Could there be a buyout of the remaining 4 letter.com's ???

[quality]

We are down to around 42,000 of the remaining 4 letter .coms
so at $6 a piece that would mean only $252,000 to buy out all
those that are left. That is chicken feed for some people...will they
survive to the end of the year or will they all be gone by xmas???

 

[Rom]

Well I think the will be sold out since you can't get 2L/3L anymore =(

Time for 5Ls!

 

[Sabre]

Oops, i meant to vote for "Yes, There Will"

I think there will be, unless someone decides they just want to go mad, and splash out on buying them....

 

[RegFee]

Well I think the will be sold out since you can't get 2L/3L anymore =(

Time for 5Ls!

So I wonder when all of the 5 letters will be gone.

One day we're all gonna be fighting for 15 letter .coms :p

 

[Nerz]

Think of buying a 4 letter as a long term investment. That's what others were doing when they bought a 3 letter domain. even if it made no sence at the time. Now that investment in a 3 letter domain is paying off!

Ya but 3 letters make 10 times more sense than 4 letters cause so many things use an acronym of 3 letters. There are nowhere near as many for four letters so the market - long term is going to be much smaller.

I think a lot of the payoff happening now is with domain traders, trading amongst themselves...i dont see too many reports of them selling their 3 letter LLL.com or .org/.info to end users..or companies.

I guess buying four letter ones is taking a chance that the same thing will happen again in 6 months when the supply fully dries up. I think there is a good chance that it will indeed happen, but there is nowhere near as much attraction to me in four letters as there is three IMO for the above reason.

 

[deet]

4 letter domain names this time next year will most likely be all gone,
Not because of their marketability but because the internet is growing.
year after year it gets bigger. I see 3 letter domains sell on ebay for upwords of $900.

 

[namey]

I bet the remaining 4 letters coms are going to be gone within the next 2 years.

 

[monRa]

In 3 years we will go back to this topic(with the search function) and we will laugh because i think then all the LLLLL.com will be also regged! Internet is growing much more, for example if the last month there have been registered 15.000 LLLL.com at this month there will be 20.000! Good investement for everyone in my opinion! Also there are LLLL.net which will gorwn in value!

 

[scrsteven]

Can anyone post a list in the available names section of the remaining available ones?

 

[namethreads.com]

I beleive there are about 70,000 left now. It will be a while before they are all bought out!

 

[cache]

3-character is easy for a human to remember, 4-char is the
max that the human memory buffer can handle, that is why the
phone numbers is listed as xxx-xxx-xxxx.

So I doubt 5-char will ever be bought out.

 

[Malaysia]

how did u guys know the figures of exact LLL.com or LLLL.com left? how do u find it?

 

[scrsteven]

Well, I just did my part and registered 50 of em

 

[Monolith]

Value may increase if theyre all bought, but itll be artificial, "gutless" value. The only value will come from other domain speculators - there's no demand for random 4 letter .com's from end-users, which is what should be driving prices.

Like it or not, xqpk.com will never be brandable and will never be a high-value acronym. The future is in short, brandable domain names irregardless of extension.

 

[snoop]

It will likely happen within the next 6 months, alot of money will be wasted and a lot of names will drop in the following couple of years afterwards, interesting how the mistakes of the past are repeated.

 

[VURG]

Do people still think that the 4 letter .COM domains will run out this year???


I don't

 

[namethreads.com]

There are a number of actual websites with 4-letter names, but I don't think any old 4-letter name is a good investment. 3-character names are better.

 

[primacomputer]

There are still over 100k 4L names unregistered, pending delete, etc. There have been about 5,000 new registrations per month in recent months. Even if this trend some how continued it will be a while before they all disappear

 

[Sam]

Ive notice from the drops that out of the 100 that dropped in the last few days all except ONE got dropcatched/registered.... something is demand

 

[scrsteven]

I agree with Prima that there are ~100k left; just scanned the list myself a week ago and just over 100k avail. I've regged 122 in the last few weeks though... getting invested in them.

 

[Michelle]

Have a few for investment :hehe:

 

[dsiomtw]

Where do you guys get these lists? Is it something publically available?

On a related note, what is the best way to do high-volume automated lookups? Do you just write a script that queries multiple whois lookup services in round robin fashion, so no one service locks you out?

 

[primacomputer]

I know some people publish various lists. I've seen some people selling them for a few bucks. I've seen some people giving them away. Some are available by subscription on certain websites. Personally I extract the data I need from the zone files.

It depends what kind of lookups you want to do as to how you would go about doing them. If you need the whois information then you need to query the whois servers. Doing this for 456,976 names will take you about a month—In theory. In reality it would probably take you a lot longer because you'll get barred from whois servers, regardless of how much you spread it around.

If, however, you only need to know if a name is registered or not you you can check for it's existence in the zone file. This is not 100% accurate, but it is much faster and can be done without any whois queries. On a typical desktop this might take half a day tops.

If you don't have the zone file and you have a limited number of names you want to check you can accomplish the same thing with DNS lookups. I don't advise raping DNS servers but it's a much lesser evil than raping whois servers.

 

[dsiomtw]

Cool thanks for the info, didn't even think of simple DNS lookups. I guess you can just do something like "dig +short domain.com" and if you get nothing back you know it's not registered. Doh.

How does one go about getting the zone file??

 

[tipsfromthetop]

4 letter domains will be all sucked up by this time next year i believe. Then the clowns at pool etc will pick up all the drops.

As for value well if you get more than a reg fee when selling then in my eyes it was a good investment.

With the growth of the internet 4 letter domains will hit value around 2-5 years time i believe.

 

[primacomputer]

Cool thanks for the info, didn't even think of simple DNS lookups. I guess you can just do something like "dig +short domain.com" and if you get nothing back you know it's not registered. Doh.

You'd be amazed how many hundreds of thousands of people hammer away needlessly at the whois servers simply because they run an OS that doesn't come with dig

How does one go about getting the zone file??

You have to get the zone file from the sponsor/manager of the TLD. For example, .com and .net would come from NSI, .org would come from PIR, etc.