The secret to 4 letter domains: include one (and only one) digit

http://semmyfun.blogspot.com/2010/09/get-that-4-letter-domain-youve-always.html

by nerfhammer • 16 years ago

82 67 16 years ago

semmyfun.blogspot.com

pjhyett2• 16 years ago

If you really want a 4-letter .com, plenty of people sell them for relatively little money. I own dufz.com, ikxr.com, izkc.com, liwk.com, puzd.com and I don't remember paying more than $10 for each. I also own vjot.com, a more readable name, which I think I paid around $100 for, but this was a couple of years ago.

count• 16 years ago

There are a few not taken - I've got one that I only paid $9 for :)

hcurtiss• 16 years ago

I'm interested in a couple domains that appear to be unused, but I'm having trouble contacting the owner. How do you go about making the offer? I've emailed a couple contacts now obtained off of whois and it seems they never reply.

pjhyett2• 16 years ago

Sometimes the domains will be listed for sale on sedo.com, otherwise you can use a service (also on sedo.com) to try and contact the owner on your behalf.

qjz• 16 years ago

As a domain owner and frequent recipient of such requests, here are a few tips:

First of all, don't assume the domains are unused. You have no way of knowing this. I have domains that are critical to my infrastructure but don't necessarily have a web site (or even public DNS records). I'll never sell them. I have others that are look-alike domains that aren't activated in order to prevent conflict with my other domains. I'm unlikely to sell these, either.

Secondly, and this is really important, make your offer as professional and informative as possible. I never reply to offers from freemail addresses that amount to something like, "Hey, I'm interested in buying a domain that you don't appear to be using for an awesome project I'm working on. Please reply ASAP. George". You don't have to divulge your business model, but at least include the name of the domain you're interested in, your FULL name, a phone number, and preferably a company name and/or related URL. Consider including your offer in the email, since it's more likely to get a response if it's at all worth considering. Serious offers are much more likely to get a reply, even if it's to say, "Sorry, not interested."

If you call and leave a message, include the same information. But keep in mind that I probably won't return a long distance call, so consider saying that you'll call back at a certain time, and do it. This will help to show that you're seriously interested.

Whatever you do, don't file a complaint with the registrar or try to initiate an unauthorized transfer. This will only annoy the domain owner and could destroy your credibility.

Finally, understand that the domain owner has no obligation to respond to your offer in any way. If you really want a response, follow up a couple of weeks later, and be prepared to make a serious offer. If you don't want to be considered a pest, stop after 3 attempts and give it a reasonable long rest before trying again (6 months to a year).

mcyger• 16 years ago

I've purchased quite a few by contacting the owner.

Always specify the domian name and make your outreach email as professional and formal as possible. I never include an actual offer so I can at least get them to reply (if you offer too little, they may not even reply). I never discuss the reason for purchase. The first email is only to determine their interest and start the dialogue.

If they fail to respond in a week (it takes time), I call the phone number listed on the whois record and try the personal touch.

Poiesis2• 16 years ago

I had someone call me up for a domain our company wasn't using any more. He asked, and I simply transferred ownership. It had been made clear to me earlier that the domain was not at all desired by the company.

bkudria• 16 years ago

On the other hand, four-letter domains which are actual English words (like the name of my company) go for much, much, much more.

niyazpk• 16 years ago

Probably other than some URL shortening service what are the reasons to be so desperate for a 4 letter domain name?

Fancy URLs for personal use can be reason I suppose. http://al3x.net/ comes to mind.

jjcm2• 16 years ago

Exactly, personal reasons. I have my initials as the domain name for my personal site.

X-Istence• 16 years ago

I own my nickname (0x58) as a .com and .org. I forgot to register .net when I registered .com and I have regretted it ever since.

icey4• 16 years ago

If you decide to do this, save yourself some headaches by also registering the spelled out version of the number as well (if it's going to be pronounced as a number).

This doesn't matter for domains like al3x.net, but it does matter for domains like ftw1.com. There will inevitably be users that try to go to ftwone.com (and possibly ftwwon.com as well).

thomasb• 16 years ago

Just registered ftw1.com... I like this idea. I think there could be a few interesting applications.

lucisferre2• 16 years ago

Ugh domain squatting is possibly the most morally bankrupt web-based business practice I can think of.

icey4• 16 years ago

How does it differ from real-estate speculation in your mind? Do you develop every domain name you purchase?

DrJokepu2• 16 years ago

There's quite a lot of difference between buying a domain with the intention or prospect of putting something of value it and buying up a large array of domains without any intention whatsoever to ever put any content on it or make any use of it besides squatting. The second is a blatant waste of preciously limited resources and should not be allowed in my opinion.

_delirium• 16 years ago

Also a morally bankrupt business. ;-)

(And also, via inflating a property bubble, in no small part responsible for current economic difficulties.)

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

real-estate speculation

...something which has not worked out so well for many economies. I don't want to make it illegal or anything - although I could live with some sort of -use-it-or-lose-it clause that kicks in after a year, and which proved a decent rule of thumb in the real world. Indeed, the term 'squatting' in relation to real estate describes gaining ownership by continuous occupation of property - which is a lot more work than going to the public records office and writings 'dibs!' on the land register.

Domain squatting is just a waste of productive resources, based entirely on the hope of extracting an economic rent from someone else later; and that rent is in proportion to the productive use a site developer (not the squatter) could make of a given domain name. The only investment squatters make in a domain name is usually to stick an ad page on there and track accidental visitors, which may give a useful data point to the buyer; but even then, the buyer is almost certainly not purchasing the domain because of such random traffic. Although registering a domain has a nominal cost, it's not really an investment in any economic sense; indeed, an ad-farm or 'coming soon' page on a domain which receives any significant amount of random traffic is polluted before it becomes branded, albeit very lightly and in a fairly harmless way. The rational economic price for a domain you own which is not making any money is the cost to date of holding the domain plus $1. Any profit beyond that is predicated on the buyer's project being sufficiently advanced and well-capitalized that writing a large check to the squatter is less painful than picking a different name.

The only economic benefit I've ever heard a squatter claim to justify their asking price was that they had made it uneconomical for someone to put porn there. Can you imagine this if domains were actually real estate? 'Yes, I do want a million dollars for this barren patch of desert with a weatherbeaten billboard and a cow skull - you should be grateful there ain't a saloon or a whorehouse here already.'

nerfhammer3• 16 years ago

Yet everyone who says this has a few domains they're sitting on and might use one day just as soon they get around to it...

bkmartin• 16 years ago

Really?! EVERYONE?! Hmm, which query on the interwebs did you use to find that fact???

I better go check my registrar account because someone must have broken in and put a useless domain name in there... I hate it when that happens.

lucisferre2• 16 years ago

I don't.

SkyMarshal• 16 years ago

I have a few domains I like but haven't gotten around to using yet, but that's a far cry from having thousands I'm just trying to flip and extract rent from.

PhrosTT• 16 years ago

I think I heard some talk about raising the yearly domain price... this is really the only good way to fight this crap.

Make it like $30 / year... price out tasters.

ohashi5• 16 years ago

Only at the margins would the registered stuff change. Tasting is a different problem from people actually buying. Tasting was a free loophole where you could buy a domain and 'return' it within 5 days and not get charged. It now costs 25 cents per domain over X domains (some reasonable numbers, i think few hundred for legitimate client mistakes), per registrar.

Revisor3• 16 years ago

Read my short guide to a good domain elsewhere on HN and for your own sake avoid domains with digits.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1659674

qeorge• 16 years ago

Good tips. I advise the "radio test" to all of my clients.

nerfhammer3• 16 years ago

Unfortunately the search for short domains leads people to abandon this rule. (worst offender of all time: del.icio.us)

If you look at the YC list it looks like at least half the YC startups would fail the radio test: https://spreadsheets0.google.com/ccc?key=t_toYuVyy6fci0MAiIa...

jamesbritt• 16 years ago

Unless the digit actually plays into the name.

I put up the Web 2.0 Validator site: web2.0validator.com (now on vacation until I get around to updating some code).

Interestingly, someone wrote to me asking how I managed to get such a domain; I pointed out the domain is simply 0validator.com, nothing magical.

Which of, course, means I can plan on web3.0validator.com :)

Revisor3• 16 years ago

Domain hacks are funny but counterproductive and problematic in the long run. Domain hacks involving digits are a marketing problem squared.

See the reasoning behind the switch from del.icio.us to Delicious.com:

So why did we switch to delicious.com? We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.

http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/07/oh-happy-day.html

dangrossman• 16 years ago

There always seem to be unregistered 4-letter .com domains when I look. When I bought awio.com it was simply unregistered. Taking a sample of 500 names and then saying all of the hundreds of thousands of other names must be registered is just wrong.

nerfhammer3• 16 years ago

I tried it with much larger samples for that character distribution and have yet to find a single unregistered name. You can't say with certainty that it must be that 100% are registered but I think that extrapolating from large random samples is a pretty good way of making inferences.

ohashi5• 16 years ago

Faster to just scan the zonefiles. You run into a black swan problem with this technique. However, that said, all of them WERE registered, TWICE throughout history. Once way back and again more recently (someone wrote 2007, sounds about right). People have realized the cost of holding them is higher than the potential sales in many cases, especially at the bottom of the quality barrel. They weren't kept because they sucked but domain investors like all people like patterns and herding and get sucked into poor investments.

drenei• 16 years ago

"The results surprised me. Apparently the optimal number of digits to include is 1, and the more digits you have the more likely it is to be registered. In fact, it appears that someone has registered every dot-com combination of 4 digits."

It shouldn't be completely surprising. The more characters (c) than digits (d) in a name, the more options available. 3c1d has more options (26x26x26x10=175760) than 4d (10x10x10x10=10000).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorial

EDIT: And also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_theory

dododo• 16 years ago

for 3c1d i think a better count is four times higher: you can have aaa1, aa1a, a1aa and 1aaa, which your count of 26x26x26x10 only includes one of these options.

i don't think factorial is relevant here: combinatorially, factorial represents the process of sampling without replacement: so if you were to be able to only use each letter once in each domain, then you would get 26!/4!26! possibilities for 4c.

this is combinatorics: the art of advanced counting, not probability, really.

mrcharles• 16 years ago

Another trick is to use .org or something. I got my four letter domain name a few years back, and it's even pronounceable! And it was pretty close to the kind of thing I wanted.

bluh.org, a great website name for pointless nonsense!

bond• 16 years ago

As far as i know 4 letter .com were all registered in 2007...

What you see now is people who didn't renew their 4 letter .com domains...

And for those who are down voting me, here's the proof:

http://www.namepros.com/short-domain-discussion/161235-llll-...

terra_t• 16 years ago

Here's an old report on how 3 letter domains got snapped up at the height of the .com bubble...

http://www.honeylocust.com/trigraphs/

jjcm2• 16 years ago

The real secret is to just register a .org name.

jjcm.org

DotSauce• 16 years ago

Give me an example of a 4 character domain with a digit in it and I will suggest a much better alternative. If you want to have a respectable web presence, use keywords or find a quality brand on the aftermarket.

If you must, the real secret to 4 letter domains is backordering as they expire or making an offer to existing owners.

ohashi5• 16 years ago

How to register the least valued domains algorithmically :)

I suspect where the 1 digit is makes a big difference LLLD being a decent combo or DLLL but LDLL or LLDL are probably almost all garbage.

marknutter• 16 years ago

Awesome post! I just bought 4RE4.com for my little web shop, areastudios.com. I think I may actually use the 4 letter version from now on :)

emehrkay• 16 years ago

Mine is 8trk.com //we'll (re)launch later this year and I'll do a "rate my startup" post :)

obiefernandez• 16 years ago

Thanks for the awesome advice. Just registered ob1e.com :)

jasonjei• 16 years ago

This tactic surprisingly works very well with Chinese websites. Most Chinese firms have reached the conclusion that a short domain name with letters and numbers work even better than a cute, clever wordplay. Those names don't work in Chinese anyway as Chinese is based off ideographs. Short combinations of letters and numbers (especially with 8s) work well.

kilomanamolik• 16 years ago

what are your favorite domain checker tools?

ljf2• 16 years ago

loads of good true 4 letter domains around if you don't won't a .com just bought we.gd om.gd and whi.im all at standard price and none been regd before. try iwantmyname.com to find and reg 2 letter names but other registrars often sell them cheaper. I used modone.gd and domainmonster.com

(and before I get accused of squatting... we good is the name of an company I'll be opening after my current employment, thought om.gd will be perfect of url shortening with a twist... wait and see. whi.im is for 'things to do suggestions that poll your friends' ... lots of ideas planned at the moment just not got names for the others.

ljf2• 16 years ago

also eurodns.com sell .com.es for just $5 a year, not bad for doing hacks like here.xyz.com.es for(here xyz comes) hard to spell out but cheap enough not to care...

The secret to 4 letter domains: include one (and only one) digit

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