Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Update on CCCC.com's

Not a big fan of these domains, but thought it would be interested to look at their registration numbers as evidence of expanding .com registration and increasing interest in short domains.

Back in February, 2008, we did some random sampling of certain combinations of CCCC's and came up with the following:

NLLL.com's (175,760 total of these, about 81% were available).
NNLL.com's (67,600 total of these, about 55% were available).
NNNL.com's (26,000 total of these, about 68% were available).
LNNN.com's (26,000 total of these, about 46% were available).
LLNN.com's (67,600 total of these, about 43% were available).
LLLN.com's (175,760 total of these, about 73% were available).

In doing these searches again recently, we came up with the following.

NLLL.com's (175,760 total of these, about 73% are available, down from 81%)
NNLL.com's (67,600 total of these, about 34% are available, down from 55%)
NNNL.com's (26,000 of these, about 55% are available, down from 68%)
LNNN.com's (26,000 total of these, about 26% are available, down from 46%)
LLNN.com's (67,600 total of these, about 21% are available, down from 43%).
LLLN.com's (175,760 total of these, about 64% are available, down from 73%). 

We also examined some new combinations.  Here are the results of the searches for these types:

LNLN.com's (67,600 total of these, about 87% are available).
NLNL.com's (67,600 total of these, about 91% are available).
LNNL.com's (67,600 total of these, about 89% are available).
NLLN.com's (67,600 total of these, about 91% are available).

What does all this show?  A couple things.  First is that registration has steadily increased since 2008 for some of the nicer types of CCCC's.  They are still a long way from being bought out, although probably over the next decade at least some of them will become bought out.  Also, all CCCC's are not created equal.  Ones with more numbers rather than letters are more popular in general.  And letters in earlier position increase popularity as well.  And there are some major disparities between registration numbers for the more popular types and the less popular types.