Distribution of names

Domain names by first character

As shown by the graph, the characters most used as the first characters are S,C,A and M. Domain names starting with these characters account for 30.5 per cent of all COM domain names in total. Domain names starting with a digit accounts for less than two per cents.

Benford's law states that lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit 1 occurs much more often than the others (namely about 30% of the time). Furthermore, the larger the digit, the less likely it is to occur as the leading digit of a number.

To be precise Benford's law states that the leading digit n (n ∈ {1, ..., b − 1} ) in base b (b >= 2) occurs with probability proportional to logb(n + 1) − logb(n). In base 10, the leading digits have the following distribution by Benford's law compared to occurence in COM domain names

Length of domain names

96.8 per cent of all domain names with 3 characters is taken, and the remainders probably contain a hyphen, or is considered without use for a domain name. The odds are somewhat better if looking at domain names with four characters where 31.8 per cent of the namespace is occupied. The length most common is 11 characters. See if your name is available and/or register it at passive12.net

Although it looks like no domain name is registered with more than 40 characters, that isn't true, although the numbers are relatively small, and only 541 domain names are registered with the max length, 63 characters.

Domains by first three characters

Looking at the top 20 groups of first three characters, "the" is the most common group with 811,220 active domain names.

It is somewhat surprising to find "www" as the second largest group. One reason might be companies registering www-company.com in case someone mis-type www.company.com, another possible reason is that this is being done for phishing reasons.

Many domain name sqatters register domains such as wwwcompanyname.com as well and try to sell it to the company or shows advertisement on the sites.