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If It's Such A Hot Domain Market, Why Isn't Anyone Using The Hot Domains?
from the just-wondering dept
There have been plenty of stories recently about how the domain squatting and selling market heated up in the last year, with some domains selling for surprisingly high prices. However, it looks like for the most part, it remains a purely speculative market. Search Engines WEB writes in to point out an article noting that of the 20 largest domain purchases in 2006, only one is actually being put to use. Most are just parked, with the owner perhaps hoping the market will get even hotter for resale. While domainers seem to want to believe the market is similar to traditional real estate, the fact that most of these "hot" domains don't seem to be put to good use suggests that people are realizing that a good domain isn't everything. Marketing some new name can be a lot more effective -- which explains many of the oddly named companies you see these days.
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Recently, I have become a fan of the new style non-www addresses with odd tld.
Clearly owners of high value trademarks will want the .com for defensive purposes, but for creators of original content, a .com is less valuable to the degree that folks like me are less likely to view a non-.com as secondrate.
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Re:
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valuable domains? I don't think so.
Combinations with repetition on the alphabetic set give us, for 4 letters,
(n + r - 1)!/r!(n-1)! = (26+4-1)!/4!(25!) = 8.841762e+30/3.722690e+26 = 23751
Given most are fairly undesirable lets say there's a couple of thousand good 4 letter combos.
but for 10 letters, and not including numbers we have 1.835794e+08 = 183,579,400 or about 200 million
So, multiply that by the top level domains
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains
I count about 270, let's call that 300
or about 60 billion possible 10 letter domains.
Assuming 80 percent are useless we are still left with 12 billion good ones.
Now, how many "hot" domains (apart from google, yahoo, sex, myspace and so on) can you think of?
That's without numbers or the full UTF-16 char set by the way.
People have realised it's not worth paying for a "hot" domain. They are really just curious trophies. Anyone with a serious business plan would just invent a name that's free to fit their new company.
btw, I love the word domainers Mike. :)
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Heres why they are parked
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Keep thinking the way you are, just more possibilites for us who figured it out long ago.
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Computation
Would you mind explaining your computation? I am not questioning it, I simply want to better understand.
In return, I promise to use the term "domainers" as often as is possible.
Sincerely,
Mike
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And what if the DOMAINS themselves ARE the business plan, like having many of them which provide natural type in traffic? That is what most portfolio owners do.
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By the numbers
With repetition allowed, alpha only, there are 26^4 four letter domain names available = 456,976. With alpha, numeric and 4(?) marks, it's really more like 40^4 = 2,560,000.
It increases exponentially ;-) with 10 characters: 26^10 = 1.4 x 10^14 for alpha only and 40^10 = 1.0 x 10^16 for all of them.
These aren't combinations, they're permutations -- order counts.
Throw in the TLDs (270) and you're up to 3.8 x 10^16 alpha only 10 letter domains and 2.8 x 10^18 alpha/numeric/mark domains.
And that's only using the common english symbols.
Of course, most of these are gibberish in any language.
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just to let you know, i've already trademarked aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
so back off :P
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Odd names
I agree that www. should be abandoned, since it is no longer needed, but the idiots and dinosaurs out there would probably get confused if there was not at least a redirect tag on the www. page.
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Re: Odd names
has it ever really been needed?
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exhaustive domains set
Don't be put off by the style and "level" of this site, mathisisfun.com is a great resource with clearly researched examples.
http://www.mathsisfun.com/combinatorics/combinations-permutations.html
Perhaps I should read it more, as SkepticBlue correctly points out I have made the spectacular error or using the combinations formula where I should have used the permutations formula. So, in fact there are even more possible domains than I claimed.
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Math Is Fun
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Abandoned WWW
It's true. Luckily things like Google Sitemaps allows you to specify your preferred domain. PageRank is still a little kooky and thinks that they are two different sites for some reason, but it's a start.
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.com is default for many
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Whoa you just don't get it..
>> Why would I sell my domain name for 3 months advertising revenue?
So this guy is making $40,000 A MONTH on one domain name. And you 'think' the domain is not in use. It's in use alright, as an advertising vehicle.. a cashcow.. a golden goose! If I had some of these names I'd park them too .. Screw work.
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To: Techie112
"
I guess he was trying to squeeze some extra cash from you, my friend.
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Riddle me this...
If anything, the one thing that doesn't factor into branding, human nature and trends is logic....
Search engine traffic and various other considerations to an extent does. This explains why catchy, short names do well, just the same as well established, clear industry names.
However you try and sell a yahoo or google type name + 5 letters. Nobody would care to remember it for starters and its bound to get typed in wrong.
I'm not going into pure numbers as to why your wrong on the financial side or what the return on educated investments are. Suffice to say people do buy reasonably priced domains, it is and likely will remain a smaller version of real estate for a long time to come
Rather than thinking all domains are worth a fortune, be reasonable with the price and a good domain will sell because it IS worth it in terms of branding/keywords/immediate advertising.
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Re: Heres why they are parked
JG-Wentorth.com.... These two examples will show you what i am talking about.... you will find those two domains at the top of the google web crawler.. why? because whoever owns the domains thought outside of the box.
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Re: Re: Heres why they are parked
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Re: Heres why they are parked
JG-Wentworth.com.... These two examples will show you what i am talking about.... you will find those two domains at the top of the google web crawler.. why? because whoever owns the domains thought outside of the box.
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