Back in 2011, 84,000 Were Registered
We looked at this back in July of 2011, when there was 8.42% registration of the six digit .com domains. Remember, there's a million total of these, so this equates to about 84,000 registered domains. I ran another spot check a year later, on May 16, 2012. At this point 9.36% were registered, so a slow climb of about 1%. I did another spot check a couple years later, on March 21, 2014. At this point, 13.96% were registered. Registration had picked up a little, but was still running at a pretty slow rate.Nearly 700,000 6n's Registered Now
It's now several years later, and how many of these domains are registered? From random sampling it looks like around 68% are registered. In other words, almost 700,000 6 digit .com domains are now registered. At some point in the last few years registration of 6n's exploded. This is similar to where things were for five digit domains 10 years ago, around the time of the initial buyout. There were around 20-30% available to register.And Selling Too
It's a fair bet than in a decade, all of these will be registered, and even the worst domains trading well above reg fee. Another crazy stat about 6 digit domains? There have been over 550 sales of these domains for more than $1,000. And there have been over 11,000 sales of these domains for more than $100. The biggest sales went for more than $20,000.So 6n's are for real. We'll keep an eye on the registration trends, and see if we can estimate when the buyout is likely to occur.
Update/Correction: Man, I've been out of this space for a while! Russell from Shortnames.com notes that 6n's were bought out in 2015 for a while, before the bubble popped. This actually makes some sense, as 5n's were rapidly bought out back in 2008, and then it popped and a number of them were available for registration for several years. The "real buyout" took time. Funny thing is, LLLL.com's were bought out before the 5n's, and the LLLL.com buyout was stickier originally. But over time, the 5n.com's were worth more. Shows the value of supply/demand (100k 5n's v. 450k+ 4L's) as well as the Chinese market's focus on numerics.