light of the recession which has devalued most domains, however it’s hard to put a price on a domain when little current sales data exists). On the .ca front, the story is much different.. To a Canadian, it’s pretty hard to imagine that the going rate on an LL.ca is as low as it is.. I sold a double premium, repeat letter LL.ca last year for $14k — when’s the last time you saw one of those sold in .com? Given there’s only 26 such domains, it’s not surprising that we rarely see such domains on the market, yet in .ca, a domain like that remain surprisingly affordable.

I distinctly remember the LLL.ca buyout pretty much coinciding with the LLLL.com buyout — I was having a lot of trouble at the time deciding which one I wanted to invest in (I even contemplated investing in both and still regret not doing that). Now I was fortunate to sell out of the low end LLLL.com market at the right time — since peaking in February 2008, we’ve seen LLLL.coms fall from a minimum wholesale of about $55 to about $4 per domain. When you consider the fact that LLLL.coms were bought out on November 2nd, 2007, you can see that most people having bought in pre-buyout or having bought in post-buyout, are now in the red, assuming they’ve been holding the domains and not reselling at least some of them to other domainers or endusers at a profit.

So, how have LLL.ca fared over this same timeframe? Contrary to the LLLL.com market, the LLL.ca market has actually done pretty good. We see all LLL.ca reaching $60+ today, many hitting $100+ and often far more in auctions. The .ca market doesn’t have anywhere near the kind of sales data that’s available for .com domains — this pretty much repeats itself with all ccTLDs, so it does require a bit more research to invest in than something like say LLLL.coms, where there’s plenty of evidence on where the market is at courtesy of 20,000+ reported sales over the past few years.

So this was a look at the .ca short domain name market.. I hope at least some of the visitors residing elsewhere found this interesting — maybe it gave you an idea about a different ccTLD you’d like to invest in? I’ll have to blog about some different ccTLDs in the future — short domain name investors really are missing out if they limit their short domain name investments to CNO.

Why are low end LLLL.coms consistently selling for more far more over at Godaddy than elsewhere? Now, I’m not complaining — it’s nice to see a steady stream of single and double premium LLLL.coms hitting $20+ day after day, but the question I have is why do we see this over at Godaddy and not elsewhere?

Now I can understand eBay reporting lower sales numbers on average — some sellers clearly don’t know how to sell on there and forget to put LLLL or LLLL.com in the title. Another argument for eBay reporting lower sales numbers which also makes a lot of sense is the fact that eBay auctions end all the time at different hours of the day, but we see that over at Godaddy Auctions as well, so what could it be? I know some domainers (eg. me) have been discouraged from using eBay due to many domainers keyword spamming their domains for sale, resulting in LLLL.com listings that were 5L.coms, LLLL.nets, etc, however that has really died down.. I must say, Godaddy is certainly much easier to follow — it’s very organized and quite easy to browse through their list of available LLLL.coms just by using the appropriate options in their advanced search box (eg. # of characters = 4, exclude hyphens, exclude digits, choose the auction types you want to look at, and make sure only .com is checked off for domain extension). But could that alone be the reason LLLL.coms frequently sell for double, and sometimes even triple what comparable LLLL.coms sell for on eBay?

Let’s stop talking about eBay for a second and take a look at Namepros. Namepros is by far the most popular domain name forum for short domains, so, shouldn’t LLLL.coms sell for decent prices over there? I frequently see LLLL.coms unsold on Namepros with $10 asking prices.. Try and sell LLLL.coms in a bulk lot (that might be as little as 20 domains) and you may be hard pressed to get much more than $5 per domain — why is that?  Even if we consider the fact that all reported Godaddy Auction prices include the renewal fee, it’s hard to justify why LLLL.coms aren’t selling at this price on Namepros, especially when one considers the fact that many times these LLLL.coms which are unsold at $10 or so are nowhere near expiration. Why would this be the case? Most of the domainers I know who are frequently active in the short domain forum on Namepros are the same people placing bids on LLLL.coms over at Godaddy Auctions — surely they would check the fixed price and make offer domain name forums on Namepros, right?

And while we’re taking about Namepros, why do bulk domain sales involving LLLL.coms sell so much worse than purchasing the domains individually? Sure, we’d all expect that it’d be a bit cheaper to buy them in bulk, but when we’re talking about 20 domains or so, the difference between offering $5 on all the LLLL.coms and offering $6 on all the LLLL.coms is essentially the difference between offering $100 on the bulk domain lot or offering $120 on the bulk domain lot. Most short domain name investors I know own a whole lot more than 20 LLLL.coms and have spent a whole lot more than $100 on acquiring the short domain portfolio they have today. And if these short domain name investors focus their domain business around buying and selling cheap LLLL.coms, it’s not all that uncommon to see short domain name investors with hundreds of these low end LLLL.coms.. So the question once again — why are they selling for so much less in bulk (sometimes 1/4 the prices of individual LLLL.coms on Godaddy Auctions)? Clearly money isn’t the issue. If you invest in cheap LLLL.coms, you invest in cheap LLLL.coms, right? While that may not be true all the time, a lot of short domain name investors have certain prices in mind for domains that meet certain characteristics — eg. they might be willing to pay $10 for any double premium, $15 for any triple premium, and so on.. If that’s the case, wouldn’t these domainers regard a bulk lot as the ultimate bargain? Why do we see short domains sell for so much less in even small bulk when many of the domainers who invest in short domains invest not only in LLLL.coms, but also in LLL.coms and other expensive short domain name segments — As I said earlier, it’s clearly not a money issue, so what is it?

What I do know is that I’ll be doing any cheap LLLL.com buying I do on eBay/Namepros and will be selling the large majority of any short domains I do acquire elsewhere.

The quad premium LLLL.com market has been one of the short domain market segments hit hardest since September 2008. Back in September, it was pretty hard to find quad premium LLLL.coms under $200. There were a few here and there in the $160-$200 range, but it was much more common to see them fetching $200-$300, with sales for $400+ pretty common as well. LPTF.com sold for $104 on November 27th — it seemed like a steal to some at the time, with no other quad premium LLLL.coms being reported sold for under $142, however it would soon be established that the minimum wasn’t a whole lot more than $104 anymore. Sales under $130 became increasingly common heading into December, with 8 quad premiums selling for under $130, including DHSF.com selling for $112 on December 23rd.  January was a strong  month for quads, the lowest four being between $130-$140.  February started off rather rough, seeing a return to $110 LLLL.coms with the sale of LGIR.com on February 3rd. Five quads sold for under $130 in February, with 3 more selling for $130, LHDP.com ended the month selling for $91 on February 28th.  March saw 35 quad premiums sell for under $135 by the time the month was over.

And that brings us to today — April 2009. April has so far seen 17 quads sell for under $135.  It’s important to note that there were roughly double as many reported quad sales in March as there’s been in April, so the number of sales in the under $135 range has actually been pretty stable over the past month.

What’s interesting to observe when looking at the data is that the minimum wholesale has held pretty consistent at $110 for several months now — there’s been a few sales here and there for under that, rarely more than a few dollars under and rarely would it be assumed that the domain wouldn’t likely sell for more if resold. That said, while we see a consistent trend of the minimum wholesale being around $110, we have been seeing more and more quads selling under $130. It’ll be interesting to see what transpires in the months ahead..

Presumably, a large number of sales near the minimum wholesale could further push down the minimum — eg. it’s highly unlikely all the domains selling in the $110-$130 are of the exact same quality, so if we continue to see this trend of sales for $115, $120, etc, we might see the minimum wholesale on quads further decrease. Quad premiums seem to at present be behaving similarly to what we see in the LLL.com market, where the weakest 15% or so of LLL.coms will all sell for pretty much the same price (lately that’s been about $3300-$4000) — clearly some of these weaker LLL.coms are much worse than other weaker LLL.coms and if domainers were being realistic about enduser potential, some of them should sell for hundreds rather than the thousands they see for being domainer collectibles.

Are the quad premiums heading down that road? The weakest of quads are certainly weaker than the strongest of triple premiums, yet even the weakest of quad premiums consistently sell for more. What does this say to me? Domainers are (at least when speaking of the weakest of quads) paying $110+ for these domains because they’re quads more than anything else — it’s certainly not because the weakest of quad premiums have more enduser potential in many cases than strong triple premiums selling for half the price.

For the record, I’m a big fan of the quad premium LLLL.com market and these observations are just me looking at what may transpire in the near future. Long term, I see this as a healthy short domain segment to invest in, all the more so if prices fall further.

Last time I spoke about recent LLLL.com sales was on April 23rd and at the time there was plenty to be excited about in the short domain market, so… How’s the market performed since then?

Well, it’s only been 4 days and there’s already some big sales to report — YUQI.com sold for $12,001 on SnapNames and Tego.com saw $7100 on NameJet. GUDI.com has been an interesting domain to watch over the past few months, having sold for $2600 on February 14th, $1850 on March 10th, and now $3101 on April 27th. Clearly the CVCV market is rather unpredictable on any particular day — as an average, prices have been pretty stable over this timeframe, however we see that individual domains can fluctuate quite a bit. If there’s something to take from that, perhaps it’s that CVCVs are not the kind of domain you should be auctioning at no reserve unless you can stomach what may amount to a large loss. Alternatively, you may find yourself pleasantly surprised, as I’m sure the March 10th buyer did,  realizing a 67% profit in well under two months — not bad at all. Now tell me, is there any market other than domaining when you’re going to see that kind of ROI in that kind of timeframe!?

Topping out the LLLL.com sales above $1000 were KAZY.com and WIGY.com, reaching $1101 (Sedo) and $1025 (TDNX) respectively.  You may or may not have noticed that all 5 sales above $1000 happen to be CVCVs. Something which has become somewhat obvious over the past year has been the increased desirability of good CVCV domains with domainers versus bad LLL.coms. It’s somewhat difficult to compare one pronounceable domain to another when we need to consider subjective factors such as pronounceability, however it’s pretty clear that if we make any reasonable attempt to control for overall quality, we’ll see that CVCV domains have weathered the economic turmoil much better than LLL.coms. When Microsoft’s Kumo launches in approximately 40 days, it’ll be just one more CVCV being used by one big enduser

In other news, we witnessed one  particularly strong AAAB sale, with ZZZR.com reaching $510 while GGGP.com could only pull in $400 — both were Sedo auctions which ended on April 26th. ECAZ.com saw $500 on Sedo — double the $260 it reached on NameJet on January 30th 2009.  We’ve also seen a few very respectable triple premium sales lately — WSCM.com selling for $109, YNMT.com pulling in $81, and HGHJ.com pulling in $135. Leading the lower quality LLLL.coms, FJTZ.com was worth mentioning, realizing $150.

It’s always interesting to try and understand the psychology of a domainer and domainers in general.. How could ZZZR.com outsell GGGP.com at the same venue, on the same day, when the latter is clearly better than the former and both buyers appear to be domainers? Why does one double premium struggle to see $5, while one of comparable quality sees $50 or even $100? Why do LLLL.coms sell so much more individually than even in small lots of say, 20?  The unpredictability of the LLLL.com market really is what makes it exciting.

I’ve always been a fan of quad premium LLLL.nets. The way I see it is simple — there aren’t a whole lot of potential endusers out there for most single and double premium LLLL’s, yet there are often many potential endusers out there for quad premium and higher quality LLLL’s.

So, why quad premium LLLL.nets? If you don’t follow the LLLL.net market, you may find it shocking to believe a quad premium LLLL.net can often be had for less than the weakest of LLLL.coms. Why? The quad premium LLLL.net certainly has a better chance of finding an enduser – we all know endusers prefer .com but when you have 20 times as many potential endusers, which one do you think is going to come out on top? Now, I must add that at present these really aren’t the kind of domains that you’ll likely be able to flip for a profit to another domainer — the money here is in, and only in, enduser sales.

I really don’t see the point in registering most currently available LLLL.nets when quad premium LLLL.nets with a few months until renewal sell for as little as $3 — plenty of time to see if you can make that big sale! As you move higher up in quality, prices become more what we’d expect in .net — a good CVCV.net or pronounceable will usually sell for 1/10 to 1/15th the equivalent .com. Why such a big discrepancy when it comes to quad premium LLLL.nets? The problem is actually the same one we’ve seen in the LLLL.com market, only worse because of the lower value of LLLL.nets. If you haven’t figured it out by now, the problem is that the renewal fee is more expensive than the domain itself! A $3 LLLL.net sounds like a pretty good alternative to a $150 LLLL.com, however with one $6 or so renewal fee, that $3 investment in the LLLL.net has now tripled to a $9 investment, with the difference between the price of the LLLL.net and the equivalent LLLL.com in this case going from 1/50th to about 1/18th — putting it much more in line with what we see in the higher quality LLLL.net markets.

Are lower quality, up to quad premium LLLL.nets worth holding? In my opinion, no. With prices as low on quad premium LLLL.nets as they are, and with prices even lower on lower quality LLLL.nets however, it might be worth picking up a few and contacting endusers in your free time — you don’t have a whole lot to lose but potentially plenty to gain! If it doesn’t work out, you drop or resell them and that’s that. If you pick up 100 quad premium LLLL.nets @ $3 per, your total investment so long as you drop or resell them is going to be a maximum of $300. Think you can get one enduser sale out of that? If you managed to sell one for say, $500, you’ve made at least a $200 profit, even if you drop all the LLLL.nets. If you manage to resell them for say, $2 per, you’ve made a $400 profit at the end of the day – not too bad at all, especially when you consider that if you’re successful with a smaller amount like this, you can always scale up operations and multiply your profit.

I did an experiment last year in the VCVC.info market to test the waters and see how enduser demand was in the .info market for reasonably high quality domains. I bought 1900 of them @ $1 per and sat on them, making no attempt to contact endusers — merely a test to see what I could expect if I made a large investment in the .info extension. I came up a little short, selling 3 of them for $500 apiece, netting back $1500 of my original $1900 investment. I made another $100 or so parking them which surprised the hell out of me, leaving me with 1900 .infos needing to be resold to domainers for $300 to fully recoup my investment… Not great but pretty good to see it’s more than possible to break-even in a market like LLLL.infos doing not much of anything. How much would I have made had I made a serious attempt to reach out to endusers? Who knows — I was way too busy at the time to consider doing it, but I’m 100% sure I would have turned a profit.

Back when I ran this experiment, quad premium LLLL.nets weren’t really a better option — most of them were selling for $10+, having just recently been bought out and benefitting greatly from the hype still largely surrounding the LLLL.com market. You don’t need 12 months to find an enduser for a domain and the great thing about quad premium LLLL.nets at present is that they really are more affordable than ever. Before the LLLL.com buyout, pretty much nobody thought about investing in quad premium and lower quality LLLL.nets — the meteoric rise in the months leading up to February 2008 changed that and we saw quad premium LLLL.nets run out. Now, sitting in a recession, many of the people who bought these names (and may have even renewed these names) are deciding to offload at least some of them to cover the renewal fees on their other names. Domainer interest in LLLL.nets was hit even harder than LLLL.coms — largely in my opinion because of what I explained above about renewal fees being so expensive relative to the price of the domains.

A domain not worth renewing isn’t necessarily a domain not worth buying and if I were to say that about any short domain market, I’d say that about quad premium LLLL.nets, because there are buyers out there that are willing to pay a whole lot more than the $3 you can expect on Namepros.

We’ve looked at many short domain markets over the months on this blog, however this will be our first in depth look at the CCC.com market. Like other short domain markets, prices in the CCC.com market do seem to a certain extent to be influenced more by character pattern and character quality rather than due to having more applicable uses or end user potential. Rarer CCC.com character patterns tend to sell for more than more common ones. In addition, CCC.coms with certain numbers or letter combinations will also sell for more — 50D.com in example would be considered a premium NNL.com type of CCC.com. Read on for more information on CCC.com prices and how to determine what your CCC.coms are worth.

Minimums — love ‘em or hate ‘em, us short domain investors just can’t live without them

Here’s a look at how the CCC.com market has been performing lately, broken down per character pattern. All minimums are taken from (and considered using) auctioned domains from major venues only — it’s the only real way to determine the minimum. CCC.coms sold recently have largely been through Sedo auctions.  Reported below are the lowest recently recorded prices per CCC.com character pattern — if the lowest sale happened to be significantly lower than the second lowest sale, the second lowest would have been used, however that wasn’t necessary this time around. Unlike the LLLL.com market, there is far less data available to be analyzed in the CCC.com market, so I’d hesitate to call this a price guide, however it should serve as a reasonable benchmark of current minimum CCC.com performance. Most CCC.coms are currently being sold through Sedo auctions — if your intent is to resell purchased CCC.coms by auctioning them on Sedo, make sure you take into account the fees associated with selling the CCC.com on Sedo ($50 minimum or 10%, whichever is greater / 10% with no minimum if the CCC.com is parked with Sedo) into any offers on CCC.coms that you make.

As will be seen, the minimum wholesales listed below are lower than the reported minimums you’d find listed on 3Character.com.

LLN.com — GL6.com @ $167 (Sedo auction, February 2009) [not exactly of minimum wholesale quality, probably more around $150 as a minimum]
NLL.com — 0QN.com @ $111 (Sedo auction, March 2009) [minimum with any number other than zero should be around $130-$140)
LNL.com -- E1Q.com @ $110 (Sedo auction, March 2009)
NLN.com -- 2J7.com @ $104 (Sedo auction, March 2009)
LNN.com -- G79.com @ $191 (Sedo auction, March 2009)**
NNL.com -- 79Q.com @ $220 (Sedo auction, March 2009)**

** There's very little recent sales data on the LNN.com and NNL.com character patterns. Historically, the LLN.com character pattern (with a minimum wholesale currently around $150) has had the highest minimum wholesale, so please take that into consideration when considering what the current minimum wholesale is on LNN.com and NNL.com (my guess would place the minimum wholesale somewhere between $130-$140 for both segments, with the minimum wholesale on LNN.com closer to $130 and NNL.com, $140). CCC.coms with zeroes in them may sell lower than the above quoted minimums.

There's not a whole lot of data on the hyphenated C-C.com character patterns either -- largely because of their scarcity (eg. L-L has only 26x26 possible combinations, L-N.com has 26x10, and so on).

L-L.com -- S-Y.com @ $1001 (Sedo auction, February 2009) [only reported 2009 sale]
L-N.com — insufficient data
N-L.com — insufficient data
N-N.com — 5-6.com @ 472 EUR (Sedo auction, March 2009) [converts to about $625 USD] and 5-8.com sold for  $735 (Sedo auction, February 2009). These are the only reported sales in 2009.

As said above, there’s really not a whole lot of data available, however one thing does appear clear — the minimums listed on 3Character.com (L-L.com @ $2250, N-N.com @ $1200) seem to greatly overestimate minimum wholesales in the current market. I would be very careful about investing in this segment and wouldn’t recommend anyone buy into it without doing their own research and understanding the risks involved. As a general rule, the rarer a short domain segment is, the more each individual sale affects the overall market — eg. One low LLLL.com sale has a much lower impact than a low LLL.com sale, which in turn has a much lower impact than a low LL.com sale on each of their respective markets. With L-L.coms being among the rarest of short domains (with just 1296 available in total and that small amount split across 4 different character patterns), their values will be more easily affected by a low sale than other segments (such as the CCC.com markets listed at the top of this post).

As is always said when reporting minimum wholesales, all prices suggested in this post in no way represent the value of any particular CCC.com — most CCC.coms will sell for above the quoted prices, some for substantially more.

Selling a domain and selling a domain on eBay are two completely different things. If you want your domains to sell for top dollar on eBay you’ll need to read this post on how to make your domain listing stand out from the rest. It’s not just about having a good domain and proper presentation is important. Targeting your domain to the right people on eBay requires carefully selecting a title, displaying an eye-catching photo, and writing a listing which makes visitors want to buy your domain. Competition is fierce and you’ll be up against domainers who have sold thousands of domains on eBay. Think you’re up for the task? Selling domains on eBay for good prices isn’t always easy, however if you can master it, it’ll be one more venue to sell domains at.

You’d think it’d be somewhat obvious that if someone were looking to buy LLLL.coms on eBay, they’re probably going to use “LLLL.com” or “LLLL” as a search term… So, why are a large number of domainers selling LLLL.coms on eBay without putting these words in the title?

Take TPGY.com as an example, with title ”TPGY.com - Triple-premium domain name”.. It’s a fairly descriptive title and certainly gets across the point that the domain being auctioned is TPGY.com and that it is a triple premium LLLL.com. So why not call it what it is — a triple premium LLLL.com instead of calling it a triple premium domain name? Yes, I’m sure far more people search for “domain name” on eBay than they do LLLL.coms, however, how many of those people typing in the search term “domain name” are actually looking for a 4 letter .com? What’s wrong with describing it as “TPGY.com - Triple-premium LLLL.com Domain Name”? That would seem to cover all the basics… If we wanted even more attention, why not replace Triple Premium, a term which I doubt even domainers would use when looking for LLLL.coms on eBay, with another more descriptive term which will either increase the probability of the listing being found or increase the probability of those who find the listing clicking on the link and viewing the description?

As LLLL.com domainers, most of us know what a triple premium is. When I see a triple premium, I know it’s a triple premium and nobody needs to tell me that a particular LLLL.com is a triple premium. If I’m a new domainer or new 4 letter .com investor, I probably don’t have the least bit of a clue what a triple premium is, so again, this is something which isn’t adding value to the listing and is using up valuable letter space, maybe even confusing some newer domainers wondering what the heck a triple premium is! People put “LLLL.com” or “LLLL” in their listing not because us LLLL.com investors need to be told that a particular domain is an LLLL.com — they put it in their because a lot of 4 letter .com investors search for 4 letter domains by typing in “LLLL” or “LLLL.com”. The same can’t be said about the word triple premium (or quad premium, or single premium, …) The exception I could see here would be using a word like “Pronounceable” or mentioning that the domain is a CVCV — these do add value because they may cause the domainer scrolling over the domains to take a second look at them if they didn’t notice right off that it’s a CVCV (like any of us pros do that! ) or that it is indeed pronounceable.

One positive thing to mention is that the seller is using an image which shows the name of the domain being auctioned – could be a better, more eye-catching one, however it’s certainly better than no image.

Now I made a whole long post describing what I saw wrong with how this domain was listed — I wouldn’t do that unless I saw this happening more often than it should (which should ideally never happen if people care about getting top dollar for their LLLL’s on eBay). Seems at least 1-2 a day (and sometimes more) forget to put “LLLL” in their listings. This is a lesson which applies to other domaining segments as well — don’t list a 5L.com without putting 5L.com and LLLLL.com in your title, don’t list an LLLL.net without putting LLLL.net in your title, etc.

One last thing, if you’re thinking about starting to sell LLLL.coms on eBay, please do everyone buying and selling on eBay a favor and don’t keyword spam “1 2 3 4 5 Letter LLLL.com Website Domain Name LLLL.net”  — it just makes it harder for buyers to find what they’re actually looking for.

Jeremy on Namepros was kind enough to share with us a first quarter LLLL.com sales report. Jeremy’s LLLL.com sales report includes all reported LLLL.com sales through March 30th and breaks down prices based on letter quality. Reading over the LLLL.com sales report, I see that anti-premiums are priced differently from non-premiums and that the gap appears to be widening. The difference between what the weakest LLLL.coms go for and the better LLLL.coms go for appears to be widening on a percentage basis as well. One thing which is interesting in this LLLL.com sales report that you’ll notice is how much higher average LLLL.com prices are for particular LLLL.com letter patterns versus the minimum wholesale of each of the LLLL.com letter patterns.

average non-premium $16.36

average single premium $21.84

average double premium $29.81

average triple premium $38.11

average quad premium $181.01

What you’re looking at is a compilation of first quarter 2009 LLLL.com sales results with outlier sales (defined in this case to be above $300 for quads and above $100 for everything else) removed. Some interesting findings which are noted:

1. The average non-premium LLLL.com fetches a fair bit less than the average single premium LLLL.com — We know true anti-premium (with 4 bad letters) LLLL.coms sell at a fairly hefty premium versus min wholesale, however that doesn’t appear to hold for all non-premiums, merely the least premium of the least premium.

2. LLLL.com investors value the premium to be placed on a letter quality difference between single premium LLLL.coms (average:  $21.84) and double premium LLLL.coms (average: $29.81) roughly identically to the premium to be placed on the letter quality difference between double premium LLLL.coms and triple premium LLLL.coms (average: $38.11).

3. Quad premium LLLL.coms stand out as an outlier when looking at all other available data on how one should “appraise” LLLL.coms based on letter quality — domainer demand associated with being a “premium LLLL.com” likely has some role in this.

4. As we all know, double and triple premium LLLL.coms account for the large majority of enduser sales outside the quad premium space, yet price differences between non-premium and single premium LLLL.coms versus double and triple premium LLLL.coms aren’t all that significant — the former being about half the latter and being way more expensive than can be explained by enduser demand which is much higher for double and triple premium LLLL.coms.

5. As we all know, LLLL.coms are collectibles — they’re like LLL.coms, only 1 letter longer. One could make a reasonable case that $16 represents the average wholesale price one could expect to receive for a bottom of the barrel LLLL.com and that any deviation from that must be attributed in part to enduser and domainer demand — domainer demand of course being influenced by the likes of letter quality, pronounceability, expiration date, and where it’s registered.

Prices on short domains are much cheaper than they were a year ago. Is now the time to start thinking about buying a short domain or should you wait a bit longer to see what the future holds for short domains and the domain name market as a whole. Some people say “Buy Low, Sell High”, others say “Don’t try to catch a falling knife” — which best describes what one’s next move should be as a short domain investor? Read on for my thoughts on the short domain market.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen LLL.coms fall to new lows — $3000 sales are happening and they certainly aren’t outlier sales anymore. With some decent quality LLL.coms being sold for not a whole lot more than the minimum (eg. kxf.com for $3400), one has to wonder if the market will be able to hold at $3000. I know more than a few domainers who are itching to get back into this market — you can quite easily buy twice as many LLL.coms with your money as you could 6 months ago, however I haven’t yet seen much to suggest prices are done falling.

Another market which has taken quite a hit lately has been the quad premium market — we’re seeing sales in the very low $100s with increasing frequency. It saddens me to see this as I do like the quad premium LLLL.com market, however with things going the way they are, I fear it’s only a matter of time before we start to see sales in the $90s. The very high end LLLL.com market seems to be weathering the storm far better than lower quality LLLL.coms and LLL.coms — Fizy.com was reported sold for $10,000 (enduser sale),  Dumi.com saw $2604 and DGPS.com $6200 recently on Sedo. When it comes to quads, it’s clear that not all quads are equal — no doubt an LLLL.com like DGPS.com is an order of magnitude better than your average LLLL.com (or quad premium LLLL.com for that matter), and that’s what one should be on the lookout for — a domain being priced based on letter quality when it shouldn’t be priced based on letter quality. I know quite a few people have had success doing just that in the CVCV space, where some of these pronounceables are meaningful words in other languages.

I don’t really have time to approach endusers unfortunately, so buying low end LLLL.coms or paying anywhere remotely close to full market value isn’t something I can consider doing during a recession given the unpredictability of where prices may be by the time I get around to selling the names purchased — that said, I still do look around and you never do know when a deal may present itself.

LLLLL.coms (also known as 5L.coms) are the latest short domain market that domainers are talking about. With LLLL.coms in many cases currently hovering around the price of a domain name registration, is it too soon to consider investing in LLLLL.coms? This does to a certain extent go back to that whole short domain debate about whether a short domain should sell for a certain value based solely on it being of a certain length or whether a short domain should need to satisfy metrics which other domains are valued upon, such as domain traffic and the revenue the domain produces. It’s no secret that LLLLL.coms won’t be selling out any time soon, so investing in LLLLL.coms is to a certain extent not like investing in many other short domain markets, in that there isn’t going to be that sense of unavailability. Many LLLLL.coms are highly pronounceable and with pronounceable LLLL.coms costing anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars, a highly pronounceable LLLLL.com for the cost of the domain’s registration fee may not be a bad investment afterall. Read on for more thoughts on this short domain market.

Timing is everything in this business — I have no doubt in my mind prices on many LLLLL.coms will be higher in the future than they are today. That said, is now the right time to invest? We’re in the middle of a recession and prices on short domains have been hit very hard. Can you afford to hold these domains for several years and will these domains appreciate faster than other domain segments (the opportunity cost of your investment in 5L.coms)?

The risks associated with an investment in LLLLL.coms are certainly higher than in most domain segments — there isn’t a whole lot of certainty about anything really. Domainers disagree on which 5L.com letter patterns are best and some trends in the LLLL.com space clearly do not appear to be holding in the 5L.com space (eg. quadruple repeat LLLLL.coms, palindromes, VVVVV, etc really haven’t caught on with domainers). Sticking to strong pronounceable 5L.coms is a must in this space in my opinion –it’s probably best to go after quality rather than quantity, even if that means buying in the aftermarket.

A brand new site has launched called LLLL Sales. LLLL Sales is an LLLL.com sales database. These LLLL.com sales are all organized by date and you can view the LLLL.coms using various different options — LLLL.coms can be organized by letter quality and by letter pattern (eg. CVCV, VCVC). You can even look at LLLL.com sales based on which letter(s) is in a certain letter position(s). With TDVR no longer being updated, it’s great to see Russell from LLLLSales.com step up and offer LLLL domainers a new solution for LLLL sales data. At present, LLLL Sales only covers LLLL.com sales, however I’d love to see it branch out into LLLL.net and even LLLL.org in the future.

Russell let me know a few days ago that he had created a new website for LLLL.com domainers and I just wanted to make a post about it here to let everyone know about it, as I really see it as one of the most valuable LLLL.com resources out there for LLLL.com domainers. Russell has compiled over 20,000 LLLL.com sales since 2005 which are viewable in a variety of ways — one can browse LLLL Sales.com looking at sales by letter quality, letter pattern, price, sales date, and venue. You can even search using a combination of these variables. No doubt this will be a very valuable resource for not only LLLL.com domainers, but anyone who wants more information about what’s going on in the LLLL.com space. Many of us were deeply saddened to see that TDVR is no longer being updated — it’s nice to see we now have a new site to get all the information TDVR provided with sales updated daily.

See: LLLL Sales

Short domains are valued differently than longer domains, keyword domains, traffic domains, and the like. When it comes to short domains, more than anything else, value is placed on how short the domain is. And so LL.coms sell for more than LLL.coms which in turn sell for more than LLLL.coms. But why is this? Certainly a very good LLL.com should be worth more than an LL.com, and the same for LLLL.coms versus LLL.coms? When it comes to end users, that is certainly the case, however other than with end users, short domains tend to almost always sell for more strictly based on how few letters the short domain has.

Will this trend of valuing short domains almost exclusively based on the number of letters they contain continue? Will bad LLL.coms having lost approximately 50% of their value since July and bad LLLL.coms having lost about 90% of their value since last February, it appears that short domains may be starting to be valued based more on their merit rather than merely based on the number of letters they contain. Short domains have always been valued in part because of their collectibile nature (as domain tokens for domainers) and the promise that a short domain could be used for any use (eg. not having the limitations keyword domains have). Are all short domains worth valuing in such a fashion however? What about a domain such as QZX.com — what could that possibly stand or? Many domain name investors are now suggesting that domains such as QZX.com will find end users in China and while that may very well be the cause someday as Internet penetration continues to increase globally, there aren’t a whole lot of Chinese end users interested in short domains at present. Read on for my thoughts on the short domain market and while I think that changes may be coming to the short domain market, short domains have and will continue to play and important role in the domain name industry.

I’ve never understood the logic behind the very low quality LLL.coms, many of which realistically have little more chance of finding an enduser than a single premium LLLL.com and come along with a price 500 times higher — makes no sense to buy a bottom of the barrel LLL.com even if you believe in that market when so much higher quality examples are available for so little more. In the LLLL.com market, the difference between the likelihood of a $10 LLLL.com finding an enduser versus a $500 LLLL.com finding an enduser is huge — of course, one costs 50 times more than the other, so that is to be expected. In the LLL.com space, we have triple premium LLL.coms fetching under 3 times what the worst examples are fetching — just doesn’t make sense in my opinion. Either one is underpriced or one is still overpriced. Seeing as we’re in a recession, I’m siding with the latter rather than the former. Why would anyone buy a terrible LLL.com (unless of course they have a particular enduser(s) in mind)? What other purpose do many of them honestly have other than serving as a domainer collectible and with prices falling the way they are and considering the current economic environment, how many domainers can afford to have such a collectible?

DN Journal rarely reported low quality LLL.coms selling above $10,000 even in the good times when these names were fetching $5000-$8000 in a reseller environment — If I’m dropping $5,000+ on a domain with the intention of reselling it to an enduser, I’d sure be expecting much more than that considering how low the probability of most names (taken on an individual name basis) realizing an enduser sale anytime soon is.

The higher the price you pay, obviously, the higher the price the enduser will need to pay. With weaker LLL.coms already having few endusers and requiring 5-figure sales for even modest returns on investment, something had to give.

Many of the bad LLLL.coms have very little chance of finding an enduser, but at the same time, they cost very little (assuming you don’t make your whole domain portfolio bad LLLL.coms which would then be accompanied by significant renewal costs). Having 100 weaker LLLL.coms sets you back maybe $1000 + $800 or so a year in renewal fees. Having spoken to enough successful LLLL.com domainers and helped many close sales, I know it’s more than possible to cover the renewal costs provided one is willing to proactively reach out to endusers — whether it’s profitable after the opportunity cost is another matter I’m not going to discuss here and would of course require assigning a value to one’s time.

Most small businesses (and even many bigger companies) don’t understand why a domain is worth $XXXX+ when they can just register a different one for $10. It’s ALOT easier to sell an LLLL.com for a few hundred than it is to see 5 figs on a bad LLL.com.

I’ve always been a fan of LLLL.coms ending in I for the reason you’ve mentioned — it just seems like a good alternative for many companies when it’s accompanied by a price 30 to 50 times lower than the LLL.com alternative. I’ve even sold a few LLLL.coms for low hundreds to ordinary folk who just wanted a particular domain for a particular reason — many LLLL.coms have some very niche acronyms desirable by the small segment of the population for whom the acronym has meaning — they’re probably not the kind of buyers that will get you mentioned on DN Journal but the sales do add up and a few hundred here, a few hundred there does go along way towards first breaking even and then turning a profit.

Like LLLL.coms, I think it’s important that LLL.com investors carefully consider what they’re investing in. I don’t buy for one second the argument that domaining is dead or that here isn’t money to be made today — it’s obviously a whole lot more difficult, but it’s more than possible.

JXW.com sold for about $5601 on 2/26 — seems to be a good example of how one could make some good profit if they could acquire a few LLL.coms (or LLLL.coms for that matter) for near minimum wholesale (because, to an English speaking person, they appear to be near minimum wholesale) which really ought not be sold for anywhere near minimum wholesale. I had a fair bit of luck doing that with quad premiums and a couple CVCVs this year — amazing that some domainers wouldn’t even Google search their domains to find out that it’s worth a whole lot more than an ordinary quad premium / CVCV / etc. The great thing about the LLL.com and LLLL.com market is that there are so many names out there, there’s plenty of bargains waiting to be had by people willing to put in the work to identify them.

Regardless of what people may say, the letters in a domain name do matter, especially in a short domain name. We have a concept in the short domain world, which we refer to as letter quality, where certain letters are premium, others semi-premium, and others still, anti-premium. All short domains can be classified as being one of these three. As a general rule, short domains with premium letters sell for more than short domains with semi-premium or anti-premium letters. If we take this short domain analysis one step further, we can see that not only can we analyze a short domain by the number of premium letters it has but also by what letters the short domain has. In the short domain world, not only are their premium and non-premium letters, but there are also letters which are more and less premium in a short domain. For example, the letters “A” and “S” are typically considered to be super-premium letters in a short domain. In the case of LLLL.coms, the first LLLL.coms to cease bing available were LLLL.coms which had a starting letter “A” in the first letter position.

Like anything in the short domain world and in the domain world as a whole, exceptions abound. In this article, we’ll discuss some of those exceptions and that while we can give average prices for short domains having certain letter patterns, we cannot ascertain the value of any particular short domain without carefully analyzing not only which letters it has but also in which order the letters are in and the significance (meaning) that may possibly be attached to the short domain’s letters when so arranged. Traditional domain name metrics such as domain traffic and domain revenue are also important to consider when determining whether a short domain is worth buying.

Haven’t quite gotten through all the letters yet but wanted to post what I’ve looked at so far. Will edit this post once complete with full details. Current data looks at January 2009 sales from A through U by first, second, third, and fourth letter position, at overall letter performance, and considers averages, medians, and geometric means. Sample sizes have been fairly consistent throughout at about 100-200 per letter. I haven’t really had much of a chance to look at the data yet and do intend to spend more time analyzing it another day, however some things do jump out, such as the good performance of the letter U against weaker premiums such as F,G, and H. Another interesting observation is the prices obtained for LLLL.coms containing a G versus those containing an H or F – most domainers consider these to be the 3 weakest premium letters, however this analysis would suggest G is the worst by a relatively large margin. There’s not a lot of information on most of the individual letter positions unfortunately and due to the large price fluctuations that have happened seemingly every month since buyout, it’s difficult to analyze the market over a much longer period of time (which would be necessary to get adequate sample sizes for letter positions). Geometric mean data for sales across all 4 letter positions per letter (the last piece of pricing information provided for each letter) is, in my opinion, the most important information this report offers.

How accurate is this data in a real world setting? Letter quality is correlated to a relatively large extent with prices. It certainly isn’t the only important thing to consider, however if we look at the 10 lowest reported premium LLLL.com sales in January 2009, it’s unsurprising the we find 7 out of 10 contain at least an F, G, or H. With 17 premium letters, we’d expect to find on average only 2-3 LLLL.coms containing an F,G, or H in the lowest 10 reported LLLL.com sales if all premium letters were of equal value. This is, of course, not what we find here.

dhsf.com $130.00
tbhf.com $139.00
bfen.com $140.00
mfgh.com $140.00
fmoo.com $151.00
TLOH.com $152.50
EINP.com $154.00
esgt.com $155.00
BCBH.com $155.37
GTNB.com $159.50

Letter A:

First Position Sales: $14957.01
Average: $679.86
Geometric mean: $203.55
Median: $159.25
Sample size: 22

Second Position Sales: $23,519.51
Average: $940.78
Geometric mean: $127.50
Median: $100.00
Sample size: 25

Third Position Sales: $5,540.72
Average: $221.63
Geometric mean: $81.67
Median: $54.00
Sample size: 25

Fourth Position Sales: $16,493.95
Average: $687.25
Geometric mean: $178.71
Median: $146.00
Sample size: 24

Overall geometric mean for the Letter A, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $137.52
Sample size: 96

Letter B:

First Position Sales: $15,733.57
Average: $425.23
Geometric mean: $68.95
Median: $54.00
Sample size: 37

Second Position Sales: $4,098.15
Average: $151.78
Geometric mean: $40.31
Median: $31.00
Sample size: 27

Third Position Sales: $22,538.69
Average: $804.95
Geometric mean: $84.46
Median: $42.00
Sample size: 28

Fourth Position Sales: $1,014.46
Average: $44.11
Geometric mean: $22.91
Median: $16.00
Sample size: 23

Overall geometric mean for the Letter B, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $51.23
Sample size: 115

Letter C:

First Position Sales: $11,064.29
Average: $481.06
Geometric mean: $99.82
Median: $69.00
Sample size: 23

Second Position Sales: $2,516.48
Average: $83.88
Geometric mean: $36.98
Median: $29.61
Sample size: 30

Third Position Sales: $6,065.64
Average: $195.67
Geometric mean: $47.42
Median: $29.95
Sample size: 31

Fourth Position Sales: $18,320.46
Average: $872.40
Geometric mean: $117.85
Median: $59.00
Sample size: 21

Overall geometric mean for the Letter C, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $62.37
Sample size: 105

Letter D:

First Position Sales: $6,974.10
Average: $290.59
Geometric mean: $75.18
Median: $45.00
Sample size: 24

Second Position Sales: $4,480.11
Average: $112.00
Geometric mean: $36.17
Median: $29.53
Sample size: 40

Third Position Sales: $7,316.90
Average: $332.59
Geometric mean: $67.63
Median: $36.50
Sample size: 22

Fourth Position Sales: $2,320.51
Average: $92.82
Geometric mean: $39.44
Median: $34.00
Sample size: 25

Overall geometric mean for the Letter D, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $48.91
Sample size: 111

Letter E:

First Position Sales: $18,330.60
Average: $539.14
Geometric mean: $100.75
Median: $88.50
Sample size: 34

Second Position Sales: $23,111.46
Average: $624.63
Geometric mean: $125.58
Median: $70.00
Sample size: 37

Third Position Sales: $8,429.56
Average: $351.23
Geometric mean: $84.62
Median: $51.00
Sample size: 24

Fourth Position Sales: $39,415.24
Average: $1065.28
Geometric mean: $132.48
Median: $41.00
Sample size: 37

Overall geometric mean for the Letter E, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $112.10
Sample size: 132

Letter F:

First Position Sales: $7,736.36
Average: $309.45
Geometric mean: $81.23
Median: $69.00
Sample size: 25

Second Position Sales: $1,169.35
Average: $43.31
Geometric mean: $28.87
Median: $25.00
Sample size: 27

Third Position Sales: $16,866.16
Average: $432.47
Geometric mean: $49.87
Median: $29.00
Sample size: 39

Fourth Position Sales: $4,531.58
Average: $96.42
Geometric mean: $33.61
Median: $22.00
Sample size: 47

Overall geometric mean for the Letter F, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $42.79
Sample size: 138

Letter G:

First Position Sales: $14,779.73
Average: $547.40
Geometric mean: $45.93
Median: $25.25
Sample size: 27

Second Position Sales: $1,842.32
Average: $49.79
Geometric mean: $24.06
Median: $17.00
Sample size: 37

Third Position Sales: $5,566.80
Average: $139.17
Geometric mean: $28.42
Median: $18.65
Sample size: 40

Fourth Position Sales: $5,049.91
Average: $144.28
Geometric mean: $31.48
Median: $20.00
Sample size: 35

Overall geometric mean for the Letter G, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $30.62
Sample size: 139

Letter H:

First Position Sales: $13,893.69
Average: $385.94
Geometric mean: $61.92
Median: $30.00
Sample size: 36

Second Position Sales: $1,379.20
Average: $47.56
Geometric mean: $28.82
Median: $28.55
Sample size: 29

Third Position Sales: $4,308.43
Average: $179.52
Geometric mean: $45.90
Median: $29.76
Sample size: 24

Fourth Position Sales: $3,738.06
Average: $79.53
Geometric mean: $38.52
Median: $30.00
Sample size: 47

Overall geometric mean for the Letter H, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $42.35
Sample size: 136

Letter I:

First Position Sales: $13,565.45
Average: $467.77
Geometric mean: $85.79
Median: $43.98
Sample size: 29

Second Position Sales: $16,224.29
Average: $450.67
Geometric mean: $78.31
Median: $40.00
Sample size: 36

Third Position Sales: $22,868.03
Average: $618.05
Geometric mean: $125.36
Median: $79.00
Sample size: 37

Fourth Position Sales: $15,517.36**
Average: $310.35
Geometric mean: $57.98
Median: $41.00
Sample size: 50

Overall geometric mean for the Letter I, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $80.94
Sample size: 152

Letter J:

First Position Sales: $2,602.06
Average: $72.28
Geometric mean: $33.09
Median: $26.75
Sample size: 36

Second Position Sales: $5,375.01
Average: $122.16
Geometric mean: $29.32
Median: $20.00
Sample size: 44

Third Position Sales: $1,933.96
Average: $37.92
Geometric mean: $23.91
Median: $21.81
Sample size: 51

Fourth Position Sales: $1,400.45
Average: $38.90
Geometric mean: $24.30
Median: $21.94
Sample size: 36

Overall geometric mean for the Letter J, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $27.16
Sample size: 167

Letter K:

First Position Sales: $7,778.41
Average: $288.09
Geometric mean: $30.17
Median: $16.66
Sample size: 27

Second Position Sales: $1,139.54
Average: $35.61
Geometric mean: $22.23
Median: $20.25
Sample size: 32

Third Position Sales: $8,210.48
Average: $273.68
Geometric mean: $26.70
Median: $17.65
Sample size: 30

Fourth Position Sales: $1,686.55
Average: $54.40
Geometric mean: $21.35
Median: $18.00
Sample size: 31

Overall geometric mean for the Letter K, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $24.67
Sample size: 120

Letter L:

First Position Sales: $15,336.38
Average: $547.73
Geometric mean: $65.52
Median: $36.00
Sample size: 28

Second Position Sales: $5,783.42
Average: $148.29
Geometric mean: $50.89
Median: $41.00
Sample size: 39

Third Position Sales: $6,680.10
Average: $215.49
Geometric mean: $63.31
Median: $59.00
Sample size: 31

Fourth Position Sales: $9,293.07
Average: $331.90
Geometric mean: $57.53
Median: $41.45
Sample size: 28

Overall geometric mean for the Letter L, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $58.37
Sample size: 126

Letter M:

First Position Sales: $15,326.69
Average: $567.66
Geometric mean: $112.41
Median: $76.00
Sample size: 27

Second Position Sales: $16,127.41
Average: $460.78
Geometric mean: $94.94
Median: $90.00
Sample size: 35

Third Position Sales: $6,630.65
Average: $228.64
Geometric mean: $66.58
Median: $50.00
Sample size: 29

Fourth Position Sales: $2,430.40
Average: $93.48
Geometric mean: $34.40
Median: $25.50
Sample size: 26

Overall geometric mean for the Letter M, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $72.14
Sample size: 117

Letter N:

First Position Sales: $6,415.55
Average: $188.69
Geometric mean: $39.00
Median: $25.15
Sample size: 34

Second Position Sales: $13,512.89
Average: $435.90
Geometric mean: $78.29
Median: $54.00
Sample size: 31

Third Position Sales: $9,025.56
Average: $282.05
Geometric mean: $78.95
Median: $111.50
Sample size: 32

Fourth Position Sales: $7,076.26
Average: $307.66
Geometric mean: $63.78
Median: $41.00
Sample size: 23

Overall geometric mean for the Letter N, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $61.92
Sample size: 120

Letter O:

First Position Sales: $4,338.47
Average: $105.82
Geometric mean: $41.67
Median: $30.00
Sample size: 41

Second Position Sales: $45,945.54**
Average: $1392.29
Geometric mean: $200.95
Median: $180.00
Sample size: 33

Third Position Sales: $10,633.52
Average: $425.34
Geometric mean: $94.09
Median: $97.00
Sample size: 25

Fourth Position Sales: $17,665.77
Average: $410.83
Geometric mean: $65.95
Median: $31.00
Sample size: 43

Overall geometric mean for the Letter O, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $79.66
Sample size: 142

Letter P:

First Position Sales: $12,109.81
Average: $484.39
Geometric mean: $62.76
Median: $41.00
Sample size: 25

Second Position Sales: $2,789.04
Average: $84.52
Geometric mean: $33.56
Median: $20.50
Sample size: 33

Third Position Sales: $16,447.77
Average: $548.26
Geometric mean: $46.79
Median: $28.95
Sample size: 30

Fourth Position Sales: $4,223.17
Average: $183.62
Geometric mean: $59.14
Median: $55.00
Sample size: 23

Overall geometric mean for the Letter P, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $47.54
Sample size: 111

Letter Q:

First Position Sales: $1,655.69
Average: $24.71
Geometric mean: $16.74
Median: $17.40
Sample size: 67

Second Position Sales: $1,319.48
Average: $24.43
Geometric mean: $17.56
Median: $16.63
Sample size: 54

Third Position Sales: $3,260.67
Average: $54.34
Geometric mean: $18.25
Median: $14.74
Sample size: 60

Fourth Position Sales: $2,535.03
Average: $53.94
Geometric mean: $21.21
Median: $17.10
Sample size: 47

Overall geometric mean for the Letter Q, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $18.19
Sample size: 228

Letter R:

First Position Sales: $7,100.90
Average: $208.85
Geometric mean: $36.42
Median: $28.78
Sample size: 34

Second Position Sales: $10,548.63
Average: $301.39
Geometric mean: $42.10
Median: $20.40
Sample size: 35

Third Position Sales: $13,530.17
Average: $520.39
Geometric mean: $77.59
Median: $38.00
Sample size: 26

Fourth Position Sales: $4,157.15
Average: $129.91
Geometric mean: $44.94
Median: $27.75
Sample size: 32

Overall geometric mean for the Letter R, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $46.66
Sample size: 127

Letter S

First Position Sales: $10,130.81
Average: $440.47
Geometric mean: $86.87
Median: $56.55
Sample size: 23

Second Position Sales: $2,305.13
Average: $115.26
Geometric mean: $48.48
Median: $38.00
Sample size: 20

Third Position Sales: $18,259.08
Average: $702.27
Geometric mean: $133.47
Median: $120.50
Sample size: 26

Fourth Position Sales: $28,255.64
Average: $1130.23
Geometric mean: $157.60
Median: $110.00
Sample size: 25

Overall geometric mean for the Letter S, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $101.24
Sample size: 94

Letter T

First Position Sales: $13,596.00
Average: $367.46
Geometric mean: $73.19
Median: $51.00
Sample size: 37

Second Position Sales: $18,696.00
Average: $603.10
Geometric mean: $99.85
Median: $61.00
Sample size: 31

Third Position Sales: $17,697.22
Average: $632.04
Geometric mean: $56.49
Median: $30.51
Sample size: 28

Fourth Position Sales: $5,223.23
Average: $174.11
Geometric mean: $57.03
Median: $37.50
Sample size: 30

Overall geometric mean for the Letter T, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $70.28
Sample size: 126

Letter U

First Position Sales: $1,792.25
Average: $56.01
Geometric mean: $28.54
Median: $30.51
Sample size: 32

Second Position Sales: $25,661.86
Average: $733.20
Geometric mean: $136.54
Median: $69.00
Sample size: 35

Third Position Sales: $12,260.82**
Average: $350.31
Geometric mean: $44.06
Median: $34.10
Sample size: 35

Fourth Position Sales: $29,619.98
Average: $617.08
Geometric mean: $66.84
Median: $40.50
Sample size: 48

Overall geometric mean for the Letter U, considering each occurence

in positions 1 through 4 as a separate event:
Geometric mean: $59.75
Sample size: 150
** Only 1 sale was reported above $10,000 — YOUI.com sold for

$14,100 in January and was treated as a $10,000 sale so as to not

alter averages reported too much. Future analysis will also use a $10,000 cap to avoid very large enduser sales from significantly distorting findings, while still acknowledging their presence. Enduser and pronounceable sales significantly distort averages (which I do not recommend be used to make buying/selling decisions) and distort to a much lesser extent the median and geometric mean. Letters A/E/I/O/U are distorted a bit more in the 2nd and 4th position due to their role in pronounceable LLLL.coms (most notably, CVCVs).

I’m not a big fan of making predictions on where the market is going based on positive sales results for a day or two, however the LLLL.com market has been chugging along rather well in this New Year.

The minimum wholesale was $2.00 in October, I feel confident suggesting it’s approximately $6.00 today, however I’ll be sure to post some results confirming those findings later this month. Even if we tack on a premium (which we should) to account for renewal, we’re still looking at a real appreciation of about 40% since October at the very low end, meaning anyone who bought in during October or November 2008 is sitting on a nice profit at present.

Quality LLLL.com sales continue to impress — TTBC.com selling for $6800 earlier this week, HIBE.com $4000, NOIL.com fetching $3805, MAFA.com $3105, AJRA.com $3000, and DULE.com $3000.

I’ve always been a fan of quality triple premium LLLL.coms (as well as lower letter quality, but overall, higher quality LLLL.coms), and we saw LMKT.com fetch $1500 this week. I know a few members on the domain name forums have had quite a bit of success in this market and it continues to impress. Considering how cheap many of the names in the triple premium segment are to purchase in a reseller environment, it does seem like a good place to invest for anyone willing to proactively approach endusers. Even the weakest of LLLL.coms are rarely fetching under $10 anymore unless they’re near expiry — something that was unthinkable for many meer months ago when thought they’d be available for handreg– some were speculating that as little as 3 months ago, so the market’s rebound certainly is welcomed.

What does 2009 hold for LLLL.coms and domains in general? Who knows. What I do know is that if you have no intention of holding your domains long term, now is the time to put a game plan together. There’s no reason not to cash in on the optimism many will have with a new administration in the White House. I’m guessing we’ll see the large majority of the domaining market improve at least temporarily.

Disclaimer: That was intended to be political — I don’t even live in the USA.

What I am suggesting though is that if the mainstream media continues to “worship” Obama, we might very well see more domainers willing to open their wallets a bit more, paying more for, and buying more domains. An increase in demand coupled with an always shrinking supply is never a bad thing

As I’ve said on many occasions, I really do see the LLLL.com market as several very distinct markets, my opinion on the market being explained here and here. It’s irrational to compare some LLLL.com segments to others, much as it’s irrational to compare stronger dictionary words to weaker dictionary words. Would any domainer worth their salt ask a question like “How is the dictionary domain market doing at present?” What sense does a question like that make? If obscure dictionary words have decreased in value, does that necessarily mean category killers have or will?

There exists at least some correlation in most of the domaining segments — if you really want to find a correlation, you can probably find one. Are quad premium LLLL.coms sales positively correlated with lower end LLLL.com sales — that is, does an increase in one tend to bring about and increase in the other and vice-versa? The domaining sector as a whole had a pretty terrible year in 2008 — hard to say in many cases what is correlated and what was merely the result of poor performance in the domaining sector. Seeing as most domains (and stocks) are selling for less today than they were a year ago, does that mean they’re all positively correlated? Of course not. The LLLL.com market is a relatively new market, there really isn’t a whole lot of data to go on, and the recession the USA has been in for the past year represents more than half the time the LLLL.com market has had significant interest from speculators.

Because of the diversity of the LLLL.com market, analyzing the entire market’s performance as a whole is difficult — the minimum wholesale and the minimum wholesale of any LLLL.com segment just doesn’t pain a complete picture, nor does the median, and even percentiles which I like to use still have their flaws (eg. more lwo end LLLL.com sales one month, more enduser sales one month,…). In many ways, it’s a very difficult market to follow, and that probably helps explain why there exist so many differing opoinions on where the market is heading.

I would argue that there exists at least some correlation between the weakest of LLLL.coms and LLLL.coms at least up to the quad premium level — we can see that both throughout the rises and falls, the markets tend to behave in quite a similar fashion. It’s difficult in many cases to make out what is the result of a positive correlation between the 2 markets and what is the result of the huge amount of speculative hype which built up from the time of the LLLL.com buyout in November 2007 leading up top the peak in most LLLL.com segments in February 2008. As I’ve mentioned a few times now, higher quality pronounceable LLLL.coms were continuing to rise in value well into March, and many of these segments have performed much better than low end LLLL.coms over the past few months. I don’t see a lot in common between the low end LLLL.coms and the pronounceable/rare LLLL.coms which have been registered in most cases for 5+ years. These domains have a much longer history of being desired and had value even before the LLLL.com buyout came about.

In no way am I saying that a sudden influx of available for handreg LLLL.coms wouldn’t affect the value of higher quality LLLL.coms — that I certainly could see happening in the unlikely event that LLLL.coms became readily available for regfee. What I am saying though is that I just don’t see how much of a correlation exists between the 2 very different weak LLLL.com and highest quality LLLL.com markets other than that. Low end LLLL.coms have a renewal premium which must be factored into every purchase and is something that is constantly eating away at their value. As/If LLLL.com prices can rise substantially over the current levels, I think the low end LLLL.coms will do just fine. At an $8 minimum wholesale (on a newly registered LLLL.com), in example, renewal accounts for a full 100% of the domain’s value. At $16, renewal accounts for 50%, at $32, 25%, etc — not hard to see that if LLLL.com prices are able to once again get above $30 or so, renewal will most likely become a non-factor.

It’s always hard to say what will happen short term — most often, predicting what will happen short term is nothing more than an educated guess. As I’ve said on many occasions, I do think the LLLL.com market has good long term fundamentals. Back around March 2008, I predicted that we’d see LLLL.coms fall in price as we neared renewal time and that they’d likely begin to recovered in January 2009 — prices most certainly did fall substantially (much more than I expected) between March and November 2008, and what we’ve seen so far has been a small or large recovery, depending on if you’re looking at it from the perspective of how much lower prices remain under what they were at in February 2008 or based on the ROI one would have received had they bought LLLL.coms in October 2008 and sold them now in January 2009. The minimum wholesale I reported in November 2008 was up a full 100% from what I reported in October 2008 — even accounting for what would need to be added to sales results to properly compensate for the renewal premium (approx 67 cents per month), we’d still be looking at prices being up at the minimum wholesale by about 50% over the course of one month — certainly not such a small number.

I’m not a big fan of looking at where prices are today and comparing them to where they have been in the past. We can’t change the past, however we can plan on how we’re going to make a profit tomorrow. If you buy 100 shares of a stock at $100, 10,000 shares of the stock at $1 (both $10,000 spent at the minimum and at the peak), and the stock bounces back to $10, you’ve spent $20,000 and have shares valued at $101,000 — or a profit of of $81,000. The price doesn’t ever have to go back to that $55 minimum wholesale I reported in February of 2008 for LLLL domainers to make a profit — it just has to go up in real terms (after the renewal premium has been factored in).

LLLL.coms, LLLL.nets, other LLLL domains — where is the future of LLLL’s? Will LLLL domains make great long term investments? Will end user demand increase in the future as internet penetration increases? How will higher quality LLLL’s compare to lower quality LLLL’s? Renewal fees currently account for a large portion of the value of most LLLL’s — can we expect that to change in the future? I guess what I’m trying to say is can we expect LLLL’s to follow the path of LLL domains?

This question gets asked quite often on domain name forums by newer members who I guess think more experienced members have all the answers. Now it’s impossible to say with certainty what will happen to LLLL.coms, however I’ll elaborate more in this post about how I see LLLL.coms and how I think we need to look at LLLL.coms to determine whether they deserve to have a place in our domain name portfolio.

First things first, while LLLL.com is a nice domainer term which means 4 letter .com, the similarities between many of the four letter domains end there. Have you ever heard a new domainer ask what the future was for dictionary domains? How much is there really  in common between a category killer like Stocks.com and a much more obscure dictionary word, such as Megalomaniac.com? Would prices falling on dictionary domains of comparable quality to Megalomaniac.com necessarily impact category killers like Stocks.com? Of course not. One is in a completely different league than the other.

That’s the way I see the LLLL.com market to a certain extent — the domain I’m blogging this on is a 4 letter .com, it also received upwards of 3000 uniques/month between development/promotion undertaken by the previous owner and direct navigation traffic. Is there much in common with an ordinary LLLL.com? Other than being 4 letters in length, I would say no. Something like CASH.com, LOVE.com, DATE.com, FISH.com, etc (yes I deliberately didn’t mention adult terms) is of obvious value — not because it has 4 letters, rather because they all receive plenty of traffic, would make plenty of revenue if parked, and really are category killer domains which someone could easily create a business around (eg. Hotels.com).

I thought it was quite funny earlier this year when Pizza.com was reported sold and some less experienced domainers went on a pizza domain buying binge. Some other pizza domains are of course good — say, CheesePizza.com, Pizzeria.com, or Pizzas.com, however these weren’t what people were buying, rather, they were buying whatever-pizza-domain-I-can-still-get-for-regfee.com. Any chance of getting an enduser on that? Now relating that to LLLL.coms, what’s there in common between a name like my LLLL.com and a name like XZQJ.com? One receives highly targeted traffic, the other doesn’t. One has meaning, the other doesn’t.

I often talk about LLLL.coms and how I see them as great long term investments — I never expected them to rocket up as fast as they did, nor do I expect many people did, otherwise we’d have all been taking out huge loans and buying as many as we could possibly afford back when they were regfee. What happened afterwards was a market correction, one which despite taking many by surprise, was justified. While I do sometimes buy domains hoping to flip them and I won’t deny having flipped more domains than most in 2008, that’s hardly why I initially invested in short domains. I saw an opportunity, I capitalized on that opportunity. Too many domainers nowadays are just looking for a quick buck. I’ve said this many times lately because it really is what I’ve been seeing. What’s wrong with holding a domain for a few years if necessary to see the return you want? When I say this, by no means am I encouraging anyone to invest or continue to invest (through renewal fees) in domains you don’t believe in hoping one day they’ll magically pay off — that’s not what I’m suggesting here, rather, what I’m suggesting is that you carefully look at the short domains (and the same can be said about other domains) you’ve picked up over the years and carefully evaluate what you should keep, what you should sell, and what you should let drop (eg. what’s not worth taking the time to try and sell).

We’re all different, we all have different goals, we’ll all have different opinions on what’s worth dropping and what’s worth keeping. I’m slowly building out my portfolio more towards domains which are either development friendly or make money on their own. Why pay $7900 for an LLL.com when I could buy a domain like this one with that money and develop it into a website which will eventually make me money? But development takes time you say? So does sitting on a forum chatting for hours, however many of us  seem to find plenty of time to do that too. I like talking about domains and spend at least a couple hours a day on Namepros talking about domains — what better way to make some money off that time spent on Namepros than to put up a few domain blogs discussing what I spend my time talking about on Namepros in greater detail than I originally did on Namepros?

Elliot had a great post on Elliot’s Blog awhile back (sorry, couldn’t find the exact post link, been awhile since I read it) about how he preferred blogging versus contributing in forums. It made a lot of sense to me — a blog is forever. People can and will come across this post on search engines, months, maybe even years after it’s been written. There are so many posts on domain name forums that even quality posts are often soon forgotten. Now I like Namepros and won’t be abandoning it, however Elliot’s post on this topic did get me thinking about how I could create a more lasting contribution.

Now before I stray too much off topic, I just wanted to finish talking about how radically different the highest quality LLLL.coms are from the lowest quality ones. An LLLL.com which receives traffic, produces revenue, and is pronounceable is, in many cases, almost as good as a dictionary word — one will find that many of the strongest pronounceable LLLL.coms are indeed dictionary words in one language or another. It’s not usually all that hard to tell… I don’t speak Spanish myself, however after coming across the relatively large number of searches being reported on Wordtracker and Keyword Discovery for DATO.com, a domain I was considering purchasing earlier this year, I decided to do some more research into the name. This seems to be the case with a lot of the stronger pronounceable LLLL.coms which are receiving traffic — they mean something to somebody. In the case of DATO.com, I soon found out it meant “data” in Spanish — pretty good name considering how expensive data recovery services are. So what do we consider this as — a dictionary word, a “good” LLLL.com? If we consider this to merely be a “good” LLLL.com, then there are a lot of good LLLL.coms out there — at least about 1/4 of premium CVCVs I’ve looked into have very significant meaning which no doubt underlies their desirability.

The same can be said about other extremely strong LLLL.com pronounceables — consider the “OO” letter pattern extremely popular in CVVC-type pronounceable LLLL.coms… BOOM, DOOM, ROOM, ZOOM, COOL, FOOL, POOL, TOOL, BOOT, FOOT, LOOT, MOOT, SOOT, FOOD, GOOD, WOOD, …The “OO” letter pattern happens to be extremely popular and pronounceable in the English language, perhaps unsurprisingly leading to it’s high level of desirability amongst endusers. FOOM.com sold earlier this year to an enduser for $21,000, NOOL.com for $2389, and WOOK.com sold recently for $10,000. YOOR.com saw $5100, MOOT.com saw $45000, GOOT.com saw $2100, and several others saw sales well above reseller value in the sub-$1000 range, undoubtedly more still selling unreported in 2008.

Too many domainers want someone to feed them on a silver platter a risk-free way to invest in domains — not going to happen. When I talk about intelligently investing in LLLL.coms, this would be an example of it. Recognize that CVVCs with an “OO” tend to sell for more than CVVCs with other repeat vowels or other different vowels. Even if you take my advice here on CVVCs with an “OO” double repeat vowel pattern, it’s still useless if we throw common sense out the window. In this case, the value of the “OO” pattern is because it generally increases pronounceability. We all know endusers like prounounceable domains — whether we look at dictionary words, company names, or even people’s birth names, it should be obvious that pronounceable names tend to be encountered far more than unpronounceable or difficult to pronounce names. So when we apply our “OO” double repeat vowel research to the LLLL.com market, we’re not only looking for CVVC-type LLLL.coms which have an “OO” double repeat vowel letter pattern, rather, we’re looking for pronounceable CVVC-type LLLL.coms which have an “OO” double repeat vowel pattern.

You’d have to try awfully hard to make XOOQ.com pronounceable in the English language — this is not the kind of domain which should see a premium because it has an “OO” pattern. Funny enough, many domainers continue to pay premiums in many LLLL.com segments in instances such as this — perhaps nowhere is this more prevalent than in the CVCV space. Like a CVVC-type LLLL.com with an “OO” double repeat vowel letter pattern, a CVCV (or VCVC, or insert other pronounceable LLLL.com category here) is popular with endusers because it’s pronounceable and/or otherwise meaningful to them. An enduser is not going to pay you more for your domain because it follows a CVCV pattern instead of a VCVC pattern — that’s something only us domainers seem interested in doing.

An enduser wants whatever he wants for whatever reason he wants it. We know a few reasons why endusers want domains — pronounceability tends to fit into many of the reasons and I’ve already discussed that above and elsewhere on this blog. If a CVCV isn’t pronounceable and doesn’t have significant meaning to someone out there, chances are there isn’t an enduser who’s going to come begging you to sell it to them. I’m surprised there aren’t more mathematicians/statisticians in the domaining world — it really is a numbers game. If you do some research on a domain and there appear to be X potential endusers for the domain, another domain having X-Y potential endusers, why would you ever choose to go with the domain having X-Y unless the endusers in that case are either a) much more likely to buy the domain or b) much more likely that if they’re interested in purchasing the domain that they’ll pay a large sum of money for it?

Domaining is a numbers game

Probability of an enduser sale times expected payout from that enduser sale sums up what a domain should be worth for the purposes of targeting an enduser in a perfect world. There are of course plenty of other things we could do with a domain (like resell to silly domainers who might pay ridiculous prices which defy logic), we could of course develop the domain, we might have reason to believe the domain will be of more value in the future — all valid reasons we might be willing to pay more for a domain than we otherwise should. So what am I saying here? As I always say, quality is important, however it’s important we carefully consider what quality means. An LLLL.com is not necessarily of high quality because it’s a quad premium, a VCCV, VCVC, CVVC, CVCV. While these individual segments have more quality domains “on average” than other LLLL.com segments, they are by no means the only quality LLLL.coms, nor are they all good examples of what quality LLLL.coms are. Just because a domain fits a VCCV, VCVC, CVVC, or CVCV pattern does not make it valuable. It might sell for a lot to another domainer — we’ve seen that a lot recently and we’ve seen how quickly that pyramid scheme can come toppling down. There are plenty of good LLLL.coms out there, plenty of good LLLL.coms that aren’t all that expensive and have a very reasonable chance of one day landing an enduser. It takes time to find them, it takes research to make sure they’re a good value at the prices they’re being offered at. Pretty much any CVCV has a much greater chance of landing an enduser than a buyout LLLL.com, however it also comes with a price tag generally between 100 and 500 times as high. Buyout domains are actually pretty decent for finding endusers granted  you can buy so many of them for such a small amount of money — again, don’t forget to account for all costs associated with purchasing and owning the domains. In the case of buyout LLLL.coms, the renewal fees happen to eat up the large majority, if not all of the profits most people make from reselling buyout LLLL.coms to endusers.

We can choose to try and make things simpler than they really are, we can lie to ourselves thinking we have the necessary skill to invest in markets we don’t, we can lie to ourselves and others about how high our losses really are, about how we don’t care about the losses we’ve suffered because we’re just going to wait it out or because we would have lost just as much if we’d have put our money in the stock market. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, it doesn’t change the facts. If we want to play stupid, the LLLL.com market is one of the easiest markets to invest in. Find any CVCV under a couple hundred bucks and no matter how ugly it is, rest assured that some domainer will pay more for it. Find any quad premium under $100 — again, no matter how ugly, and you can rest assured a domainer will be happy to take it off your hands at a profit. Find an LLL.com under $2500 — you’re probably in a good position to make a decent profit so long as you can get it sold quickly. Domaining can be easy, domaining can be hard. We can make it easy, however that leaves so much money on the table… Why limit yourself to only buying at prices below the established minimums? Don’t know the LLLL.com market enough to do it any differently? Why not put in the time to better understand the differences between the different LLLL.com and other short domain name market segments so that you can make more intelligent short domain name investment decisions? Why strictly depend on what others say? Why not go out there and collect your own research?

You’ll never know who’s being honest, who’s a bit biased, and who’s outright full of it if you don’t have something to compare it to. There’s no reason anyone can’t put in the time to become much better at recognizing opportunities. As we’ve seen lately, when it hits the fan, it’s usually the stuff at the very bottom which gets hit worst. In part because the stuff at the bottom (in the case of LLLL.com, LLLL.net, 5L.com, and other weaker short domain segments) have a renewal fee which substantially increases the cost of long term ownership and in part because a large portion of these weaker short domains are held by domainers who aren’t so sure about the markets they invest in and like to stay near reported minimums thinking it reduces their risk. When the minimum starts to fall, these type of investors are the kind most likely to panic. There’s nothing wrong with necessarily selling under what’s believed to be the minimum and might indeed be necessary or the smart move to make in a falling market, however more often than not this move is being made by people who seem to have used little more rationale than a flip of a coin to decide how to move forward with their domain name investments. Buying good domains below established minimums is a good idea. Buying bad domains below established minimums isn’t necessarily so, especially in a falling market.

We need to rethink what qualifies as a weak domain. Weak LLLL.com to me means not only a buyout LLLL.com but also a vanity LLLL.com in the VCCV, VCVC, CVVC, and CVCV segments where the value of the domain in question seems to primarily be derived from a general understanding that all domains in those particular segments are worth a certain amount of money than from anything else. We’ve seen this behavior in the LLL.com space (non-premium versus premium LLL.com pricing), we’ve seen this behavior in the CCC.com space (eg. NNL.com versus NLN.com pricing). It works great for price guides to give information in such a way — If I say that on average an ordinary LLL.com goes for less than a premium LLL.com, that a single premium LLLL.com on average goes for less than a quad premium LLLL.com, or that an NLN.com goes for less than an NNL.com, those are of course *usually* true statements . The problem arises when we try to apply what holds true in many instances and apply that to all instances. You just can’t do that and if you do choose to do that, expect to get burnt eventually. Nowhere other than in the short domain world am I aware of such simplistic thinking going on. Who would ever ask what a dictionary words RPM was, how much traffic it was receiving, and make a judgement call about buying the domain based solely on that without knowing anything else about the domain? Unless you’re getting a really good deal (low revenue multiple, or in the short domain space, a price well under the currently accepted minimum wholesale), this just isn’t a viable strategy.

A person asked on Namepros about what members there thought about the future of LLLL.coms — that’s what inspired this post. What I wrote there was relatively similar to what I’ve written here, albeit 3000 words less. LLLL.coms can be classified into many different categories, I split them below into where I see them fitting “on average” based on how safe of investments I see them as being. It’s assumed you’re paying the same percentage of fair market value regardless of what segment you choose to invest in. This is not necessarily representative of what is and what isn’t a good investment if you’re purchasing at a price well under or well above likely reseller value.

1. Four letter dictionary words or other 4 letter domains producing revenue/receiving traffic

2. highest quality pronounceable LLLL.coms, brandables + acronyms, generally registered 5-15 years ago

3. higher quality LLLL.coms regged 3-6 years ago (encompassing weaker pronounceables + quad premiums)

4. buyout domains

The strongest domains were registered a long time ago. You’re not finding many of those stronger CVVC-type LLLL.coms I mentioned in this post registered around buyout time, nor are you finding other strong pronounceable LLLL.coms as having been registered in the months leading up to the November 2nd, 2007 buyout unless they were the result of a drop. Many of these stronger LLLL.coms are upwards of a decade old — these are domains that people chose to purchase when bad LLL.coms could still be had for regfee, these are domains which often receive more traffic, more revenue, and appear to have more potential endusers than weaker LLL.coms.

As with any domain investment, having a plan about how you’re going to go about monetizing what you’ve decided to purchase is necessary. For some of us, that plan may be development, others it will be resale to other domainers, and others still it will be resale to endusers, or otherwise monetizing the traffic received. No strategy is inherently wrong, no strategy is unworkable. Some strategies may be more difficult for some people than others… Blogging is hard for some people, other people struggle with web design, some people aren’t good at selling to endusers,…. We all have our strengths and weaknesses — it’s important to consider that when going about buying domains.

YP.com was reported yesterday on Namepros as having sold for $3,850,000 by an astute member who came across an SEC filing. This has been discussed on many domain name blogs already (see Domaining.com) while I was sleeping, so I won’t repeat what’s already out there. It’s a good sale for the LL.com market and one which continues to show that even in tough times there are companies out there buying domains for large amounts of money.

There’s of course no guarantee we’ll see another sale like this again anytime soon, however when people sometimes wonder why LL.coms, LLL.coms, LLLL.coms, and other short domains have the value they do, it’s important to consider the very small chance they might end up with a “big enduser”, this one being incredibly huge and unlikely to be repeated anytime soon, however we do see smaller sales in the $10,000-$100,000 on LLL.coms and LLLL.coms every so often. The chance is extremely small in most cases, however one can of course greatly increase their chances by holding a large number of domains or looking for short domains which you believe to have better than average odds of finding an enduser (eg. not buyout LLLL.coms or minimum wholesale LLL.coms).

I know a few people sitting on 1000+ LLLL.coms and most have sold between 1 and 10 domains to endusers who approached them over the past year (more of course if they proactively reached out, however this would require assigning a value to the time they’re spending doing this) — predictably, those with stronger LLLL.coms (CVCVs and other pronounceable LLLL.coms registered a decade ago) have been having much better results than those with largely weaker LLLL.coms (buyout LLLL.coms). Renewal fees do of course need to be subtracted from profits earned and is something especially important for bulk LLLL.com owners to consider — 1000 LLLL.coms is an $8000/year liability. If you sold 10 LLLL.coms to endusers for an average of $1000/per, you’re only up $2000, minus your time over the year (not factoring what was paid for the LLLL.coms — that’s obviously sunk and irrelevant as to whether the LLLL.coms should be kept or not at this point).

As I’ve said many times on this blog and on domain name forums, I’m not a particularly large fan of very low quality short domains — if we look at YP.com in example, it’s certainly not the strongest LL.com however it’s a long, long ways from the weakest. Why pay $50,000 for an LL.com which has pretty much an absolute zero chance of landing an enduser when you could have an LL.com of comparable quality to YP.com for say $70,000 and have this chance? Despite it being unlikely you’ll see a result like this one, divided over the relatively small number of LL.coms there are, even just having that chance is worth a great deal of money. I haven’t gone over every LL.com to report an exact figure of how many are still in the hands of domainers or weak endusers (smaller companies who might be inclined to sell for a good offer), however let’s take 200/676 in the hands of domainers/weak endusers as a ballpark figure. If you divide the $3,850,000 by the 200 LL.coms, you get an average of $19,250 value just from this sale alone. This of course  strictly theoretical and means nothing for everyone not holding the domain that gets the sale (eg. 199/200 not better off from this sale).

I don’t want to get into probability and it’d be highly inaccurate without spending a great deal of time on the post, however I think common sense should dictate that something like QZ.com which probably would fetch $50,000 or so in a reseller environment has one heck of a lot lower of a chance of ever landing an enduser than something like OW.com which sold for $100,000 earlier this year — twice the price, probably 20 times better a chance of finding an enduser.

The same can be said for LLL.coms, LLLL.coms and short numeric domains — the weakest examples of each just don’t make a great deal of sense in light of how much better examples can be had for a bit more. I know a lot of domainers want an LL.com, NN.com, NNN.com, LLL.com, etc just to say they have one — if all you can afford is a bad example in such a category, why not downgrade a category and pickup a very strong domain which stands a chance of finding an enduser?

We can all agree to disagree on the merits of short domains and certain short domain segments, however I think we can all agree a domain like QZ.com has much lower odds of ever finding a permanent home than something like CSE.com. If you were only allowed to sell to an enduser, would there be any doubt in your mind which to go with? I know there’d be none in mine.

Warren Buffett once said “Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market shut down for 10 years.” How many people would want to be stuck holding QZ.com or QXZ.com for 10 years (and I apologize in advance if anyone reading this owns these domains — seems to happen to me a lot when I start throwing out names) if they weren’t allowed to resell them? I certainly wouldn’t. What’s incredible about both the LL.com and LLL.com market segments is that a huge increase in quality can be had for a modest increase in price. If we look at generic domains, the average generic you can get for $50,000 isn’t all that much worse than the average generic you can get for $100,000. When it comes to short domains, a $50,000 LL.com and a $100,000 LL.com can be the difference between a domain which produces zero revenue and has realistically no chance of ever finding an enduser and a domain which earns a few dollars per day ($XXXX/yr) and does have a reasonable chance of finding an enduser within a few years.

EIV.com recently went for $5000 — not a gigantic leap in price over the minimum which most people currently see as being in the $3200-$4000 range, however it has one heck of a lot higher odds of finding an enduser than a bottom of the barrel LLL.com. Times are tough, many of us might want to develop our short domains so they can at least earn us some of that money we spent on them back — how the heck is anyone going to develop QXZ.com? I’ve heard the letters are good in China but I don’t speak Mandarin, nor do most of the domainers investing in these domains. EIV.com, while not being the easiest domain to think of an acronym for, is certainly something I’m sure I could meaningfully develop if I spent a few hours thinking of a plan of action. QXZ? I have enough trouble even thinking of words that start with X or Z — one of them might be workable but having both X, Z, along with Q is really pushing it in my opinion. You have my respect if you can find a meaningful acronym for that… Of course you don’t necessarily need an acronym to develop your short domain and I certainly wouldn’t discourage people from developing a domain like QXZ.com (that’ll be the only way it’ll make any money afterall).

The LLLL.com market has one of (if not) the largest differences in the short domain name world between sale prices of the cheapest and most expensive short domains of equal letter length (in this case, 4 letter .coms). Are there really any similarities between a non-premium LLLL.com and a CVCV, VCVC, rare, or other strong pronounceable LLLL.com? Both cheap and expensive domain names have their advantages and disadvantages — we’ll look at that in this post in the context of the LLLL.com market. Are you planning on reselling the domains to other domain name investors or are you going to try and find end users for your LLLL.coms? What about liquidity — will you need to sell out sometime soon or can you afford to hold and renew these domains until satisfied with the return on your short domain name investment?

Whenever we talk of LLLL.coms, we see the same thing repeating itself –  a lot of domainers (new and old alike) fail to truly understand the diversity of the LLLL.com market. This post is dedicated to anyone new to domaining or the LLLL.com market with the goal of getting you up to date on how much this segment has changed over the past few years. While it hasn’t been updated in awhile, I wrote a post on Namepros last December designed to help people completely new to domains learn about domain name investing — check out the Domain Newbies section to learn more about it. If you’re new to domaining, this link will be useful even if you stumbled across this blog, still unsure of what domaining segments you want to invest in.

While we may refer to all 4 letter .com domains as LLLL.coms, it’s clear not all are created equal — the same can be said about LLLL.net or even LLLL.info where highly quality pronounceable and brandable examples in these extensions may fetch prices higher than weaker LLLL.coms would. It’s important to differentiate between “bad” LLLL.coms which were registered right before the LLLL.com buyout, and higher quality LLLL.coms which were registered years before the LLLL.com buyout.

If you look at when a lot of the highest quality pronounceable LLLL.coms were first registered, something may surprise you — people chose to register these 4 letter .coms despite there being plenty of 3 letter .coms still available to register. Almost without exception, 1 letter domains are worth more in the same extension than 2 letter domains, which are worth more than 3 letter domains. When we get to 4 letter domains however, that starts to change. Why? It’s hard to say. For one thing, there aren’t a great deal of pronounceable domains with under 4 characters. A second thing, many of the pronounceable LLLL.com letter patterns are already used with great frequency by corporate America and elsewhere in the world — this encourages domainers to pay more for these domains as they see them as being desired by endusers.

Unpronounceable LLLL.coms with bad letters and seemingly little enduser potential or traffic accurately describes many of the LLLL.coms registered right before buyout. You’ll most likely need to proactively reach out to endusers or have a very large number of these if you wish to make any meaningful number of enduser sales. One advantage of these domains is that their low cost eliminates the risk in offering the domains to TM holders (at least for those of us outside the USA). The domains are cheap enough that if a company wants it, you’ll likely be able to sell it to them for something cheap (still well above your cost) and avoid the dispute resolution entirely. The purchase price is often low enough that it won’t need to get approved by upper management. LLLL.coms as a whole have a certain rarity and inherent element of collectibility. The main downside of the low end LLLL.coms are the annual renewal fees which can rapidly eat into any success anyone with a large portfolio of low end LLLL.coms achieves. Food for thought — 1000 LLLL.coms will cost about $8000 per year to renew. If you sold $10000 worth of LLLL.coms to endusers in a year, you’d only have $2000 left after renewal fees are paid. If, on the other hand, you sold $20000 worth of LLLL.coms to endusers in a year, you’d have $12000 left over — 6 times more for having sold double the amount. As can be seen, this absolutely is a numbers game and one which favors those willing to work hard and proactively seek out endusers. Despite this market having declined considerably since February 2008, many LLLL.com investors have remained in the black by proactively reaching out to endusers. Return on investment (when positive) is, on average, highest in this segment. Unfortunately, so too are the losses.

Pronounceable LLLL.coms are a much more difficult sector to master than ordinary LLLL.coms. While there are base prices for LLLL.coms that have a certain letter quality, certain letter patterns, certain levels of brandability, assumed enduser potential, traffic, etc, it’s much more difficult to accurately appraise pronounceables, nevermind assess their value beyond a reseller level. A good grasp on the English language is necessary in most cases to see why one domain is better than another. While domainers are told that “C” is a good premium letter, it can also often weaken a pronounceable LLLL.com. Similarly, domainers are told that letters X and Z are bad letters, however both of these letters can in many cases make for great pronounceables — eg. ROXY, LOOX, ZUNE. Semi-Premium? Anyone want to tell VISA.com that their CVCV has a semi-premium “V” in it? How about telling the Bank of America that BOFA.com has a weak premium “F” in it?

If I haven’t made my point clear yet, let me do so now — pronounceable LLLL.coms operate on very different market fundamentals than do ordinary LLLL.coms. While an unpronounceable LLLL.com may almost always go for more if it’s a quad premium than if it’s a triple premium, while a triple premium with J/K/U/V/W/Y almost always goes for more than a triple premium with Q/X/Z, while a quad premium with A/S/E almost always goes for more than a quad premium with F/G/H, … While all that goes on, someone else (enduser) looks at a pronounceable LLLL.com and decides they like how it sounds, that it fits in well with their business model, that it’s the perfect name for a new product of theirs, etc. “ZUNE” being a double premium means nothing to Microsoft and their MP3 player. ZUNE is easy to pronounce, it’s unique, it’s kinda cool — it works for them and that’s what they decided to go with. Highly Pronounceable LLLL.coms fitting a CVCV, VCVC, CVVC, and VCCV pattern make up the large majority of top dollar sales, none of which were available anywhere near shortly before buyout, however we do see quite a few sales of pronounceables which don’t fit these particular LLLL.com market segments as well.

If you’re aiming to resell to endusers rather than to other domainers, it’s time to forget about letter quality, rarity, domain age, and pretty much every other element previously mentioned — they don’t mean squat to most endusers. An enduser doesn’t care how many other acronyms your LLLL.com has or that you mention the domain makes  $100/month parked, granted he has no intention of parking it. If he’s not able to convert visitors to the domain into customers of his, he likely doesn’t care about traffic either — they’re worth Zero. Zilch. Nada.   What does mean something to an enduser? To some endusers, traffic may be something they’re interested in.

Okay, so now that we’ve got what an enduser doesn’t want out of the way, let’s finish covering what an enduser does want? Pretty simple — an end user wants what he decides he wants. The enduser might need to have or might want to have your domain. It’s important to do your best to try and differentiate between the two — someone who wants to have something probably has a budget in mind and is going to stick to it. Someone who needs to have something (particularly if it’s a large corporation) may, on the other hand, seemingly have the sky for a limit.

Everything from Ravi.com which was reported in DN Journal last night as having sold for $200,000 and was registered in 1993 to the stuff which was among the last domains to be registered on November 2nd 2007 is by definition an LLLL.com — they are both 4 letter .com domain names, however in many cases they don’t have a great deal in common other than that.

Since October 2008, LLLL.com prices have started to increase once again — great news for short domain name investors, or is it? As some domain name investors not invested in short domains have mentioned, it’s important to account for domain name renewal fees when investing in short domains and attempting to determine whether a particular short domain name investment will prove to be profitable or not.

Lower quality LLLL.coms have continued to rally upwards so far in December from the beating they were dealt between March and October 2008. We’ve slowly crept up from a minimum wholesale of $2.00 to what is now in the $5.00 range.

As some of the domainers less optimistic about LLLL.coms on Namepros have made known, it’s very important with low end LLLL.coms that we factor in the cost of renewing these domains each year. It’s unfortunately not quite fair or mathematically correct to suggest the minimum wholesale has gone from $2 to $5 over the past month and a half — we need to factor in the renewal premium for those 49 days which have passed and add it to that $2.00 October figure to accurately determine how much prices have appreciated.

Assuming an $8 renewal fee which seems to be about the average renewal fee LLLL.com investors are paying to renew their domains, we’ll need to add an additional $1.07 to that $2.00 figure (bringing it to $3.07) to properly compensate for 49 additional days of the LLLL.com’s registration having been used. For the purpose of all calculations on www.LLLL.com, it’s assumed that the renewal is paid daily. This takes the guesswork out of pricing the domains and allows prices to be analyzed each month in a precise mathematical fashion, rather than prices varying heavily depending on what month most of the domains sold expired in.

$5.00/$3.07 = 63% profit for those who purchased minimum wholesale quality LLLL.coms in October. Similarly, anyone with minimum wholesale quality LLLL.coms should now see roughly 63% more for their domains than they would have otherwise.

It’s important to note that lower quality LLLL.coms continue to be difficult to sell in bulk and you’ll likely need to sell for lower than the prices reported here if you need to rapidly liquidate a large collection of minimum wholesale quality LLLL.coms, especially a large collection of soon to be expiring LLLL.coms. In reality, most domainers have at least a moderately large amount of higher quality LLLL.coms to go with those lower quality LLLL.coms, so if you were to sell them together in a lot, it’s quite possible you’d end up getting the minimum wholesale or above the minimum wholesale still, despite the quantity being undesirable for most investors in this market. It’s a bad idea to try and sell LLLL.coms in bulk lots larger than 100 LLLL.coms — split it up into 2, 3, etc lots if necessary, however be careful about putting too many in a lot.

I offered this suggestion on 4 Letter Noob last year and I will offer it here as well — keep your eyes peeled for deals over the next couple weeks. We should see a few of them as less serious domainers spend time with their families instead of continuing to actively follow the drop and auction scene. Don’t neglect your families of course, however do set your alarm or make a note to make sure you don’t miss out on the auctions you’ll want to take part in. Patrick, the owner of ChefPatrick.com, made an absolute killing recently – picking up Oyoa.com on Namepros for $70 and reselling it on Sedo for $490 within 3 weeks. Now I’m not sure if we’ll see a deal quite that good over the next couple weeks, however I’m fairly certain we’ll see a nice supply of good deals and a few steals.

The LLLL.com buyout occurred one year ago to this day. The LLLL.com buyout has held, however short domain names as a whole have greatly decreased in value, as has much of the domain name world. The LLLL.com buyout has had a roller coaster of a ride since last year, as has most of the short domain name market, with prices for most short domains peaking in February 2008 and falling significantly in the months afterwards. We’ve seen some enormous short domain name sales this year, such as Fund.com for nearly $10MM and many NNN.coms selling for $100k+ each. While domain name investor to domain name investor prices have fallen, end user prices continue to remain strong in the short domain name market segment. One short domain name market which has weather the economic storm rather well has been the NNNN.com market. With increasing global internet penetration, we can expect short domains to be increasingly desirable in the future once the current economic woes subside. While this blog is new, my blogging about short domain names isn’t — I’ve been blogging since November 2007 about short domains, previously over at 4LetterNoob.wordpress.com. Like my previous short domain blog, this blog will be dedicated to domain names of 5 or less characters. To view more information on short domains including information on how we came to having an LLLL.com buyout, please click on the title of this post to read the rest of the content about short domains. All posts on this blog will have an excerpt (such as this), as well as more domain name content accessible only by clicking on the post title hyperlink.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the LLLL.com buyout and a fitting day to start blogging at www.LLLL.com.

Despite criticism regarding the performance of short domains lately, many short domain investors have defied the skeptics and realized enormous sales this year. LLL.coms saw CPC.com and MCC.com realize $210,750 and $195,000 respectively and LLLL.coms saw a flurry of sales among dictionary words reach as high as $9,999,950 for Fund.com. Unet.com led the year for VCVC-type LLLL.coms, bringing in $100,000, Atty.com brought in $48,900 and Kudo.com brought in $40,000. The real winner this year in the LLLL.com space were pronounceables, especially CVCVs which saw enormous returns and weathered the economic storm better than most domaining segments.

The short numeric domain market has been the big winner this year and continues to record solid numbers. NNN.coms reported numerous massive enduser sales this year, led by 173.com and 770.com which sold for $302,790 and $343,000 respectively. Not far behind, 11.com and 880.com saw $188,888 each and 6 other NNN.coms reported sales for over $100,000 as documented by DN Journal. NNNN.coms continue to post solid sales month after month on Sedo and have also seen some enormous sales recently — 8808.com selling for $51,111 and 8008.com selling for $58,889. Most domainers haven’t unfortunately been as successful as Marchex finding top dollar endusers for NNNN.coms, however NNNN.coms in general continue to record solid sales in the $400-$1000 range. After quickly rising in value and popularity from January through June 2008, NNNNN.com investors suddenly found themselves in a market which had more sellers than buyers.

The mobile internet is slowly coming along, global internet penetration continues to grow, and demand for short domains remains high, both among domainers and endusers alike. The past year has been full of highs and lows for most short domain name investors, part of the blame being on current economic conditions and part of the blame being overspeculation in some short domain name market segments.

This blog will be dedicated to short domains of 5 or less characters. If you’re new to domaining and stumbled across this blog, I highly recommend visiting the Namepros Short Domain Discussion forum. It’s full of information on not just LLLL.coms but short domains in general.

Phil, the previous owner of LLLL.com (who goes by the handle “VURG” on Namepros and DN Forum) started sharing information about the LLLL.com market back in early 2006 on Namepros. Thanks to his research and the work of DYYO.com, early LLLL.com investors were able to make more informed decisions about how to go about investing in LLLL.coms.

Research provided by Phil in the Namepros LLLL.com Countdown Thread follows. If you have the time, give the thread a read and relive LLLL.com history as those invested in them back in the day saw it.

22% Remaining - 25th January 2006
19% Remaining - 31st March 2006
16% Remaining - 29th June 2006
13% Remaining - 1st August 2006
10% Remaining - 15th February 2007 (crossed without traffic testing early April)
9% Remaining - 26th February 2007 (crossed without traffic testing early May)
8% Remaining - 2nd March 2007 (crossed without traffic testing in June)
7% Remaining - 21st March 2007 (crossed without traffic testing early July)
6% Remaining - 3rd July 2007(crossed without traffic testing some time in July)
5% Remaining - 1st August 2007(crossed without traffic testing August 11)
4% Remaining - 14th August 2007(crossed late August)
3% Remaining - 15th September 2007(crossed In September)
2% Remaining - 14th October 2007
1% Remaining - 31st October 2007
0% Remaining - 2nd November - COUNTDOWN COMPLETE!

Thanks for visiting www.LLLL.com and I hope you’ll be back soon! If there’s anything related to short domains you’d like more information on, please feel free to leave a comment or send an email to reece(at)LLLL.com and I’ll do my best to cover it in a future blog post. I’ll be adding a short domain name price guide later this month which should help better track the performance of short domains across domain extensions.

Want to learn more about short domain names? Do you know the difference between short domain name terms such as LLL.com and NNNN.com? This short domain name guide will explain in detail what all of the most common short domain terms mean. There are many different types of short domains and even if you’re an experienced domain name investor, you will most likely find this short domain name guide useful. Successfully investing in short domains requires a thorough understanding of the various short domain name markets and the prices short domain go for in those short domain name markets. Covered in this short domain name guide are everything from 2 letter .coms to 5 letter .coms, with numbers and combinations of numbers and letters (referred in the domain name business as “characters”) also being covered. The next time someone asked you how many premium letters your short domain has, you’ll have no problem telling them! This short domain name guide is encyclopedic in content and should serve as a great reference — both now and in the future.

C = Character. When seen in a domain name listing, the number of C’s refers to the number of characters in a domain name. In the domain name industry, the term Character refers to either a Letter of the English alphabet (A-Z) or a Number (0-9). A domain with many characters may have both many letters and many numbers. When used in conjunction with “V”, C takes on the meaning of Consonant.

L = Letter. When seen is a domain name listing, the number of L’s refers to the number of letters in a domain name. Letters are sometimes represented as C or V, when referring to a particular Consonant-Vowel letter pattern domain name.

N = Number. When seen in a domain name listing, the number of N’s refers to the number of numbers in a domain name.

Premium = A premium domain name (when speaking of short domains) is a domain name composed exclusively of letters: A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,L,M,N,O,P,R,S,T. These letters are referred to as “premium letters”. A premium domain is, in other words, a domain devoid of: J,K,Q,U,V,W,X,Y,Z. These letters are commonly referred to as non-premium letters. The letters J,K,U,V,W,Y are considered by most domain investors to be of higher quality than the letters Q,X,Z. The letters J,K,U,V,W,Y are commonly referred to as “semi-premium” letters, whereas Q,X,Z are referred to as “bad letters”. These terms are used strictly in a reseller setting and currently hold the largest weight in the 3 and 4 letter markets. More information on premium letters and premium domains, along with many examples will be provided in the 4 letter (LLLL) .com section which is included midway through this guide.

As a general rule, Characters can be represented by Letters or Numbers. A 3 letter .com (LLL.com) is in other words, a type of 3 Character .com (CCC.com). Likewise, a 3 number .com (NNN.com) is also considered a 3 Character .com. Because all number and all letter domains, such as LLL.coms and NNN.coms sell for considerably more than other 3 character domains, domainers typically refer to them as LLL.coms and NNN.coms, and not CCC.coms (3 Character .coms), despite them being composed of 3 characters. The following are industry terms and an explanation of their meaning.

LL.com = 2 Letter .com. Two Letters from A-Z. They may be the same letter or different letters. Examples include: AA.com, BC.com, DJ.com, MX.com, YQ.com.

LN.com = Letter-Number .com. One Letter from A-Z followed by One Number from 0-9. Examples include: A1.com, B9.com, X2.com, Y5.com.

NL.com = Number-Letter .com. One Number from 0-9 followed by One Letter from A-Z. Examples include: 1A.com, 9B.com, 2X.com, 5Y.com. Notice the difference in letter-number placement between an LN.com and an NL.com.

NN.com = 2 Number .com. Two Numbers from 0-9. They may be the same or different numbers. Examples include 11.com, 21.com, 47.com, 90.com.

LLL.com = 3 Letter .com. Contains 3 Letters from A-Z. Examples include: AAB.com, ABC.com, JHD.com, OOO.com.

LLN.com = Letter-Letter-Number .com. Two Letters from A-Z followed by One Number from 0-9. Examples include: JH7.com, KL4.com, MM8.com, ZX2.com.

LNL.com = Letter-Number-Letter .com. One Letter from A-Z followed by One Number from 0-9, which is followed by One Letter from A-Z. Examples include: B2B.com, G4S.com, B3G.com, Y2K.com.

LNN.com = Letter-Number-Number .com. One Letter from A-Z followed by Two Numbers from 0-9. Examples include: C93.com, D22.com, B16.com, W40.com.

NLL.com = Number-Letter-Letter .com. One Number from 0-9 followed by Two Letters from A-Z. Examples include: 4DD.com, 3NT.com, 7WJ.com, 9QS.com.

NLN.com = Number-Letter-Number .com. One Number from 0-9 followed by One Letter from A-Z, which is followed by One Number from 0-9. Examples include: 2D4.com, 5Y7.com, 6R1.com, 3F2.com.

NNL.com = Number-Number-Letter .com. Two Numbers from 0-9 followed by One Letter from A-Z. Examples include: 40A.com 66V.com, 75J.com, 91R.com.

NNN.com = 3 Number .com. Contains 3 Numbers from 0-9. Examples include: 123.com, 300.com, 444.com, 747.com.

LLLL.com = 4 Letter .com. Contains 4 Letters from A-Z. Below we define different types of 4 Letter .coms.

Anti-Premium: A domain name that contains only non-premium letters. An anti-premium domain is
a domain which is composed strictly of letters: J,K,Q,U,V,W,X,Y,Z. The term Anti-Premium is most commonly applied to 4 Letter .coms, however it also makes a good adjective to describe  LLL.coms selling near the minimum wholesale as well. Examples of Anti-Premium LLL.coms include: YXZ.com, VKQ.com, XZW.com, QKU.com. Examples of Anti-Premium LLLL.coms include: WKQU.com, XYQZ.com, YQUW.com, KQJV.com. Anti-Premium LLLL.coms are the lowest quality LLLL.coms on the market and are generally among the cheapest.

Single Premium: We use this term to refer LLLL.coms containing only one premium letter. Examples of Single Premium LLLL.coms include: JHXZ.com, UQTX.com, WQUE.com, EUWJ.com.

Double Premium: We use this term to refer to LLLL.coms containing two premium letters. Examples of Double Premium LLLL.coms include: ASWQ.com, BJKT.com, WVMG.com, HWRZ.com.

Triple Premium: We use this term to refer to LLLL.coms containing three premium letters. Examples of Triple Premium LLLL.coms include: ASDX.com, POSW.com, NWOO.com, XEEB.com.
LLL.coms containing three premium letters are commonly referred to as “Premium LLL.coms”. Examples include: SAS.com, RTN.com, NPG.com, RSS.com.

Quad Premium: We use this term to refer to LLLL.coms containing four premium letters. Examples of Quad Premium LLLL.coms include: AAAL.com, FFLE.com, MNGO.com, GHPR.com.

We’re not going to be particularly strict on the letter Y as to its consonant and/or vowel status in this guide… There is little consensus on where the letter Y should fall. My personal belief is that it should be classified as a vowel when it takes the role of a vowel (examples: RUBY, HOLY), and classified as a consonant when it does not (examples: YAMS, YOLK).

CVCV = A 4 letter .com domain name which follows a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel letter pattern. CVCVs are generally extremely pronounceable and are among the most valuable LLLL.coms. Examples include: MELO.com, MOFO.com, ZENE.com, LUMI.com. Many CVCVs are actual words in English or in another language and that partly contributes to their high valuations, on top of their immense brandability and obvious enduser potential.

CVVC = A 4 letter .com domain name which follows a Consonant-Vowel-Vowel-Consonant letter pattern. Examples include: NOOL.com, ROOX.com, BEER.com, MOOT.com.

VCCV = A 4 letter .com domain name which follows a Vowel-Consonant-Consonant-Vowel letter pattern. Examples include: ADDA.com, ELLO.com, INGE.com, UGFO.com

VCVC = A 4 letter .com domain name which follows a Vowel-Consonant-Vowel-Consonant letter pattern. VCVCs are often among the most pronounceable and desirable LLLL.coms, right up there with CVCVs. Examples include: OPAL.com, ONEX.com, ILEC.com, UQEN.com.

AABB = A 4 letter .com domain name which contains only 2 different letters, where “A” and “B” symbolically represent two different letters from A-Z. Examples include: CCDD.com, DDJJ.com, MMXX.com, ZZGG.com.

ABAB = A 4 letter .com domain name which contains only 2 different letters, where “A” and “B” symbolically represent two different letters from A-Z. Examples include: CDCD.com, DJDJ.com, MXMX.com, ZGZG.com.

Palindromes = A 4 letter .com domain name which contains only 2 different letters from A-Z. Examples include: CDDC.com, DJJD.com, MXXM.com, ZGGZ.com. Palindromes are commonly referred to ABBA-type LLLL.coms. They inherited the name Palindrome due to their identical nature when reading from left to right or right to left.

Triple Letter = An LLLL.com containing three of the same letter. These are sometimes referred to as Triple letter repeats in the case it is of an AAAB or BAAA letter pattern. Examples include: SSSJ.com, SWWW.com, HHGH.com, IJII.com. Notice how each of these examples showcases the Triple Letter LLLL.com differently. These are all considered Triple Letter LLLL.coms.

VVVV = A 4 letter .com domain name which contains four vowels. Examples include: AEIO.com, EUOU.com, IOUI.com, EAUU.com.

CVCCV = A 5 letter .com domain name which follows a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Consonant-Vowel letter pattern. CVCCVs are among the most popular 5L.com domain names which are registered and resold today.
Examples include: RORRE.com, FOGGE.com, ZINNE.com, VISTA.com.

CVCVC = A 5 letter .com domain name which follows a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel-Consonant letter pattern. CVCVCs are essentially CVCVs with an additional consonant at the end.
Examples include: FALES.com, FIRAL.com, SAGEP.com, LINUX.com.

CVCVV = A 5 letter .com domain name which follows a Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel-Vowel letter pattern. CVCVVs are essentially CVCVs with an additional vowel at the end.
Examples include: RAGOO.com, PARIA.com, MELOO.com, MONEE.com.

CVVCV = A 5 letter .com domain name which follows a Consonant-Vowel-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel letter pattern. CVVCVs are CVCVs with an additional vowel included before the second consonant.
Examples: ZOOME.com, ROOMI.com, PIECO.com, MOOLA.com.

VCVCV = A 5 letter .com domain name which follows a Vowel-Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel letter pattern. VCVCVs are essential VCVCs with an additional vowel at the end.
Examples include: ATOMO.com, EFOTO.com, ISAMI.com, OSIRA.com.

Due to the high prices CVCVs and VCVCs have been seeing lately, many 5L.com investors see CVCCV, CVCVC, CVCVV, CVVCV, and VCVCV as five of the most promising 5L.com alternatives to brandable LLLL.coms which are rapidly increasing in price.