Are all NNNNN.com taken or not?

[rkbdomain]

591 as of this morning.

[DomainName]

thanks rkb.

[Dopa.com]

For the Chinese, is it better if the number ends in an 8, like 37568, or does it matter where the eights are? More eights in the number the better I guess?

If it has to be NNNNN, More eights in the number the better!

[James Jean]

Not to hijack your thread op, but slow it down folks. just saying.. Scarcity DOES NOT necessarily imply shortage ergo scarcity does not have to equal value. Think about it for a bit. Don't confuse the subjective idea of something being rare like 88888.com with something being scarce. Buying it all out doesn't make your names rare. just my 2 cents


Ok back on topic

[rkbdomain]

You are certainly correct. For anyone that saw what happened with the NNNNN.com buyout in 2008, this was crystal clear. NNNNN.com domains were bought out by domainers (myself included) on the hope that prices would rise like they did with LLLL.com's. Almost 20k were registered in a few weeks. While I think that many reasons advanced then for the future value of these domains (namely, rising Chinese internet presence) are still true and even more true today, the fact that they are rare as you say does not instantly give them value. However, a fairly high number of NNNNN.com's are developed sites, mostly Chinese sites, but some are also US and foreign zip code sites, organization/product number sites, blogs, etc. The Chinese keep registering and using these domains, and some of the top Alexa sites are NNNNN.com's and other numerics. So good number sequences to the Chinese can have significant value, as recent sales from 4.cn demonstrate. These may or may not be bought out again. If they are, they may rise in value as an added scarcity premium, but the main driver would be the actual use and demand for the domains in China.

[PRED]

On a side note, a Cyprus-based company registered about 50K NNNNN.pro less than a year ago, that is half of the total .pro registrations.
I wonder if they will all be renewed

you're kidding???
why on earth would anyone register one let alone that number?
they are probably responsible for taking down the Greek economy lol

madness. utter madness

[rkbdomain]

Down to below 50 it seems, I found 34 available to register today although I missed one day's dropped. Appears over the weekend a few Chinese domainers decided to register nearly 500 of these domains.

[rkbdomain]

NNNNN.com's still hovering near 0, today there are 32 available. In the meantime, NNNN.org's are seeing serious registration. On June 24th I checked and there were 1,035 available, today there are 601. And the most heavily registered in the last few weeks? Not surprisingly, domains that start with the letter "8". Looks like Chinese domainers are so desparate for good numbers they are even looking at .org domains now.

[DNabc]

Everyday a few NNNNN drop, I try to get only a few per week but I can confirm that most are taken by Chinese domainers or companies.

[rkbdomain]

Some mind-boggling results from my surveys of random NNNNNN.com's. After looking at 5,000 of these, it seems that on average 8.4% are registered. This means that while NNNNN.com's are almost 100% registered, almost the same number of NNNNNN.com's are registered (100,000 v. 84,000). I had no idea so many six-digit .com's had already been registered. I discuss this more in depth on my blog.

Also, turns out that more than half of the .org registrations I noted before were from tasters that later dropped the domains. But still a lot of registration activity going on there.

[hugegrowth]

Are the Chinese buyers taking them for investment, or building sites on them (or both)?

Everyday a few NNNNN drop, I try to get only a few per week but I can confirm that most are taken by Chinese domainers or companies.

[rkbdomain]

Both, a good portion of the top 500 Alexa Chinese sites are numerics, including 5n's, 6n's, etc. When I checked a couple years ago about 10% of NNNNN.com's were developed Chinese sites. I haven't looked lately, and I haven't checked the 6n's that are registered. Most 5n's are parked pages though, and a lot of these domains naturally get traffic (usually from China). Even Marchex had previously developed its 45,000+ US-zip code domains and now just leaves them parked it seems.

[rkbdomain]

All NNNNN.com domains registered as of this morning.

[rkbdomain]

All NNNNN.com domains registered as of this morning.

So they have been bought out for a while, but still don't get over reg fee for random numbers. At the same time, the drops are picked up, and, more interesting, is that the re-registration rates have picked up as well.

They have been averaging about 40-50 drops/day for the last several months, which the market is absorbing. But that number looks to drop to around 12/day in the next month or so, given the number of domains that expired in April.

I have a randomized dataset of 20% of the NNNNN.com's, and here is what I have found for the percentage of domains expiring by month.

March, 2012 1.5%
April, 2012 0.4%
May, 2012 3.0%
June, 2012 3.9%
July, 2012 4.7%
August, 2012 4.1%
September, 2012 4.2%
October, 2012 4.1%
November, 2012 3.5%
December, 2012 3.3%
January, 2013 4.5%
February, 2013 8.4%
March, 2013 4.2%
April, 2013 5.7%
May, 2013 3.1%
June, 2013 1.3%
July, 2013 1.1%
August, 2013 1.2%
September, 2013 1.1%
October, 2013 0.7%
November, 2013 32.7%
December, 2013 0.5%
2014+ 3.0%

You can see the high percentage of April expirations that were renewed (April 2013 has 5.7% of outstanding domains, April 2012 has only 0.4%). If this trend continues through May and later this year, we may finally see price appreciation in NNNNN.com's. As the market has been easily picking up the 40-50 drops/day, it remains to be seen what happens when drops fall to 10-20/day. Same buying pressure, diminishing supply. I had thought prices would rise with the buyout and they didn't, so could be wrong here again. But it certainly looks good that the buyout has stuck and registrants are renewing their numbers.

[katherine]

Buyout has no influence on prices, when it is artificial (sustained by speculation), and the end user demand is not there.
See lll.us/.biz/.info/.in etc. Bought out for years too, and the reseller market is still crap.

[rkbdomain]

Buyout has no influence on prices, when it is artificial (sustained by speculation), and the end user demand is not there.
See lll.us/.biz/.info/.in etc. Bought out for years too, and the reseller market is still crap.

Excellent point. This is the real question, is NNNNN.com going to suffer the same fate as those others? Could happen, happened in 2008 when it got bought out and crashed.

But there are also some reasons why it may be different. These domains are actually used, primarily in China, and many numerics (including NNNNN's) are among the top Chinese websites. Also, these are short .com domains with potentially universal appeal. Marchex, a Nasdaq traded company, owns 1/3 of them and has since 2004. Chinese internet users value numbers over letters and numbers are a big deal of Chinese culture.

There's a reason why there's so much interest in these domains, and why there have been recent big sales (notably 41186.com for $16,000). I will agree that a lot of it is currently speculation (heck, I am a speculator!) but that doesn't mean there isn't real end user demand out there that will make the speculators wealthy down the road. Also, the same could really be said for NNNN.com's. There is actually less "use" of these domains than the NNNNN.com's, a higher percentage of the five digit domains are used as developed sites. Most NNNN's are just parked and held by domain "speculators". Yet they still sell easily for over $1,000 and are fully liquid, even though end user purchases are infrequent.

[hugegrowth]

Of all my domains, my NNNNN.com get some of the most monthly WHOis inquiries, according to the GoDaddy report I run.

[woofard]

Of all my domains, my NNNNN.com get some of the most monthly WHOis inquiries, according to the GoDaddy report I run.

Well I looked and looked but found nothing; I didn't want to seem like a noob and ask this question but here goes anyway - How in the heck do you see WHOis inquiries on your domains?

[urlurl]

i would like to know too

[hugegrowth]

You have to login to your GoDaddy account and create an exportable list.

Domain Shane tells how at

http://domainshane.com/finding-how-m...by-step-guide/