Domain Name Value by Part of Speech

"How is the value of domain names affected by part of speech?"

A DomainsBot study on secondary market trends by Emiliano Pasqualetti, with assistance from Antony Van Couvering

Contents 1 Introduction 2 Goals 3 Conclusions 4 Data

[edit] Introduction

We examined 4304 domains containing up to 3 keywords sold on AfterNIC from January 2003 to September 2005. We examined their value based on whether they contained certain parts of speech. We looked at parts of speech as well as "non-lexical" or "non-grammatical" components - a lexical component is a recognized part of speech in English, while a non-lexical component is a number, an acronym, a brand name, or a nonsense word. We considered nouns (N), adjectives (A) and verbs (V). We grouped under "other" (O) the remaining grammatical types: articles, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns. We grouped all numbers and keywords that didn't belong to a grammatical part of speech (acronyms, brands, typos and nonsense words) in a "non-grammatical" group (X).

[edit] Goals

1. To identify the most successful grammatical types (or part of speech) for each class of domains, both for total value and for average value
2. To confirm the results of DomainsBot Labs Investigations #1, that lexical domains are more valuable than non-lexical names as the number of keywords grows

[edit] Conclusions

• Most domains names are made of components directly recognizable as a part of speech.

• The noun is clearly the most valuable part of speech in a domain name. One domain name in three contains a noun, and almost 70% of all domain names contain at least one noun.

• The value of a noun is shown most strikingly in domain names of one keyword: the average value of a one-keyword noun domain is $100 more than a verb, and $500 more than an adjective.

• Verbs and adjectives are the only relevant parts of speech apart from nouns. Verbs have a $400 higher average value than adjectives for domain names of one keyword, but for two- and three-keyword domains adjectives are worth more than verbs.

• For one-keyword domains, 60% of the total value came from non-lexical domains, but the average value of lexical domains is nearly twice that of non-lexical domains

• For two- and three-keyword domains, the value of non-lexical components shrinks considerably, both for total value and average value.

• Grammatical components other than nouns, verbs and adjectives (adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.) are irrelevant to value.

[edit] Data

Figure 1 – Percentage of domain names sold, and percentage of value for domain names containing the most important parts of speech. Nouns are clearly the most important part of speech. Domain names containing a noun account for 70% of all names sold, and 74% of the value, and they are especially valuable in one-keyword domains. Adjectives are next, with nearly 18% of total value, and verbs are last at 5%.

Figure 2 – Nouns as a percentage of number of domains sold, and of total value. 32.5% of the domains we analyzed are composed only of nouns (representing 35% of the value) while 70.3% have a noun as at least one keyword (74.6% of value). Of domain names composed of multiple keywords, 67.4% of analyzed domains ends with a noun type keyword (72,4% of total value). (Note: Based on analyzed domains only, comprising 93.2% of the total number.)

Figure 3 and Figure 4 - For one-keyword domains, the number sold (Fig. 2) and value (Fig. 3) of different parts of speech. The “X (non gramm)” bar refers to numbers, acronyms, brands, typos and nonsense words.

Figure 5 – The only relevant exception to the trend of noun predominance comes with single keyword domains. For single keyword names, “non grammatical” keywords rank highest both in terms of domain names sold and of value exchanged (sum of prices per group) – almost 60% of total value.

Figure 6 – Average value of domain names of one keyword containing different parts of speech. “Real” parts of speech like nouns, verbs and adjectives represent a smaller portion of the market, but nevertheless they still show a high quality in terms of value, almost double the value of non-grammatical components.

Figure 7 – Examples of one-keyword domain names of different parts of speech, with sale price. The top domains of “non grammatical” group are in many cases 2-character domains, which explains the high average value of this group.

Figure 8 – Representative non-grammatical one-keyword domains. It’s important to notice the fundamental differences between our different studies. In the “DomainsBot Labs Investigations #1” study we identified three different value drivers: the number of keywords, the length, and the lexical properties, and we compared “short domains” and “lexical domains” (usually longer domains of more than one keyword). In the current analysis the non-grammatical group does not represent short domains (even if most “short domains” are part of it). Instead, it represents non-lexical keywords of all lengths.

Figure 9, 10 and 11 – For two keywords, number (Fig. 9), value (Fig. 10), and share of value (Fig. 11) of domains sold by part of speech. In this class the importance of nouns rises. Sorting the data in descending order we see the importance of nouns in the first 6 groups (89% of total). Furthermore, in the first 4 groups it’s interesting to note that the noun is the second keyword.

Figure 12 – Average value of two-keyword domain names. The high average value of groups like “Other+Non-Grammatical” or “Verbs+Adjectives” can be considered exceptions because both groups are undersized (only 36 domains). The average value penalizes the first two groups (Noun + Noun and Adjective + Noun), but the highest sales prices were achieved in these groups (e.g. petsupplies.com at $70,000 and proproject.com at $60,000). For two keywords, 98.4% of the domains were considered statistically relevant.

Figure 13 – Examples of two-keyword domain sales prices, grouped by part-of-speech combination

Figure 14 – Number of three-keyword domains sold, grouped by part-of-speech combination. Most of the considerations made for two-keyword domains are still valid for domains of three keywords, but this time the statistical sample of relevant domains is only 66.3% of the total (with three keywords there are 125 possible groups). All the three-keyword domain names we analyzed contain at least one “noun” component.

Figure 15 – Value of three-keyword domain names, grouped by part-of-speech combination. The “Adjective+Noun+Noun” and “Noun+Noun+Noun” groups are the most relevant statistically both because of the number of domain names sold, and for the total value exchanged (more than $70,000 per group).

Figure 16 – Share of the three-keyword domain names market, by part of speech.

Figure 17 – Representative sales of three-keyword domain names, grouped by part of speech. All are .com names.

Figure 18 – Average value of part-of-speech combinations for three-keyword domains. The larger groups are penalized on average value because of the larger number of small sales. The “noun+other+noun” group has modest values if the exceptional tipsandtricks.com is excluded.

Source: AfterNIC

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