…but it paints availability in the best possible light.
Ever since new top level domains started rolling out, Verisign has been pushing the idea that plenty of high quality .com domain names are still available.
It’s sort of right.
Take a look at this infographic the company just put out.
The company has some interesting stats. Did you know that 7 out of 10 .com domains looked up are available? Or that 23 million times a day, a .com domain name availability check is successful?
Of course, how you calculate the numbers makes a difference. Curiously, there’s a footnote next to the 23 million number that suggests this was just measured on a single day.
One area in which Verisign is definitely playing with the numbers to make them favorable is the stat that 95 percent of five-character .com combinations and 99% of 6 character combos are available.
That includes numbered and hyphenated domains like d3-r9.com. Take out digits and hyphens and the percentages drop significantly.
However, Verisign points out that 13% of daily .com registrations are five to six characters long, and that 73% of these contain only letters. (Who knows if end users or just domainers are registering these.)
The truth is, there are a lot of good .com domains available. And a lot of them exactly match new TLDs that people are paying a premium to register.
When I compare new TLD registrations to the matching .com (e.g. something.expert to somethingexpert.com), I often find 75% or so of the domains available in .com.
jane says
I randomly throw in letters “agdy” just to see if a registrar is working because they just throw out “not available” so often, that and the “seplling” errors that crop up from time to time due to a missed key
couponpages says
I’ve always felt that there were plenty of .Coms.
It boggles my mind that people think the new TLDs are intended to create more domains. The funny thing is a lot of new TLD buyers are just defensively buying the same names.