A lot of "brands" are built on short clear names. A lot of the time, this name happens to be a CVCV (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant-Vowel) like Nike, Puma, Hulu, Pogo etc. Having the matching .com (majority of the time) is also a must!
(To be clear, a vowel is: A, E, I, O and U. I’m not a "sometimes Y" as a vowel kind of guy (or gal) and you shouldn’t either. HYHY is not a CVCV domain IMO!)
Using data from the searchable reported domain name sales database NameBio.com, here are some recent stats on CVCV domain names and why I think most CVCV .com’s are a great investment and a good use for a brand. (please keep in mind that NameBio doesn’t have every reported sale in it’s db and of coarse the ones not reported). I used the first 3 page results doing a cvcv search at NameBio.
69 Total CVCV domain names that I am using data from.
Out of those 69 CVCV domain names, 54 of them were .com! The .com CVCV’s were the highest price sold and of the 54 .com’s, 51 were 4 figure sales or higher:
- 2 sold for Six Figures. Riva.com for $200K and Wife.com $100K
- 21 sold for 5 Figures
- 28 sold for 4 figures
The most popular place of purchase was:
- Sedo.com with 28 of the total 69 CVCV sales
- NameJet.com followed with 15
- SnapNames.com with 9
- Afternic.com with 8
- Moniker.com with 3
- 1 each for TDNAM.com, TRAFFIC and RickLatona.com
Some of the "worst" (lowest sold price and hard to pronounce IMO) CVCV’s start with the letter X and Q not followed by a U.
Clearly 4 letter English Dictionary words .com’s that are CVCV’s often sell for the most as well. Wife.com and Nite.com are two in this bunch.
Repeating Consonant-Vowel combo’s are popular and also fetch a popular price. JOJO, HEHE, BABA etc.
CVCV’s that contain only what are considered "Premium" letters also rank mainly near the top. Most consider premium consonant letters as: B, C, D, F, G, H, L, M, N, P, R, S, T.
If you are considering starting a new brand or product, I suggest you consider a CVCV .com domain name as most are clear of trademark issues, short, catchy and a lot have low search engine returns. That is a good thing when you are starting out, because you want your site / domain to rank high matching your term.
You can see the domain names reported sold and used to gather the above data via screen shots here, here and here.
fizz
Interesting stuff Jamie.
Re not “sometimes Y”, does that mean you wouldn’t consider something like Sony a CVCV?
Reece Berg
Great post Jamie!
There seems to be a major disconnect between domainers and developers when it comes to search results. Most domainers don’t seem to get that more search results means more competition! I’ve long been a fan of CVCVs and you did as good a job as anyone elucidating why.
Russell
Most reported CVCV.com sales can be found here: http://www.llllsales.com/index.php?p=1024
To show only CVCV without Y you can add “Y” to the “does not contain” search field.
Jamie Zoch
@Fizz
That is correct. Sony is not a CVCV. It’s pronounceable but not a CVCV IMO. Don’t get me wrong, I clearly like 4L domains similar to Sony that are pronounceable. Several are VCVC or end in Y.
Jamie Zoch
@ Reece,
Thank you. Yes it seems domainers often announce search results in the wrong way (I myself had in the past until I started developing). I think most domainers that announce High search results do it in a way to say “It’s a popular term” but to really see if a term is popular, it needs to be one word (or made up words like CVCV’s) or for two word or high combo’s ” ” needs to be included to get the Real search results.
spellman
50 people get to rich but tens of thousands will drop and drop again bcause they wont be sold for shit
mntor
@spellman
If you are referring to CVCV.coms, i don’t think they are going to drop anytime. There are only 10k odd CVCV.coms and many are already developed ones.
Josh P
I view CVCV.com domains as more “domainer-type” names.
Domainers love CVCV’s because of they’re rare and memorable, their wholesale market values are relatively easy to determine (hence they’re “liquidate-able”), and they visually stand out like hotcakes in drop lists. Also, popular drop list analysis tools (DRT, FreshDrop.net, etc.) can weed these out using algorithms any competent programmer could code up in about 15 minutes. For all these reasons, I feel certain that of of all categories (except random LLLL.com’s and CCC.com’s), CVCV.com’s are bid the highest relative to the probability they will sell to endusers down the line.
Yes, one could point to many instances of high-profile CVCV purchases (hulu.com, Kiva.com, etc.), and I’m sure that some bulk LLLL.com portfolio holders sell several CVCV.com’s to endusers every year. But bear in mind that MOST endusers who purchase CVCV.com’s are newly VC-backed startups whose CEO or marketing director thinks that your CVCV.com simply “sounds cool”. Because of this new venture-backing, CVCV.com’s often sell for a lot when they do, but all signs indicate they are highly, HIGHLY speculative investments for domainers targeting endusers, and I’d only recommend domainers with 6+ figure liquid budgets (probably less than 0.01% of us) even consider investing in them. If you examine the 69 sales Jamie mentioned (itself an extremely small quantity relative to the total number of CVCV.com combos), you’ll find nearly all to be domainer-to-domainer flips.
Keyword domains present much better bang for the domainer’s buck. Over the past six months I have flipped over 150 keyword .com’s to endusers for profit out of maybe 600 I’ve acquired within that frame. While keyword .com domain sales are statistically LESS LIKELY to make headlines because the vast majority of keyword .com sales ring up at $2500 or less, a VASTLY HIGHER percentage of well-advised keyword .com & .net domains sell to endusers each year. Interesting duality, isn’t it? 90%+ of domain acquisitions occur by established companies able to draw a straight line from your domain to its revenue potential via savings in PPC capital attained by conversion of sponsored search listings to organic listings. Keyword domains corresponding to a product or service offered by 4+ established companies are, by this very fact, enduser-type domains. And as we all know, enduser sales offer the highest ROI of any flip type.
Invest in keyword domains if you’re looking to covert within the next 3 years. Offer your Tafu.com to and enduser for $15,000 and you’ll have a tough time justifying why they should opt for your CVCV.com over Wafu.com, being offered by its owner for a mere $5,000.
All this being said, I think that enduser acquisition activity will pick up slightly over the next several years as web 2.0 services continue to heat up. But look for CVCV.com prices to crash by around 50-80% at some point before the year 2013 for much the same reason single and double-premiums LLLL.com prices did.
*** NOTE: I don’t place short dictionary domains (wife.com, sale.com, etc.) under the CVCV.com category because the lion’s share of their value lies in word usage / commercial application, not the fact they’re CVCV.coms.
Jamie Zoch
You make some strong points Joshua. This post was more about LLLL’s and why I think CVCV’s are the best to invest in. Random LLLL’s are nearly always used for an Acronym. CVCV’s are used to build a Brand in the majority of cases. I agree that Keyword domains are clearly the over all best investments, but for LLLL’s, CVCV’s are. One other main point that I wanted to be clear, it’s very likely with a CVCV that No (zero) Trademarks are in place. This can be a very big deal as many common terms (keyword domains) hold Trademarks for wide ranges.
Josh P
Agreed. If you do choose to invest in LLLL’s (which I don’t recommend, though they might hold water in the very long term), CVCV’s are the way to go. You’re destined to make substantially more money holding 5 CVCV’s than 100 LLLL’s that are triple-premiums or inferior.
whatever
The whole business of buying and selling domain names is built on a retarded idea in the first place. CVCV, VCVC, LLLL, it hardly matters. The biggest websites out there seem to do fine with 6, 7, or even (gasp!) 8 whole letters – google, myspace, youtube, twitter, facebook, wikipedia, blogger, wordpress, etc., etc. etc… hell, even hotchickswithdouchebags.com probably does as well – or better – with their 23-letter domain name than it would with, say, rija.com.
Personally, I’ll be glad when this whole “domain speculation” industry is completely dead. A normal, not-rich person can’t even find a freaking domain name anymore because every name they can think of (even ones that completely suck) has been taken already. Just today, for example, I was thinking that it would be fun to build a website that made fun of twitter (because, you know, twitter is retarded), and I checked to see if “twittard.com” had already been taken. I knew it would be, and of course it was. Of course, nobody will ever do anything with it, because the idiot who bought it doesn’t have an actual idea to develope it, and no one (especially me) is going to pay some rediculous price for it. So it’ll sit there and sit there, unused, just like 97% of all the other domain names…
Hmmm… I wonder if “twitterisforidiotsandretards.com is already taken… I’ll go check now.
HEY! IT’S STILL AVAILABLE! Freaking AMAZING!!!
I hate you all.