Are domain names running out?
In our humble opinion, the web hit the mainstream in 1995. Since then, the world has been buying up web addresses at an increasing rate. Does this mean that there are no good domain names left? Having entered the domain registration business, this is the kind of thing we should know, so we have conducted some research.
How do we work out how many .com's are available?
Some tech: each character in a domain name can be a letter, a hyphen, or a number. There are 26 letters, ten numbers (including zero), and 1 hyphen, so there are 37 possibilities per character. Hence, there are 36 one-dimensional domain names (36, actually, because hyphens are not allowed as initial characters). Each of the 36 one-letter domains can be prefixed by one of the 37 possibilities, so there are 36*37 = 1,332 possible two-character domain names, and 36 + 37^2 domain names of length 2 or less.
In total, there are 36 + sum_{i=2}^{6} 37^i = 2.57 billion domains of length 6 or less. Yes, that is a lot; domain squatters beware.
Which domains are already taken?
We ran a query on the zone file, the list of registered domain names, and here is what we came up with.
| Mean | 13.44 | The average domain name length |
| Median | 13 | At least half of all domains are longer than this |
| Mode | 11 | The most common domain name length |
So, the average domain name length is actually 13.44. This is much longer than we expected. The most common domain name length is 11, slightly below the mean; the difference between the mode and the mean is caused by positive skewness due to the long right-tail of lengthy domain names.
Let's zoom in on that:
Short answer: Yes! There are plenty of short domain names available. You might just have to be creative.
How many English words are left?
We ran a query using over 350,000 words to find out which were not used as domain names, and the answer was 160,623. Please keep in mind that many of these words are along the lines of Barmkin and zymotoxic, so don't get too excited.
How many two-word combinations are left?
Using our ngrams data, we determined that there are more than twenty five million two-word combinations that are used in Wikipedia text, but are not domain names. There were 25,351,74 to be exact, but this changes constantly as Wikipedia and the registered domains are updated. We didn't include words of length less than three.
In summary
Using the method described above, we can determine that there are over 23.8 times a billion to the power of eleven domain names available. There are circa 91 million .com domains registered.
If you cannot find a good domain name, then the problem is not the lack of availability of good names. The problem is finding them.
