Businesses Continue to Buy and Use 3 Letter Domain Names

Three letter domains continue to be hot commodity.

With Comwired’s relaunch as DNS.com, I found a recent study by domain investor Nat Cohen on three character domains rather timely.

Cohen randomly generated 100 three letter domain names that contained only premium letters (no j, k, q, x, y, z) to see who owned them. Here’s what he found:

Small and Medium Business: 51%
Large Business: 20%
Domainers: 20%
Non-profits/Educational/Government/Religious: 2%
Personal: 1%
Inactive: 6%

73% were owned by businesses or institutions. In 2008 Cohen ran a similar analysis with a smaller pool (50 domains) and found that 58% were actively used by businesses. Cohen notes that “businesses are slowly absorbing the pool of LLL.com domains that are “in play”. 42% of premium LLL.com domains were not actively used by business in 2008. In a little over two years that percentage is down to 27%”.

Not surprisingly, a number of large companies use their three letter domains to redirect to other corporate web sites.

Cohen believes domainers have been facilitating this absorption by businesses by reaching out to private domain owners to acquire their three letter domains and then reselling them to businesses. Cohen himself has been a big investor in three letter domains.

Here are some recent three letter domain acquisitions:

DNS.com – Comwired, Inc
IPA.com – Austin Web Development
RMC.com – Restoration Management Company
Glo.com – Microsoft (currently registered to BermanBraun)

As far as I know, here are three “domain sites” using three character domains: Domain Name Wire (DNW.com), Domain Name News (DNN.com), and Domain Name Forum (DNF.com). All three use the domains to redirect.