.ly

Originally .ly domains are the country-code domain extensions for Lybia. However, as .ly is a great extension for domain hack for English words, it has also been used internationally. This is a short, brandable extension with the danger of users directly typing in the “name”ly.com domain. As an example, bit.ly is now redirected to bitly.com.

There are about 120 sites with .ly extension with better than 1M Alexa rank. The top Alexa .ly sites include url manipulation or url shortener services. The most popular among these are bit.ly, ow.ly url shorteners. Snip.ly and sur.ly services are for modifying the target page of outbound links. List.ly is for creating, sharing  and collaborating on lists. Its general use as extension is also reflected by the fact that the .ly sites with Alexa 100k or greater are all non Lybia specific. Its yearly fee is $75, which is relatively expensive. Thus, the room for domain speculation is somewhat narrowed as compared to .com domains.

The above table lists the most expensive sales of .ly domain names in the past years. Among these, local.ly stands out with its $100k price, and instant.ly is the most successful according to traffic.