Dynadot

analysis Domain Names With Color - Part 1

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Adding a color to a word can make a memorable brand.

A brand like RedBull provides a brand icon known around the world.

The color purple could mean many things, but the mattress company Purple has acquired the name in the .com extension, and spent the advertising dollars, so you now probably think of their signature purple mattresses.

A pink elephant is a name anyone will remember, even if you never see one in reality. Check out the company that uses PinkElephant.com.

The company perhaps most associated with the color pink is VictoriasSecret.com, and the domain name pink.com redirects to their pink collection.

In this article, I take a look at how different colors have sold as part of domain names, and how often they appear in business names and on brandable marketplaces. Part 2 will look at the psychology and marketing aspects of colors, as well as data for additional colors.

Primary and Secondary Colors

The primary colors are based on the physics of light, as well as the color response of the human eye. The primary colors are normally considered red, green and blue. They are primary in the sense that one cannot be made from a combination of the others.

You perhaps saw a demonstration in high school where color beams are added. Equal amounts of red, blue and green produce white light. A surface which does not reflect any color of light is black.

If an artist or print specialist, you are probably more familiar with subtractive colors, or pigments. For example, ink-jet printers use yellow, cyan and magenta, along with black, to replicate any color.

The List

In this first article, I look at data for the primary colors red, green and blue, along with white, as well as the pigment, or subtractive, primary colors yellow, cyan, and magenta, along with black.

I have added popular secondary and additional colors pink, purple, orange, and violet. There are many other colors, some of which will be considered in the second article.

NameBio-Recorded Sales

I used NameBio data, but instead of the Anywhere setting used As A Prefix[ and As A Suffix. This is particularly important for red, since numerous words not associated with the color contain the word red, such as powered, hundred, tempered, etc. If you use the Ends With these would be included, even though they have nothing to do with the color red.

NameBio records a combination of wholesale and retail transactions. I set a $500 minimum price to focus mainly on retail sales. From my list of colors, the eight with highest number of sales are shown below.

Image-Numbers8.png

The number of $500 plus sales for that color as a prefix and as a suffix. All extensions and all time, NameBio data.

Green is clearly the most popular color, probably because of its environmental association. Blue, red and black are the next most popular.

It is much more frequent to have the color as the first word, as in RedBull or WhiteSwan.

Number of sales can be misleading, so I also looked at the dollar volume, that data shown below. Yellow edges out purple in this list.

Image-Volume8.png

The total dollar volume for each color as a prefix and a suffix. $500 plus sales only. NameBio data.

I also looked at sales involving the exact word, with sales in different extensions. Here are the top sellers given as number of sales in that color, average price.
  • green 13, $5280
  • red 10, $14,600
  • black 10, $3907
  • pink 8, $5186
  • white 6, $3831
  • purple 4, $265,200
The high average price in purple was due to the sale of purple.com for $900,000.

Number of TLDs

The number of top level domains (TLDs), or extensions, in which the color is registered is very high for almost all of the considered colors. I measured this using dotDB, with results shown below.

Image-TLDs.png


BrandBucket Listings

Colors are frequently found in names listed at brandable marketplaces. The search engine at BrandBucket makes it possible to search for names that begin or end with a color.

For reasons noted earlier, for red I had to go through the list by hand to not count names which ended in red, but did not refer to the color.
Image-BrandBucket.png

Note that these are percentages from the set of ten colors shown, not from all names involving any color.

In Business Names

It is important to know how frequently different colors were used in business names. For this I used OpenCorporates, including only names of active businesses and organizations.
Image-Businesses.png

Green is the clear leader, with blue and red next. Black and white are not far behind.

Black is a common surname, so many of the listings probably reflect that, or organizations associated with black culture, rather than the color per se.

Violet, magenta and cyan do not find relative to other colors nearly as much use. There are still significant numbers of listings, for example, 4037 for violet, 2182 for magenta, and 864 for cyan.

Color Extensions

A number of colors have been released as new gTLD extensions. None of these have had many $500+ aftermarket sales yet. Here is the list with the number of sales and average price.
  • black 7, $7166
  • blue 7, $1645
  • green 11, $5799
  • pink 4, $829
  • red 4, $6880

Sales Exact Colors

I checked the current status in the .com extension for each of the colors.
  • green.com – not operational
  • red.com – cinematic cameras
  • blue.com – parked, for sale
  • white.com – for sale
  • black.com – crypto
  • yellow.com – digital asset trading
  • orange.com – network technology
  • violet.com – for sale
  • purple.com – mattresses
  • pink.com – redirect to Victoria’s Secret
  • magenta.com – redirect to Love Magenta fashion
  • cyan.com – gaming

Final Thoughts

There are many additional colors not considered here. Gold and silver are popular, although have meanings other than color. Brown and gray are two other common colors not considered.

Please suggest in the comments colors you would like me to analyze in the second article in this series. Need some inspiration? Here is a compact list of colors.



Thanks to NameBio, BrandBucket, dotDB and OpenCorporates that I used in this analsis.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Nice Bob. Next time I’d like to see non primary but still popular colors like gold and silver for example.
 
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A great article Bob but I wish you would not have given up my 'colorful' secret to domain registrations! :xf.wink:
 
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Excellent Article. You make both Learning and Understanding very easy with your detailed research work. Thank You. 🙏
 
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Thanks for sharing such a important informative article.
 
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Excellent article Bob! You make things easy for new domainers like myself. Thank you.
 
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Thanks @Bob Hawkes for the another insightful article. Apart from the popular colours I would like to see in the next phase the following ones which also could make a nice brands pairing with another words :

Azure, Silver, Gold, Lime, Coral etc
 
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Brown is also popular.
UPS spent about 50 million in a few months to advertise the sentence:
"what can brown do for you".
And .TV registry "responded by saying" : "you can buy brown.tv for $ 250,000 per year".
UPS ignored them, instead they decided to renew thousands (if not millions) of gems like:

the-brown-truck.biz

forever.

 
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Very interesting article, thanks for that Bob.
What about Cream as a color? Such as CreamSofa.com
 
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Pinkdoor since 98 a year before.
 
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Thanks for sharing . its very interesting
 
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GREEN DOOR..... nobody on this forum would remember the song Green door sung by
Frankie Vaughn in 1956. The site GreenDoor.com is a cannabis-related site. What a shame!
 
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Primary color are blue, red, yellow, black and white, green is a secondary color that we can make from yellow and blue, orange from red and yellow, Violet from red and blue, pink from white and red....
 
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Primary color are blue, red, yellow, black and white, green is a secondary color that we can make from yellow and blue, orange from red and yellow, Violet from red and blue, pink from white and red....

Not sure about it. It may be an illusion. Green may exist as an individual color, but when blue and yellow are mixed our brain can interpret it as green while it may be not. One can look at a blue and yellow fine dust mix,
and it would look yellow, but under electron microscope it may still look like blue+yellow, and no green may be present. Does green in rainbow come from yellow blue mix, I don't know but I don't think so. There may be many more shades, I mean in real sense, not in illusion sense. How many frequencies are possible, I don't know, it is not taught in school, but it may be a discrete set, not a continuous one.
 
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ok.. this is something really interesting.. tx
 
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thanks bob for this amazing article :) my favorite colors are red & black.
 
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