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Analysis of short domain names and popularity
Short dot com domain names command a high premium in the resale market. Even seeminglymeaningless 3-letter combinations sell for many thousands of dollars at domain trading forums.Such high prices are often justified based on their relative scarcity compared with longer domainnames. But are these very short domains really more likely to be popular? And, if so, do somecategories of short domains do better than others?
In order to calculate the effect of a domain’s length on popularity we examined the most popularwebsites in the world ranked by traffic. We took our list domains from Alexa, which publishes afree list of the Top 500 global domains.
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From this list we examined all dot com domains with 3 orfewer characters. We further divided these names into 5 categories:
Category Members Description
NN.com 100 2-digit domains between 00.com and 99.comNNN.com 1000 3-digit domains between 000.com and 999.comLL.com 676 2-letter domains (e.g. qq.com and hp.com)LLL.com 17,576 3-letter domains (e.g. msn.com and udn.com)3-char.com 28,0803-character domains containing at least one letter and onenumber (e.g. fc2.com and 6rb.com)
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Next we checked how many names from each category were to be found among the Top 500.Here’s what we found:
Category In Top 500
NN.com 3NNN.com 4LL.com 5LLL.com 223-char.com 3
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Our list of the top 500 domains was obtained on November 9, 2006. Alexa calculates their rankings based on trackingdata from millions of users with Alexa’s browser toolbar installed. Although Alexa’s rankings are by no means a perfectrepresentation of the true relative traffic a website receives, we believe them to be highly accurate for the web’s mostpopular websites. These top domains generate a volume of traffic which would be difficult to hide from Alexa’s albeitnon-random data source, and would also be difficult to fake by artificial means.
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Although the number of 3-character domains is sometimes said to be 46,656, that number (36 to the 3
rd
power)includes all of the LLL.com and NNN.com names as well. To get the number of “true” 3-character domains you have tosubtract out these other names (46,656 - 17,576 - 1000 = 28,080).
 
 These numbers might be interesting
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, but by themselves they are not all that meaningful. To find outwhat they mean we need to know whether these quantities are significantly different from whatmight have randomly occurred, and how the quantities compare to the relative scarcities of eachcategory of name.
The global domain market
There are currently about 112 million domain names registered in all of the Top Level Domains(TLD’s), including both “generic” TLD’s (e.g. com and .net) and country code specific TLD’s (e.g..de for Germany).
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 Based on this estimate of total worldwide domain names, and assuming that each of these individualdomain names had an equal probability of being a high-traffic name, how many from each categorymight we expect to find in the Top 500 list?
Category Expected number in Top 500
NN.com 0.00045NNN.com 0.0045LL.com 0.0030LLL.com 0.0783-char.com 0.13
As the table above shows, if the distribution of high-traffic domains was completely independent of length and category, we would most likely not find a single domain from
any
of our categories inthe Top 500.Clearly, setting aside for now the “why”, there is an
extremely strong correlation
between shortdomains and popular websites.
Scarcity versus Popularity
The chart below shows the ratio between the actual numbers of domains in the Top 500 relative tothe expected amount in each category. This gives us a measure of the relative strength of eachcategory in terms of producing high-traffic websites.
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For the list of all individual domain names in each of these categories, see Appendix A at the end of this document.
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This information comes from a November, 2006 report by Verisign. Seehttp://www.verisign.com/static/040029.pdf  
 
Scarcity/Popularity ratio
1.236,7201,65789628023.9
01,0002,0003,0004,0005,0006,0007,0008,000
All .com 3-char.com LLL.com NNN.com LL.com NN.com
     M    u     l     t     i    p     l     i    e    r
 We have added in all .com names as an additional category. As you can see, .com names in generalhave just a 23% better chance of making the Top 500 than we would be expected by chance alone.
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 3-character .com names “beat the odds” by a multiple of 23.9, LLL.com by a multiple of 280, andso on until we get to NN.com names, which have an astounding 6,720 times more members in theTop 500 than would be expected by random chance alone.We can see from this chart that not only is it the case that short names in general are more likely tobe in the Top 500, but this relationship between scarcity and relative likelihood of popularity holdstrue for every sub-category of short name as well. The scarcest category (NN.com with 100 names)is, on a name-by-name basis, the most effective at generating Top 500 domains. This is followed byLL.com (676 members), then NNN.com (1000 members), LLL.com (17,576 members) and finally3-char.com (28,080 members).Lest it be argued that scarcity is, by itself, enough to guarantee a high proportion of populardomains, it should be noted that Top 500 lists only 2 LLL.net domains (a category just as scarce asLLL.com) and not a single short domain with a hyphen, even though L-L.com and N-N.com are justas hard to find as their 2 character, unhyphenated counterparts. Clearly some scarcely populatedcategories are much more effective than others.
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We are estimating a total of 58 million .com domains currently registered. 292 of those made the Alexa Top 500 listwe examined.
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