Why not Long Domain Name

Long domain name

Why Long Domain name with character more than 12 have less value

I was learning about Short/Long named domains. One thing which was referred again and again was easy/difficult to remember domain name.

The question came to mind is “How we remember and why we forget”.Remembering something is directly related to Brain. Most computational neuroscientists tend to estimate human storage capacity.They estimate somewhere between 10 terabytes to 2.5 petabytes (One petabyte is about 1,000 terabytes.). Hard disk of our brain has virtually unlimited storage capacity. Further neuroscientists divide memory into two parts.Short term and long term. Short-term memory, which I will refer to RAM of our computers, has much smaller capacity.Long-term memory of brain ( storage of computer) is unlimited. The original research into short-term memory says we can only remember 5 to 9 pieces of information at any given time. More recent experiments suggest it may even be as low as 4! A Domain Name may be short  or long,it does not stay for a long time in short memory. In internet era, information is so easy to access, it has made less likely to remember. Studies suggest,we are able to access information so conveniently.If the brain knows it can just access it again so easily, it’s less likely to bother remembering the information itself.

“We don’t attempt to store information in our own memory now a days.Not to the  same degree that we used to, because we know that the internet knows everything… …One could speculate that this extends to personal memories. We are constantly looking at the world through the lens of our smartphone camera.This  may result in us trusting our smartphones to store our memories for us. This way, we pay less attention to life itself and become worse at remembering events from our own lives”. – Dr. Maria Wimber, University of Birmingham.)This is called “Google Effect” and there is ongoing debate on “Is technology making us stupid”.

Thus whatever domain name (for that propose URL) we check on the internet goes to our short memory.This does not stay (remember) for a long time. If we struggle hard to remember it then it goes to long-term memory. Thus it does not matter if Domain is short or long.Memory plays in similar ways for both
The myth has been created  “Short Domain is easy to remember” and are generally of high values.This favours marketers for short and very short domains to sell high. But this is also true that commonly used words do not need any memory training.  It may be “SEX” or “INSURANCE”.But by comparison,the latter domain (Long Domain Name) was sold for $ 35.6 Million against the former (Very Short Domain Name) which was sold only for $13 million.

It does not matter if a domain is long or short. what matters is “the right domain name is one which can explain your business line “SEX.COM  was sold for $13,000,000 in 2010. Value of this domain is only because it sums up everything in one word . Otherwise why ULE.COM which was sold just for $145,000 (private sale-Feb12) of three characters was not sold for high value as SEX.COM.

SSM.COM was sold for  $145,000 (private sale-Jan 2004)..  But this domain sold so low as compared to SEX.COM. Although” S”, is considered a premium letter and here are two S(SSM.COM) as compared to X (SEX.COM) which is of lower quality.

PHD.COM ($150,000 -Jan2012) have most valuable letters and has highest position in education (Ph.D.).It was sold for less value then SEX, COM. It is the popularity of word, not the size, which matters most. (This is what we call SEO, Keyword etc)

Let us examine long domain name-(All statistics are taken from DNPric.es)  Incidentally, such domains (DNPric.es) are called  Domain Hack

From the table below I understand that long name domains also sell at record breaking prices
What I understand Longer domain names  have a better chance at being unique and expressive of business line.

Domain Name No of Characters Price-USD Year
CARINSURANCE.COM 12 $ 49,700,000 2010
CARDRATING.COM 10 $10,200,000 2008
PRIVATEJET.COM 10 $ 30,180,000 2007
INSURANCE.COM 9 $35.600,000 2011
ALTAVISTA.COM 9 $ 3,250,000 1999