Registration Update - Short Domains (4C, 5L, 6N)

It is often useful to check and see how close the "next" short domain type is to being bought out, and how the domain type is trending.

4 character (4C or CCCC.com's) are hot right now, and are being registered at a steady pace.  There are approximately 1.2 million 4 character domains in total.  They are still far from being all bought out (another 5-7 years perhaps), but here are some recent data points to give an idea of how popular they are:

April 16, 2018: 614,877 registered
August 19, 2019: 664,451 registered

6 number (6N or NNNNNN.com domains) are also being registered at a strong pace.  There are 1 million total, and these are the closest to being bought out (again), perhaps only a couple years until the 6N buyout:

April 16, 2018: 771,128 registered
August 19, 2019: 796,854 registered

As for five letter domains (5L or LLLLL.com's), these are far from being bought out.  There are 11,881,376 total of these domains, and we only have a couple data points here:

April 16, 2019: 3,257,718 registered
August 19, 2019: 3,156,254 registered

Registration's for 5L's actually declined in the last few months which was surprising.  We will keep a closer eye on these domains.  There is not much chance there will be a buyout of 5L's for decades (if ever), but it is still interesting to see the numbers as a bell-weather for short domain, and letter registrations, in general.

CCCC.com (4C) Domain Registration Update

There continues to be steady registration of 4 character .com names.  Here are numbers of registered names as of our checks dating back to February, 2008:

06/18/2019 - 636,418 (average of 342 registered/day since prior check)

04/16/2019 - 614,877 (average of 91 registered/day since prior check)
 
12/04/2018 - 602,771 (average of 190 registered/day since prior check)

01/11/2018 - 540,794 (average of 153 registered/day since prior check)

05/01/2012 - 300,000 (average of 55 registered/day since prior check)

02/01/2008 - 215,000

Average registered per day since January 2018 - 183.

If the current rate holds up, CCCC.com domains should be bought out around 2027-2028.   The data from 2012 and 2008 is not precise, we were using random sampling techniques back then, but it should be in the ballpark of the number of registered domains.  We will keep regular track of these, which is easier to do now with the handy tool that dofo.com provides which lets you see all registered domains of a particular type. 

Registration Data for (Very) Long Letter Domains

We've done this for numerics, and thought it would be interesting to see how registration rates look for longer letter domains.  Like much longer letter domains.  Here are the number of registered letter domains according to dofo for all strings of letters, from 1 letter domains up to 30 letter domains.  Only .coms were looked at.

What is interesting is that the number of .com letter domains peaks at 11-length (9.6 million registered).  Then registration rates start to fall, but not by much. 

Number of Letters		Number Registered
1		26
2		676
3		17,576
4		456,976
5		3,257,718
6		5,690,913
7		6,233,995
8		7,648,600
9		8,582,454
10		9,423,782
11		9,649,620
12		9,461,404
13		8,969,298
14		8,282,875
15		7,329,996
16		6,376,458
17		5,492,672
18		4,549,593
19		3,698,050
20		3,020,999
21		2,389,850
22		1,880,458
23		1,469,796
24		1,118,642
25		838,496
26		630,085
27		460,372
28		334,697
29		245,998
30		177,835

Where Did the Volume Go?

Although there are a couple days left in the 1st quarter of 2019, it is pretty obvious that there is going to be a significant decrease in trading volume among almost all categories of short domains.  We say "almost all" because there is one category of short domains that is doing fine on volume, and may even surpass Q1 2018 when all is said and done.  Can you guess which one it is???

Here are the numbers (from ShortNames):

CCC.com sales declined from 257 in Q1 2018 to 129 in Q1 2019.  

LLL.com sales declined from 33 sales in Q1 2018 to 18 sales in Q1 2019.

LLLL.com sales declined from 2,917 sales in Q1 2018 to 1,679 sales in Q1 2019.

NNNN.com sales declined from 11 in Q1 2018 to 8 in Q1 2019.

And....

NNNNN.com sales stayed almost perfectly steady, there were 886 sales in Q1 2018, and 867 have been reported in Q1 2019.  Almost no change at all.

It is not surprising to see the decline in sales volumes across the board, the market is still recovering from the last parabolic rise and fall in short domain prices.  Look at what Bitcoin is doing recently.  But what is intriguing is that NNNNN.com domains seem to be largely unaffected by the decline in volume.  This might be a good sign for NNNNN.com domains, or it could just reflect that these domains are less likely to be developed than the other types noted above, and instead are more likely to be traded.  Will be interesting to track volume the rest of the year, and see how the various pieces of the short domain market adjust to the new realities.

LLL Traffic Statistics

We looked at 1,000 random 3 letter .com domains, to see what traffic statistics looked like.  Here's what we discovered.  138 domains had top country traffic rankings (13.8%).  Of these, here is how they broke down:

84 were in the US
8 in China
4 in Russia
3 in Saudi Arabia
3 in India
3 in Germany
2 in the UK
2 in Nepal2 in Myanmar
2 in Iran
2 in Egypt2 in Bangladesh
2 in Australia
2 in Canada
1 each in Botswana, Brazil, Czech Republic, Greece, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mexico, Nigeria, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Israel, Japan, Spain, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Uzbekistan.

So the vast majority were in the United States, and remarkably few in China.

As for overall traffic, 108 domains (10.8%) had traffic rankings in the top 1 million of sites worldwide.  As one might expect, the top 10 had very strong traffic numbers:

1.  BBC.com  (#94)
2.  MLB.com  (#1,903)
3.  BBT.com  (#4,163)
4.  MTB.com  (#9,281)
5.  ISD.com  (#15,682)
6.  BTC.com  (#16,093)
7.  VSP.com  (#16,489)
8.  TCM.com  (#19,606)
9.  RIL.com  (#24,502)
10.  TOM.com  (#25,403)

Deep Dive into CCC's (Part I) - LNN.com Domains

We have been focusing on short domain traffic statistics, to see if this gives any insight into different short domain types.  So far, we have looked at NN.com's, LL.com's, CC.com's, and NNN.com's.  We wanted to look at CCC.com's (character, character, character), but this market seems quite fragmented.  There is a big difference between 11A.com and j0i.com, for instance.  So one way to break these down is into Number-Letter patterns.

The first pattern we looked at was LNN.com's.  These are letter-number-number, and we expected that their traffic statistics would be one of the stronger of the CCC.com's.  Here's what we found.

In a random sample of 1,000 LNN.com's, we found 17 (1.7%) with country traffic rankings on Alexa.  Of these:

10 were in the United States
3 in China
2 in Russia
1 each in Hong Kong and Japan

As for the top 10 LNN.com's we surveyed, here is the list:

1. U77.com (#28,760)
2. U51.com (#69,328)
3. D23.com (#104,929)
4. L99.com (#157,338)
5. A67.com (#270,636)
6. Z57.com (#304,674)
7. E87.com (#307,343)
8. K11.com (#432,469)
9. M18.com (#495,138)
10. C64.com (#561,990)

Not great.  Not one LNN finished in the top 10,000 and only 13 total domains (1.3%) had traffic ranks in the top 1 million of sites worldwide.  One thing that seemed noteworthy is that of the top 4 sites, 3 have country ranks in China, which is in fact all the sites with China rankings.  So to the extent there is a "future" for these domains, it seems almost certain to be in China.

Next we will look at NLL.com's, and see if the results are similar. 

Traffic Stats for NNN.com Domains

We looked at three digit .com numeric domains, numbered 100 through 999.  The traffic results were as follows:

51 domains (5.67%) had country ranks on Alexa's traffic rankings:

21 were in China
12 were in the United States
2 in the United Kingdom
2 in Malaysia
2 in India
2 in Hong Kong
1 each of Taiwan, UAE, Slovenia, Russia, Japan, Isle of Man, Egypt, Costa Rica, Cambodia, and Brazil.

47 domains (5.22%) had traffic in the top 1 million on Alexa's rankings.  Here are the top 10 NNN.com domains, by traffic rank on Alexa:

163 .com	(#95)
178 .com	(#841)
360 .com	(#2,213)
258 .com	(#4,075)
115 .com	(#5,589)
500 .com	(#7,589)
110 .com	(#10,238)
265 .com	(#12,481)
233 .com	(#16,905)
160 .com	(#19,959)