As we mentioned recently, registration continues to increase for 4-character .com domains (CCCC.com's).
To get a better picture of the CCCC.com landscape, we looked at all possible number-letter configurations. The goal is to understand what is registered, and what is still available. Here's what we came up with. To start, the easy ones:
LLLL.com (456,976 Total) - 100% Registered
NNNN.com (10,000 Total) - 100% Registered
LNNN.com (26,000 Total) - 100% Registered
LLNN.com (67,600 Total) - 99.75% Registered
NNLL.com (67,600 Total) - 99.44% Registered
NNNL.com (26,000 Total) - 99.39% Registered
This is about what you would expect for these popular strings. There were only a handful of LLNN.com and NNLL.com's available, so these are effectively bought out. Now on to the next "tier" of these domains:
NLNN.com (26,000 Total) - 62.3% Registered
LLLN.com (175,760 Total) - 61.62% Registered
LNLN.com (67,600 Total) - 56.83% Registered
NLLL.com (175,760 Total) - 46% Registered
NNLN.com (26,000 Total) - 40.98% Registered
NLNL.com (67,600 Total) - 35.17% Registered
As you can see, there's a huge jump from the NNLL's to the NLNN.com's. Now, for the bottom "tier" of CCCC.com's:
LNNL.com (67,600 Total) - 30.32% Registered
LLNL.com (175,760 Total) - 29.6% Registered
LNLL.com (175,760 Total) - 29.57% Registered
NLLN.com (67,600 Total) - 23.32% Registered
Some initial thoughts. There is almost no correlation between scarcity of a string and its popularity. Nor does it seem that any general rules can be derived, such as that domains which start with letters vs. numbers are more popular, or vice-versa. It does seem that more domains that start with numbers are in the second tier vs. the third tier, but it's also true that the very worst string starts with a number. So it is hard to draw much insight one way or another into whether numbers or letters are preferable. It really seems like some strings are just more favored than others.
If you want a blast from the past, we also looked at CCCC.com registration 6 years ago and 10 years ago, and these prior results can be found here. It's pretty neat to compare the numbers. For example, in 2008, 27% of LLLN.com's were registered. In 2012, only 36% were registered. Now 61.62% are registered, which suggests that the registration pace has picked up a bit.