GGRG.com has a much publicised quarterly report on the market for short domains. The stand out performer in terms of sales volume in a very dry selling market was LLL.com at $11.4 million. What has become clear with a bit of digging is that 4.CN unloaded over 250 LLL.com very recently, likely to one buyer. The 4.CN owner was in the midst of a fire sale of their portfolio over the last 6 weeks. The lowest BIN price was $23,000 and the highest was near $100,000 – I would suggest they got to a figure around $26,000 each for their portfolio.

LLL.com market is still kicking in contrast to LLLL.com which has seen a 28% drop in the lowest valued names. I believe when valuing 4L.coms many domainers make the mistake of only looking at the availability, being 26 times more than 3L.coms, so therefore they value them at 1/26th of a 3L.com (about 4%). However, that doesn’t take account of demand and you only need to think of how many companies you can recall using a 3 letter acronym compared to a 4 letter acronym. It has to be north of 10 times more companies are using 3 letters instead of 4 letters. Therefore a more sensible valuation would be around half a per cent of a 3L.com. Seems that is where they are heading.

Just an aside $11.4 million dollars of sales means at least 400 3L.coms were sold probably more than in the last 18 months