In the fourth in this series of articles exploring how the application of appropriate tools, algorithms and analysis techniques can identify the existence of attractive, unregistered brandable domain names, I consider the prevalence of a few additional styles of name.

Any identified domain names given as specific named examples in this article have been purchased as part of a ‘test set’ (all available at ‘cost price’ at the time of purchase); any associated valuations are as given by an automated, AI-driven tool.

Domain-ly-ify-ing the search

As for the case of ‘ize’ domains considered in the previous article in this series¹, keywords featuring certain other suffixes have also historically proved popular for use as brandable names. Two specific examples are domain names ending in ‘-ly’ or ‘-ify’. As for ‘ize’ domains, the name structure can produce terms appearing similar to particular categories of grammatical terms (adverbs and verbs, respectively), which can provide an attractive sense of dynamism for a potential brand². Both of these suffixes have been adopted extensively for a number of years³, with well-known brands including Bitly, Reachly, Grammarly, Seekly, Talently, Brainly, Scopely, Leafly, Calendly, Musically, Openly, and Spotify, Bizify, Healthify, Expensify, Proposify, and many others. An additional aspect to the ‘ly’ names is that they are particularly amenable to construction using second-level name (SLD) / top-level domain (TLD) combinations (utilising the .ly ccTLD which technically pertains to Libya, but is one of many extensions which are commonly ‘re-requisitioned’ for other use-cases⁴). However, in this analysis, I consider only .com names.

Whilst ‘ly’ names (for example) may appear superficially similar to adverbs, it seems that non-dictionary neologisms are more often preferred from a brandability point of view (as borne out by the examples presented above), perhaps both because of the relative unavailability of pure dictionary terms (i.e. true adverbs) as available domain names, and because of the general apparent appeal of newly-coined terms (in some ways analogous to ‘sensationally spelled’ terms as discussed previously⁵). The examples presented in this study have largely been selected with this trend in mind.

The first step in identifying available names is firstly to consider the set of registered names, through analysis of the (in this case, .com) zone file. As of the date of analysis (22-Sep-2024), there are 604,379 registered .com domains with names ending with ‘ly’ (comprising an alphabetical list from 000area-weekly.com to zzzzzfly.com), and 51,235 ‘ify’ domains (from 00ssl-verify.com to zzzify.com). Unlike the cases of domains of a particular length, there are—of course—an infinite number of possible ‘ly’ or ‘ify’ domains. The analysis in this study therefore focuses on available domain names where the prefix is an attractive, brandable (generic or business-related) term, and the domain name as a whole is (relatively) short.

To this end, I consider (single-word) prefixes (i.e. the portion of the SLD prior to ‘ly’ or ‘ify’) comprising either: any of the set of (34) business-related keywords⁶ considered in the previous study of sensational spellings; any of the set of (999) most common English nouns⁷, any of a set of (2,766) general business-vertical-related keywords drawn from various sources⁸ (including the large set of descriptors used in Google business profiles^{9, 10}); and (for ‘ify’) any of a set of (96) common English adjectives¹¹. For the ‘ify’ domains, I also consider cases where any final vowel on the prefix-term is optionally removed.

The analysis yielded a set of 1,068 potentially available ‘ly’ domains of interest, and 2,220 ‘ify’ domains. Amongst these, some of the most appealing and/or brandable examples included alcoholicly.com (<$100), amusemently.com ($104), competitionly.com ($185), introductionly.com ($104), petrochemically.com (<$100), and breakfastify.com ($1,326).

The domains

Domains beginning with the definite article (’the’) are also traditionally popular in branding, with the term considered to have the potential to add specificity (rather than genericism) to the name, and convey a sense of gravitas. Numerous instances of sales of ‘the’ domains at prices in excess of $1M dollars have been reported¹², and they may also comprise an attractive brandable alternative in light of the shortage of availability of dictionary-term (in isolation) domain names.

The set of registered .com domain names beginning with ‘the’ is somewhat larger than for the categories of names discussed in the previous section, with 3,264,507 registered names (from the————————————————————————————line.com to thezzzzone.com, in addition to a number of examples featuring non-Latin characters) (including also examples where the term appears as a sub-string of a longer word such as ‘theatre’, ‘there’, ‘thermo-’, etc.).

The most obvious category of appealing names are those in which the second-level name consists of ‘the’ immediately followed by (just) a dictionary term. The analysis in this case focuses on the same lists of nouns and adjectives considered previously, plus any of a list of (45) common English single-word superlatives¹³. This first-stage analysis yielded the identification of ten candidate domains (i.e. those which are absent from the zone file) of potential interest, including thedifficulty.com ($1,598), theco-operation.com (<$100), theannoyed.com ($1,523), thewettest.com (<$100), and—forming a ‘pair’ which could potentially be sold together at a premium, offering additional brandability options—thefattest.com ($1,564) and thethinnest.com ($1,429).

Widening out the search, to those examples where the portion of the domain name after ‘the’ consists of an adjective-(or superlative)-plus-noun pair, yields a much larger set of candidate names, with the set of keywords used in the analysis generating over 127,000 possible available names, including (for example) 421 of the form thebest[noun].com.

Discussion

Once again, the analysis has shown that—despite the general lack of available, short .com domain names, and particularly those with SLDs consisting just of a single-word dictionary term—there are still significant numbers of brandable options available, for searchers with access to the appropriate tools, techniques and algorithms. It is also noteworthy that many of the examples available for registration at cost price (typically of the order of $10) are deemed to have significantly higher values, in many cases in excess of $1,000.