The Domain Name T-Deficit
Monday, June 28th, 2010
Calculating the frequency of first letters in domain names.
Is the letter “T” under-represented on the interwebs?
Maybe, although you can draw your own conclusions as to why, and if you really care.
Paul Kedrosky took a look at the top 1 million domain names on the web according to traffic and tallied them according to their first letter. He then compared that to the frequency of each first letter in the English language.
He found that the letter T has the biggest difference between starting a domain name and starting an English word. 6.5% of the top 1 million domain names start with “T”, while 16.7% of the English language starts with the letter.
The most popular starting letter for domain names was “A”, starting off 7.1% of the top one million sites. Could this be a throwback to the days of Yahoo! Directory and other web directories that were sorted in alphabetical order?
The most over-represented letter is “C”, which starts off 6.8% of domain names while starting only 3.5% of English words.
Further Reading:
all keyword domains gets THE prefix so letter t is leading
@ Even – that would suggest the opposite of what Kedrosky found.
it will never work so that all websites equally share a percentage for each starting letter
you would think ‘t’ would be popular though
for two word domains in particular
anyway, i doubt twitter are sweating on it
lol
Based on the article “s” and “m” are the top 2 in the list and not “a”. I guess the list is column is not sorted.
The first flaw I see with this analysis is that domains are global. I’m sure there are first letters in german, spanish, japanese domains that distort the use of first letters in english.
(I’ll let someone more knowledgeable than me figure out which major foreign domains skew’d the analysis.)