At the beginning of 2018, we checked how many 5 letter .com (LLLLL.com or 5L.com) domains were registered. It came out that 29% of these domains were registered, meaning 71% were available. In other words, out of the total pool of 5 letter .com domains (11,881,376 domains), this meant that about 3.5 million were registered (3,445,599 was the estimate).
Today, ran new bulk searches of random strings of 500 of these domains, and got an updated figure of 74.4% available, meaning that around 3 million were registered (3,041,632 is the estimate).
Here are the individual results of the bulk searches:
379 75.80%
373 74.60%
379 75.80%
379 75.80%
374 74.80%
383 76.60%
360 72.00%
373 74.60%
360 72.00%
367 73.40%
385 77.00%
375 75.00%
373 74.60%
358 71.60%
362 72.40%
This suggests that about half a million 5L.com domains that were registered at the beginning of 2018 are no longer registered. This is not surprising given the bottoming out of prices in the LLLL.com market, and sluggish prices for shorter letter strings as well. The letter domain market definitely appears to be in a worse slump than the number domain market in 2018. At least 6n.com registration continues to expand. Will be interesting to keep an eye on both of these markets in 2019, and see how registration trends shape up.