***UPDATED ARTICLE***

One market pretty much every domainer has an opinion about is the LLLL.com market. Today, rather than look at sales numbers, we’re going to look at LLLL.com drop and LLLL.com registration numbers, courtesy of research from Andrei of NameDato.com.

Andrei is a well known short domain name investor who has been tracking LLLL.com drops each and every day since the LLLL.com buyout.

LLLL.com drops and the LLLL.com minimum wholesale are intimately correlated. Domain name “buyouts” are a familiar experience to most domainers who’ve been in the game awhile, many having taken part in one at some point or another. How many here remember November 2007 when LLLL.coms were bought out and what transpired seemingly immediately afterward?

When a commodity is not readily available, crazy things (crazy good things if you’re invested in them) can happen. Without a readily available supply of cheap LLLL.coms, domainers interested in entering this market would be forced to buy LLLL.coms off other domainers. There’s no incentive to sell cheap when you know interested buyers have no choice but to come to you.

When analyzing LLLL.com drop data, one needs to remember drops occur on average roughly 60 days after registration lapses, visit SnapNames.com/deleteprocess for an explanation of the drop process. With LLLL.coms trading at their highest ever recorded prices in February 2008 (min wholesale approx $55), it’s unsurprising to see April 2008 drop data also reporting the lowest recorded number of drops. As prices began to fall in the months following the rapid rise in prices leading up to February, we see that drops began to grow.

And then something interesting happened as Fall began — actually, 2 interesting things:

1- The economy went for a royal shit.
2- Interest in LLLL.coms picked up, as evidenced by slightly increased prices, an increased number of bidders on LLLL.com auctions, and drops being much lower than most expected.

July 2007 (drop data corresponding to September 2008) is when interest in LLLL.coms really began to pick up. So far, we only have definitive proof that drops aren’t significantly increasing based on registrations which occurred between July and September 2007. With an average of 2047 drops/month over the past 3 months, drops have only increased by 115 drops/month versus the 1932 drops/month average reported for LLLL.com registrations between September 2006 and May 2007.

Between July and November 2nd 2007, over 30,000 LLLL.coms were registered, approximately 19,000 +/- 2000 (accounting for known traffic testing going on at the time) of them having been registered between July and the end of September 2007. If we look at estimated drops for November using an approximation of average drops known to be occurring thus far (up to November 23rd is known, LLLL.coms deleting after that may still be redeemed), we note that November drops corresponding to September 2007 are well under what has been seen in previous months.

Reece Berg
LLLL.com

Special thanks to Andrei owner of NameDato.com for the stats & graph information.