Domaining.org.uk

Towards the end of 2007 all four letter .com domain names were registered. Four letter dot com domain names (sometimes written as LLLL.com) are now selling at a minimum price of $40.00 and a great many sell for much, much more. I would expect these prices to increase modestly, but steadily, over the course of this year. 

So, how long will it be before all LLLL.co.uk domains are registered?

That question is hard to answer but there are a number of market drivers that mean, to me, that four letter .co.uk domain names may sell out relatively quickly. Importantly, domainers who missed the opportunity to make profits with LLLL.com domains are chasing other opportunities such as LLLL.net and LLLL.org domains and it looks like they are next to sell out. After that it could be LLLL.co.uk s turn.

There are also plenty of brandable four letter .co.uk domains left and they are steadily being bought up as the available pool of decent domain names generally gets ever smaller.

Clearly, four letter domains with less popular letters such as Q,V,X,Y and Z are likely to be the last to be sold. However, many domains names with such letters are already developed into fully fledged websites.

Here are a few developed sites I found where at least one of the four letters is Q,V,X,Y or Z:-

QXYZ.co.uk  is an international technology firm

ZXZX.co.uk is a programmers personal website

VWD.co.uk (only 3 letters, though) is a lottery syndicate website

TOXI.co.uk is a developers portfolio website

VISN.co.uk is the website of Vision Internet

These were found with just a brief random search around the net, and I would have found far more if I’d searched for longer. 

Could it be that within say 12 to 18 months all .co.uk domains will be registered? In my own personal view I think we could see them all registered within 18 months although many domainers disagree. Then we will see prices moving slowly upwards, although it is unlikely that these rises will be massive.

So what do you think. Do you think UK LLLL.co.uk domains will be fully registered soon? Do you think they will never sell out? Are you buying four letter .uk short domains? Tell us what you think, below.

Lets imagine, for a moment, that you are a bricks and mortar retailer selling classic car spare parts in London, England and you want to set up a website. The chances of you finding even a remotely generic domain name at a reasonable price is negligible. So you decide to go with something like DavesCarSpareParts.com. Its not a great domain, but it is descriptive.

Once your site is up and running you look at how to market your website. The name you have chosen is the best you could find, and you may even be able to rank well when people type in ‘Daves Car Spare Parts’ into the Google search box, but few people type this in, anyway. What is worse its hard to say over the telephone and its not that easy to remember.

So if you cannot get a reasonably generic domain for your business, what can you do?

The problem is one that many, many businesses face and there is a trend developing that may have serious implications for domain names and domaining.

According to trend monitoring website  The Trendwatch, the solution Japanese businesses in this situation are starting to adopt is interesting, to say the least.  There is an emerging trend for Japanese businesses to optimize their sites for specific keywords and promoting the keywords people should use to search for their business in advertising, as well as the site URL:-

It turns out that search boxes seem to be the latest thing in advertising all over the little island, and have been for the past few months. Not only do they list the URL, but they also place a search box in the ad, with the keywords already placed.

So the business in our example just needs to pick some memorable keywords and encourage people to search on these words such as ‘car spares’, ‘a1 parts’ or even ‘Daves spares’.

I think that trends like this pose a significant threat to the value of generic domains. If its going to cost me $2,600,000 for a domain like Pizza.com but I can rank no 1 in Google for ‘love pizza’ at a fraction of that price annually, then I am going to at least consider the cheaper option. Furthermore, for many businesses this might be their only option. Keywords are back but this time its serious.