Some songs you just can’t get out of your head. “One Is The Loneliest Number” has been on replay in my mind since 1969. I probably played the Three Dog Night version hundreds of times from an LP record during my college years. It evokes emotions every time I hear the song replayed now. If you are from a younger generation unfamiliar with the song, here is the Three Dog Night version on YouTube. But remember, I warned you this is one of those songs that you can’t leave behind.
It is far from the only song that includes ‘one’ in the title – Ranker lists dozens of the better known songs.
So what does all this have to do with domain names? This article started out as a collection of ways that ‘one’ can be applied to the practice of domain name investing. But as I wrote the article, it evolved to also look at sales and corporate use of domain names with ‘one’. There is a certain irony in the article about one not focussed on a single idea.
.COM is Number One
While there can be a place for other extensions, and technically they all work exactly the same, there is no doubt that in use, registration, and aftermarket sales, .com is the number one extension.
It is therefore important to always know the status of the .com when you are considering investing in other extensions.
Brandable Creativity – Limit To One Change
If you are being creative with spelling or terms, as a general rule of thumb only make one change from the correct spelling or term in a brandable. Why? Memorability really suffers if people have to remember multiple changes. So it’s okay to change an s to a z, or leave out a vowel, but don’t leave out a vowel and change an s to a z in the same brandable name.
More Than One Company
You should look at sources such as OpenCorporates when considering any domain investment. Particularly if the term is not a generic dictionary term, be cautious of investing in terms with just one company currently using the term. Why? The case would be easier to make that you are targeting that company. That is particularly the case if the name is made-up or creatively adapted.
Do You Have Only One User In Mind?
Even if multiple companies use a name, If the main reason you are making this investment is because of one company, odds are it is not a wise investment. Not only are all of your chances with one company, but you may well be treading in shaky legal territory.
Never Invest on Basis of One Sale
There are tons of outlier sales happening every single day. While that is great for those sellers, don’t build a portfolio trying to copy outlier sales. Don’t be overly influenced by a single sale, no matter how impressive.
The Obvious One
Some investors are fortunate to hold domain names that are clearly the one superior domain for a niche. Names like
Seek a name that is clearly the best possible name in a niche. Even if it is a small niche, the name will have value that will only grow with time.
The sections below move to look at the term ‘one’ as part of a business name or domain name.
One Is A Popular Business Term
With the idea of one being primary, or first, ‘one’ can be a positive part of a brand. I checked this hypothesis by using OpenCorporates to look at how many active companies and organizations use ‘one’ as part of their name, former name, or also known as name. A staggering 265,946 have ‘one’ in their name.
Sales of the Exact Term One
Next I turned to NameBio to see how many times the exact term ‘one’ has sold, or at least with sales listed at NameBio. Keep in mind that perhaps 5% of retail sales get listed on NameBio. The exact term ‘one’ has 40 listed sales on NameBio, including high 4-figure sales in extensions like .boutique and .run that have fairly limited sales records. You can see the full list here.
The highest-value exact sale of ‘one’ is from 2014, when the .cn sold for over $160,000, followed by a $128,000 sale of the .es in 2007. The highest recent exact match sale was the .vc selling this year by @DomainHacks for just under $50,000.
Sales of One as Part of Longer Terms
Because the letters of ‘one’ are part of many popular words, like done, clone, lone, lonely, drone, etc. it is challenging to find all sales with the term ‘one’ in them, but you can use the NameBio Prefix and Suffix to find a subset.
There are 685 sales listed on NameBio with ‘one’ as a prefix, totalling $1.5 million in dollar volume. If we consider ’one’ as a suffix, we find 588 sales and dollar volume of $1.2 million. This data indicates that ‘one’ can work almost equally well at the beginning or ending term.
The .One Extension
There is also an extension .one, so I looked at sales in that at NameBio. There are 132 listed sales of .one extension names, totalling about $132,000. The highest value sale is
The nTLDStats site indicates about 215,000 .one registrations. Prices increased about a year ago in this extension, and transfer and renewal prices now generally start at about $14 per year for names that are not registry premium. There are sharply discounted first-year registrations, at time of writing less than $4 at a few registrars, although the normal first year rate is about double that.
Also a .Uno Extension
‘Uno’ means ‘one’ in Spanish and a number of other languages. There is also a .uno extension, with just under 17,000 registrations in the zone file according to nTLDStats. there are only 14 sales of .uno listed on NameBio, and only one above $1000.
One Is Highly Registered Term
I consulted dotDB to see that the exact term ‘one’ is registered in 576 extensions, one of the more registered terms.
It is also true that ’one’ is part of more than 3.8 million longer domain names. Keep in mind that latter figure is deceptive, though, since many of those longer names have the letters ‘one’ but as part of words like clone, drone, etc.
So, in terms of domain and company names, one is far from the loneliest number.
Closing Thoughts
Please share in the comment section below your thoughts on ‘one’ as a branding term, or your experiences selling names involving the term or extension one.
In researching this article, I discovered that Harry Nilsson apparently wrote the lyrics while listening to the busy tone on the telephone. You can read about the late Harry Nilsson here.
While the Three Dog Night version of the song is best known, various other artists have performed the song, including The Beatles. By the way, I was somewhat surprised to see that Three Dog Night are still actively touring.
In case you are asking, what on earth is a ‘three dog night”, the term comes from the practice before efficient home heating when on the coldest nights you snuggled with a dog to stay warm. A three dog night is a very cold night, where you need three dogs to stay warm.
As a bit of fun, why not share below how a line from the song could be applied in the domain industry? For those who loved Uniregistry, and mourn its demise, maybe “It’s just no good anymore since you went away.” could be applied to the closure of Uniregristry.
If you like, share what song is on permanent play in your head. What words from song titles do you think also make interesting domain names? This article on The Most Common Words in Songs lists love, never, time, life and sorry as among the most common. The article points out that the popular words change with each decade.
Thanks to NameBio, nTLDStats, OpenCorporates and dotDB for data used in the article. And thanks to the late Harry Nilsson for creating the song. and Three Dog Night for performing the version I love!
It is far from the only song that includes ‘one’ in the title – Ranker lists dozens of the better known songs.
So what does all this have to do with domain names? This article started out as a collection of ways that ‘one’ can be applied to the practice of domain name investing. But as I wrote the article, it evolved to also look at sales and corporate use of domain names with ‘one’. There is a certain irony in the article about one not focussed on a single idea.
.COM is Number One
While there can be a place for other extensions, and technically they all work exactly the same, there is no doubt that in use, registration, and aftermarket sales, .com is the number one extension.
It is therefore important to always know the status of the .com when you are considering investing in other extensions.
Brandable Creativity – Limit To One Change
If you are being creative with spelling or terms, as a general rule of thumb only make one change from the correct spelling or term in a brandable. Why? Memorability really suffers if people have to remember multiple changes. So it’s okay to change an s to a z, or leave out a vowel, but don’t leave out a vowel and change an s to a z in the same brandable name.
More Than One Company
You should look at sources such as OpenCorporates when considering any domain investment. Particularly if the term is not a generic dictionary term, be cautious of investing in terms with just one company currently using the term. Why? The case would be easier to make that you are targeting that company. That is particularly the case if the name is made-up or creatively adapted.
Do You Have Only One User In Mind?
Even if multiple companies use a name, If the main reason you are making this investment is because of one company, odds are it is not a wise investment. Not only are all of your chances with one company, but you may well be treading in shaky legal territory.
Never Invest on Basis of One Sale
There are tons of outlier sales happening every single day. While that is great for those sellers, don’t build a portfolio trying to copy outlier sales. Don’t be overly influenced by a single sale, no matter how impressive.
The Obvious One
Some investors are fortunate to hold domain names that are clearly the one superior domain for a niche. Names like
hotels.com and agent.ai define authority in a sector – it’s not surprising that both are in active use. Seek a name that is clearly the best possible name in a niche. Even if it is a small niche, the name will have value that will only grow with time.
The sections below move to look at the term ‘one’ as part of a business name or domain name.
One Is A Popular Business Term
With the idea of one being primary, or first, ‘one’ can be a positive part of a brand. I checked this hypothesis by using OpenCorporates to look at how many active companies and organizations use ‘one’ as part of their name, former name, or also known as name. A staggering 265,946 have ‘one’ in their name.
Sales of the Exact Term One
Next I turned to NameBio to see how many times the exact term ‘one’ has sold, or at least with sales listed at NameBio. Keep in mind that perhaps 5% of retail sales get listed on NameBio. The exact term ‘one’ has 40 listed sales on NameBio, including high 4-figure sales in extensions like .boutique and .run that have fairly limited sales records. You can see the full list here.
The highest-value exact sale of ‘one’ is from 2014, when the .cn sold for over $160,000, followed by a $128,000 sale of the .es in 2007. The highest recent exact match sale was the .vc selling this year by @DomainHacks for just under $50,000.
Sales of One as Part of Longer Terms
Because the letters of ‘one’ are part of many popular words, like done, clone, lone, lonely, drone, etc. it is challenging to find all sales with the term ‘one’ in them, but you can use the NameBio Prefix and Suffix to find a subset.
There are 685 sales listed on NameBio with ‘one’ as a prefix, totalling $1.5 million in dollar volume. If we consider ’one’ as a suffix, we find 588 sales and dollar volume of $1.2 million. This data indicates that ‘one’ can work almost equally well at the beginning or ending term.
The .One Extension
There is also an extension .one, so I looked at sales in that at NameBio. There are 132 listed sales of .one extension names, totalling about $132,000. The highest value sale is
wallet.one that sold for $49,000 in 2022 at Sedo. The nTLDStats site indicates about 215,000 .one registrations. Prices increased about a year ago in this extension, and transfer and renewal prices now generally start at about $14 per year for names that are not registry premium. There are sharply discounted first-year registrations, at time of writing less than $4 at a few registrars, although the normal first year rate is about double that.
Also a .Uno Extension
‘Uno’ means ‘one’ in Spanish and a number of other languages. There is also a .uno extension, with just under 17,000 registrations in the zone file according to nTLDStats. there are only 14 sales of .uno listed on NameBio, and only one above $1000.
One Is Highly Registered Term
I consulted dotDB to see that the exact term ‘one’ is registered in 576 extensions, one of the more registered terms.
It is also true that ’one’ is part of more than 3.8 million longer domain names. Keep in mind that latter figure is deceptive, though, since many of those longer names have the letters ‘one’ but as part of words like clone, drone, etc.
So, in terms of domain and company names, one is far from the loneliest number.
Closing Thoughts
Please share in the comment section below your thoughts on ‘one’ as a branding term, or your experiences selling names involving the term or extension one.
In researching this article, I discovered that Harry Nilsson apparently wrote the lyrics while listening to the busy tone on the telephone. You can read about the late Harry Nilsson here.
While the Three Dog Night version of the song is best known, various other artists have performed the song, including The Beatles. By the way, I was somewhat surprised to see that Three Dog Night are still actively touring.
In case you are asking, what on earth is a ‘three dog night”, the term comes from the practice before efficient home heating when on the coldest nights you snuggled with a dog to stay warm. A three dog night is a very cold night, where you need three dogs to stay warm.
As a bit of fun, why not share below how a line from the song could be applied in the domain industry? For those who loved Uniregistry, and mourn its demise, maybe “It’s just no good anymore since you went away.” could be applied to the closure of Uniregristry.
If you like, share what song is on permanent play in your head. What words from song titles do you think also make interesting domain names? This article on The Most Common Words in Songs lists love, never, time, life and sorry as among the most common. The article points out that the popular words change with each decade.
Thanks to NameBio, nTLDStats, OpenCorporates and dotDB for data used in the article. And thanks to the late Harry Nilsson for creating the song. and Three Dog Night for performing the version I love!
... Great read... I personally have stayed away from "one" branding/investing as it can be confused with "won" or "1" with the radio test... but always open to change.. Thanks Bob!
