Tips for choosing brandable domain names that sell on BrandBucket

The marketplaces for brandable domain names are flourishing. The websites offer catchy domain names for end users at a relative high (around 2-3 000 USD) price. Of course, this market has caught the attention of domainers’ as well: many of them want to sell their domain names on the most popular brandable domain marketplace, BrandBucket.

In order to help domainers, there have been an analysis and also a list on the names sold on BrandBucket around. Although these post provide useful information on BrandBucket domain name sales – however, in order to be able to give advice on hand-registering or buying tactic, a comparison of listed and sold domain names is much more relevant.

Thus, we have made a thorough analysis and comparison of different parameters of listed and sold domains on BrandBucket with the assumption that we provide a useful tool for domainers. Much to our surprise we came to the following conclusion…well, let’s see.

The sold domains names were taken from the above mentioned list from dngeek.com. We have randomly selected 524 domains (see the Table below) from the more than 20,000 domains currently for sale on BrandBucket.

As the number of analyzed sold (1105) and listed (524) domain names is not the same, so the distribution percentage of a given parameter was taken into account. If the distribution of parameters does not differ between listed and sold domain names that means that the given parameter is not a determining factor. As an example, the fact that most domain names beginning with the letter ‘s’ does not mean anything if the highest number among the listed domain names also start with ‘s’. On the contrary, a huge difference of a given parameter between listed and sold domain names reflects to a possible influence on sale success.

We have analyzed and compared the following parameters of sold and listed domain names:

• First letter
• Last letter
• Domain length
• Domain age

So let’s see:

First letter distribution of sold and listed domains on BrandBucket

We consider large differences between red (sold) and green (listed for sale) columns. The relative chances for sales are greater in case of a domain name starting with a character with greater sold than listed ratio. This means that we have more chances of selling our domain if it starts with the letter ‘a’, ‘j’, ‘m’, ‘q’, ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’, whereas the worst choices are domains starting with ‘v’. This is true assuming that the relative small number of listed domains remains with the exception of ‘a’ and ‘m’, where the chances of sales are high in spite of high number of listings. As we can see from the figure, the highest number of domain names starting with ‘s’ are sold. However, the ratio of listed domain names starting with ‘s’ is even higher, so our chance to sell a domain name starting with ‘s’ is lower than average. These results are not surprising: it is known that start-ups are advised to choose a starting letter for their product either from the beginning or from the end of the alphabet.

Next, let us consider the ending characters:

Last letter distribution of sold and listed domains on BrandBucket

As can be seen,’x’,’y’ and ‘u’ are the characters where a difference between listing and sold ratio exists. Domains ending with  ‘x’ and ‘y’ are easier to sell, whereas domains ending with ‘u’ do not have a high chance of a successful sale. Since the domains listed on BrandBucket cannot be sorted according to their end character, this figure proves that comparison of relative listing and sold ratio shows the true sale chance of a domain listing.

Next, the effect of domain length on sale success was analyzed:

Domain length distribution of sold and listed domains on BrandBucket

From the figure it is obvious that domainers’ and buyers’ point of view on the ideal character number is quite different: buyers would definitely not go for a domain longer than 9 characters, no matter how many of these long domains are listed.

And the most exciting one is the domain age. Nowadays many domainers still hand-register .com domains in spite of the fact that .com is just oversaturated in the hope of selling them at one of the brandable domain name marketplace.

Domain age distribution of sold and listed domains on BrandBucket

Here is the truth: the chances of hand-registering a domain today and sell it for thousands are very low. 60% of listed and only 10% of sold domains on BrandBucket were registered this year. It should be noted that we did not have information on the dates of sales (i.e. a domain name registered back in 2013 and sold on the same year is indicated as a 2 year old domain in our figure), so 10% of the sold domains is probably underestimated. However, we can state that at least 50% of the sold domains are aged i.e. more than 5 years old.

In summary, based on the analysis above, simple rules can be defined that maximize the chance of selling a domain:

• Domain name should start with ‘a’ or ‘m’  (‘j’, ‘q’, ‘x’, ‘y’, ‘z’ are good as well, but a bit risky if many new domain names come with these letters)
• Domain name should end with ‘x’ and ‘y’
• Domain name should be possibly under 7 character long
• The chances of selling your domain will be increased if it is older than five years. Of course that does not mean that hand-registering is over, as you register a domain even for $1, whereas buying an aged domain costs much more, so your profit might be higher by hand-registering.

So now go and check if xerox.com is available, since it fulfills all these rules 😉