I came across a really fascinating article yesterday about Dennis Forbes, who has been studying a huge list of domain names in his spare time, making him something of a domainologist. Some of the things Mr. Forbes has found by looking at the list (which he got from someone at VeriSign) are truly amazing:
All of the 1,000 most common English words have been snatched up. The word “a” appears more than any other, though most of the time, of course, it’s just a letter in a longer word. The least-used common word is “consonant,” Mr. Forbes says, which is in just 42 domains, including “consonantpain.com,” which isn’t a misspelling but a word game.
Mr. Forbes checked the U.S. Census Bureau’s 1,219 most-common male names, the 2,841 most-common female names and the 10,000 most-common surnames; all were booked. Not only that, but when you link the top 300 first names with the top 300 last names, 89 percent of the resulting combinations are taken for male names and 84 percent for female ones.
And more generally?
For example, for every possible two-character and three-character combination, including both letters and numbers _ all possible domains are taken. Virtually all English words with four letters are claimed; those that aren’t are usually contractions, and Web rules don’t allow apostrophes.
Half of all domains are between nine and 15 characters long; the average length is 13. A domain can have, at most, 63 characters, and there are 550 such domains. In fact, some people have made a haiku-like art out of 63-character domain names.
Told you it was interesting! I’ve been known to buy domains on a whim, but there are people who have turned it into a multi-million dollar business. Digital real-estate is valuable as well it seems!
Read: NFD News
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