The real value of LLLL.coms

This is the year of short domains without doubt. 2-3-4 letter .com prices are in the sky and when I login to any marketplace I see nothing else than short, meaningless patterns. Almost all the money that was invested into keyword domains earlier went into this segment. So let’s analyze it how much does an LLLL.com worth in reality.

Domains were invented to host websites, this is a fact. End users earn money from their domains if there is a website there with lots of visitors. While the current hype is fueled by investors and not end users, investors also don’t have too much other options here than reselling it to an end user. And an end user will like it if a successful website can be hosted on the domain. LLLL.coms have little or no search traffic, little or no type-in traffic and therefore no parking revenue; they were not used in the past so cannot be used for SEO. So their worth is equal to the chance that a website can be more successful on an LLLL.com than on any other (typically longer) domain – this is what I call intrinsic value.

The chance of being more successful on an LLLL.com than on any other domain can be analyzed by checking the enrichment of LLLL.coms in the Alexa top 1M. Please find all LLLL.coms and their pattern (C for any consonant, and V for any vowel) in the Alexa top 1M in the table below.