Premium letters or Big BS ?
I am known for never shutting my mouth even if I have nothing to gain, simply because I hate BS…I hate lies, I simply hate wrong things.
There is a myth going around from years in the industry: Premium letters.
Newbies asked me this many times. What is a Premium letter? And what is a non premium letter.
Some website in the past created this “fable” and lots of sheeps…ehm pardon me “investors” believed that since they believed that some letters were not Premium, they did not buy them so the prices of acronym domains (such as LLL or LLLL) started to decrease.
The habit grew so much that in a catch 22 or paradox, what that site originally wrote , was starting to become true. Like if I wrote that “pigs fly” in 2003 and all people coming later were believing it, then you`ll hear in 2008 that yes pigs fly and by reading this everywhere, a new domainer may start believing pigs REALLY fly.
Years later, in 2008, the fable is still going on.
That`s enough , it`s time to look at REAL DATAS and be smarter than sheeps.
The following study is from 2002 so it`s based BEFORE THE MISTAKEN GUIDE from the 3 chars site came out and it has more value because it was not affected by that, while recent datas are just the mirror of the mistakes domainers have done most of the times following that “guide”.
http://www.mcgees.org/fourletterdomains.html
Survey of Four-Letter Domains
In March 2002 I conducted a survey of four-letter .com domains currently reserved on the Web. There are 456,976 (264) such domains, so I probably annoyed the whois server administrators. Here are some statistics on what I found:
Four-letter domains reserved as of March 2002: 257,400 (56.3%)
Percentage of palindromic domains (adda, zyyz, etc.) reserved: 93.5%
Percentage of domains containing ‘faq’ reserved: 46 out of 52 (88.5%). The ones not yet registered are faqj, faqk, faql, faqo, faqr, and faqv.
I have only found two four-letter words that have not been registered: tahr, a wild mountain goat, and yirr, listed as an echoic in the OED and found in Burns.
Here are some more statistics:
Registration rate for domains beginning with a certain letter:
Most popular:
a: 72.7%
w: 70.4%
t: 68.0%
u: 66.4%
i: 66.3%Least popular:
v: 37.6%
y: 34.2%
z: 33.6%
x: 32.1%
q: 26.7%Registration rate for domains containing a certain letter:
Most popular:
a: 72.7%
s: 70.9%
c: 68.3%
i: 67.4%
t: 65.5%Least popular:
v: 43.7%
y: 41.8%
x: 35.6%
z: 32.9%
q: 22.2%Registration rate for domains containing a given two-letter pair:
Most popular:
us: 91.4%
in: 90.1%
ma: 90.0%
sa: 89.5%
as: 88.8%Least popular:
gq: 10.3%
qv: 10.3%
qk: 10.2%
vq: 9.3%
fq: 8.9% (46 of the 50 least popular two-letter pairs contain q. The most popular q-pairs are iq, hq, and aq.)
Also the LETTER FREQUENCY in several languages may help a bit (despite you need to understand that this is not specific only for ACRONYMS:
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=914452
So as you can see , according to these statistics the letter U in English is used more than letters like M , C and F and is right in the middle of the list (same in the italian language).
If we analise the stats regarding French and German , then the U is used even more.
How can anyone dispute this and don`t call it Premium ?
Right…first of all, calling letters Premium and not Premium is MISLEADING.
This is what I think we should call them :
MOST USED LETTERS or LESS USED LETTERS.
and my chart based on the actual market (which evolves with the evolving Internet Worldwide penetration)
MOST USED LETTERS:
LEVEL 1: A-B-C-D-E-F-G-I-L-M-N-O-P-R-S-T-W
LEVEL 2: H-U-V
LEVEL 3: J-K-Y
LEVEL 4: Z
LEVEL 5: Q-X
For the records, I ran a survey at NamePros lately over the letter U and this were the results:
http://www.namepros.com/domain-name-discussion/391166-the-letter-u-premium-or-not.html?
Also, it`s about time that some old domainers wake up and realise that English is JUST A PART (BECOMING SMALLER each day) of the Internet. Other languages are used more and more widely.
For example, did you know that the Italian Alphabet has only 21 letters? No J-K-W-X-Y in the land of Ferrari!
While in China, did you know that Chinese does not have the letters A-E-I-O and V ?
And did you know that in Germany the letter Z is very good?
I`m welcomming comments, so have your say!
Premium letter classification is BS. But some people probably need it.
“Sex” contains “x”, but it’s still a “premium” word.
Hello, I was discussing ACRONYMS.
SEX is a dictionary words and dictionary words of course should not be taken into this debate.
Thanks
Thank you for the great post. Plain, clear data is something that we can not argue against!
Very good analysis. I think the 4 Letter domain Game is a round go round between domainers, and only very few of them are developped at this moment. But one thing is for sure, it is at this momemt a sure value in any portfolio. Keep on your good work. CIAO !!
Hi Dietmar, thanks for taking the time to post your comment.
I have to disagree, it`s not a game a large part of the whole LLLL.com are already developed.
I have been a financial advisor and stocktrader for several years so let me explain you something in plain simple words.
Many people buy stocks in the hope they rise in value (or open short positions in the hope they lose value but that`s another story, not applicable here). And when they need money they need a market there ready to get cash back. That does not necessarily means that they don`t believe anymore in the company they were invested in.
Sometime people need urgently money, they get sick, they need a new car because their old one broke…etc.
Other people instead need/want to INVEST in long term bets (that`s what most of investments are: BETS).
I invite you to do some research and maybe even wait some months or years since no one with a brain would hope to become millionaire OVERNIGHT.
And, despite the posted survey is referred to LLLL.com , the whole sense of this post is in general referred to all acronyms: 2, 3 or 4 letters.
One other significant factor I can think of is the country represented by a particular cc-TLD.
eg in Australia, the letter A for Australia, Q for Queensland, S for Sydney etc have extra importance. I’d expect that acronyms with ‘i’ in them (particularly at beginning or end) with the extension .it would have extra value? Is this true?
So many companies (end users) use a geographic term in their company name which makes the acronym more sought after.
Great post BTW
I agree with you 100%. One thing that i was thinking about while reading the post near the end was, that the bottom 4 levels in your chart directly relate to the letters not being used in other languages besides english or used seldomly in other languages. So in all reality the statistics could be flawed because of the many many different laguages on the internet. If you look at these letters which you say are not used in italian, J-K-W-X-Y, you will noticed all of them are in the bottom 4 levels except the W. Also if you look at the letters that are not in chinese, you will notice that there is no V which is in the bottom 4 levels as well. Although there maybe no A-E-I-O in chinese but i think we can all agree that these letters are in most languages.
So in all reality the letters should not be listed as “Premium” but as “Most Used” as you have stated. Great post!