Looking for a cool new domain for your business, and want something short and pithy? You’re probably SOL because …
… every one of the 676 two-byte .COM domains is registered (and registrars now require domains to be at least three characters long).
… every one of the 17,576 three-letter .COM domains is registered. If you throw in numbers, of the 46,656 possibilities there are only 228 open, but not available for another month (and speculators are circling like vultures).
Of the 456,976 four-letter domains, a whopping 97,786 are free, a bit over 20% of the possible combinations — if QFEV.COM is what you’re looking for. Add in numbers, and there are 1.16 million available. You, too, can make ML7G.COM a household name!
And of the five-letter domains, only about 8% are taken. Huzzah!
The average .COM domain is eleven letters long. The maximum is 63 letters — and, yes, DIDYOUKNOWTHATYOUCANONLYHAVESIXTY-THREECHARACTERSINADOMAIN-NAME.com is already taken (but for sale).
The article has many more fun stats, including how many of the most common male and female and family names are already taken (don’t hold your breath). Fun stuff.
Hmm – I suppose hyphenation is the new succinctity.
I have it on good authority that hyphens are a huge gaffe in domain names, and that only unstylish and stupid people use them.
More on this intense debate here and here. The gist of the argument is that (a) people don’t understand terms like “hyphen” and “dash,” or else get confused and think they are actual words in the domain, and (b) it looks silly when used to excess. Whether this is true with non-hypenated domains as well I leave as an excercise to teh reader.
I was always happy that I managed to score sfad.org, even if I do get the occasional misdirected email for .com or .net.
I have no problem with being a .org. In fact, I chose it intentionally, since we seem to be a non-profit organization.