I have seen this mentioned at some domain forums a few times. There are just too many LLLL.coms and this will keep prices from increasing in the long term. Part of the reasoning is that there just aren’t enough end users for all the domains. Another reasoning is that some of the combinations will never find real end users. I’ll address the second part of this in another post because there is evidence that these domains are finding plenty of end users no matter the quality of the domains.

Regarding the shear numbers of these LLLL.coms lets look at this in a relative way:

There are over 450,000 LLLL.coms. I probably should have the exact number memorized but don’t. That sounds like a huge number. However if we consider how many websites are online now you may not think the number is that high.

How many websites are currently online? Well, nobody knows the exact number but there was one company last year who made an estimate. Netcraft is a company that uses spiders to get data for Microsoft. In Feb of 07 they estimated there were over 108 million websites!

108 MILLION!!

This is how the growth of websites has looked in the past 12 years or so:

August of 2005 = 18,000 websites

May 2004          = 50 million

Oct 2006            = 100 million

Feb 2007            = 108 million ( that’s 8 million in just 4 months! )

OK, now how do you feel about 450,000 domains? The number of websites increases by about half a million about every week it seems. If not more.

The arguement that there are too many LLLL.coms doesn’t really hold water.

These domains are like having property in a prime neighboorhood in San Francisco or New York.