Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Developed LLLL.com's v. NNNNN.com's

I surveyed a random selection of LLLL's, and here's what I found: 24 were developed sites, of which 8 were Chinese websites, 1 was an Arabic site, 1 was a Netherlands site, 1 was an Argentina site, and the other 13 were English-language and consisted of a mix of corporattions, organizations, and personal blogs. I did not count sites that were parked or just had "for sale" signs and so forth, same with the NNNNN.com's (which you can see here).

Assuming this is a representative sample, it means that approximately 24% (around 100,000 LLLL's) are developed sites, and around 76% (approximately 350,000) have yet to be developed. Comparing the LLLL.com's to the NNNNN.com's, the LLLL.com's have a much lower percentage of developed sites (24% v. 46%), and a much higher number of available sites to be developed (350,000 v. 54,000). This strongly suggests that NNNNN.com's will continue to rise in value following the buyout.

As for which type of domains will be more valuable in the long-run, there are arguments on both sides. The LLLL.com's have the following advantages over the NNNNN.com's:

* They have 1 fewer character than the NNNNN.com's.
* Premium LLLL.com reported end-user sales are higher than those for NNNNN.com's (the highest I have seen so far for NNNNN.com's is around $2,500).
* The market seems to prefer letter domains to number domains.

However, there are several reasons why the NNNNN.com's could end up being worth more than the LLLL.com's:

* NNNNN.com's are much more scarce (100,000 total compared to 456,976 LLLL.com's).
* The NNNNN.com's already have a higher proportion of developed sites (46% to 24%).
* Any "bad" number combination still has type-in traffic and plenty of uses (part numbers, foreign zip codes, cell phone words, dates, lucky numbers, etc.) whereas a "bad" letter combination may not have type-in traffic and may have more limited end-user potential.

Here's the list of the LLLL's I looked at:

acax Chartered Accountants
aioz
alav
axav
basl Beach Soccer Pro (redirects to beach soccer pro .com)
bcff
bkaw
btrr
cawf
cdaz Music website
cehd
cejw
cjgr
dfol
dmgc
dsig
emey
endu
esol
eufl
exgm
fhem
fhlc
fllb
fpnh
fvsa Argentina technology company
ggof Guardian Group of Funds
ggpd
gvcu Casino Stocks Information
hiwx Houston Iron Works
hqlm
hxgu
idwh
iihd SMR Architectural Hardware
iwic International Writing Instrument Corp.
iwzz Chinese site
ixgr
jbfa ABS Consulting
jiuf
jshp JSHP Transformer Co., Ltd.
keag
ksmk
kvhb
ljdi
lszh
lwle
mhpe
mzwu Chinese blog
nesp
ngkg
nllb
npif
nufj
nvao Nederlands-Vlaamse Accreditatieorganisatie
nxnf
oajv
ofsq
onro
oxlr
oxqt
qbgk
qecg
qgcg
qpjy Chinese site
qxbj Chinese site
rcia Vircom .net
riht
rltb
rojs
sdfq
sgtp
skyq Internet Services
svff
syez
tfkg Arabic Site
txxi
ubbf
uesh
ujmp
uqkb
usqs
uvzo
uycy Language Schools
voyy
vunv
wzwr
xrxf
xsxq Chinese site
xxrx
ydhq
yfkx
ynid Chinese site
ynnr Chinese site
ytnu
yugb
ywxq
zecv
zfkt Hangzhou Zedford Artificial Environment Engineering
zlsv
zysh

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