In one of the previous posts, we observed that since the last LLL.in buyout, fewer and fewer LLL.INs are getting dropped. This is a good thing for the stability of LLL.INs and price increase.
In this post, we’ll take a dive into what kinds of LLL.INs are dropping. Before we put up stats, let’s get some nomenclature out of the way so that we are all on the same page. If you have been domaining for some time, you would have undoubtedly heard the terms like western premium, chips, etc. Let’s refresh this again for the benefit for all:
- Western Premiums: Usually for LLL and LLLL names where each letter comprises of ABCDEFGHLMNOPRST only.
- CHIPS: Stands for CHInese PremiumS, and contains alphabets, that does NOT include AEIOU and V
- Indian Premiums: Since Indian domain market is still in its infancy there is no name assigned to India Premiums akin to CHIPS for the Chinese Market. But that does not mean that there Western Premium and Indian Premium alphabets exactly are the same. Based on common usage of certain alphabets in Indian languages, it has been observed that K and V, in addition to the Western Premium alphabets are considered are common and can be construed as Indian Premiums. So the alphabets that form Indian Premiums are ABCDEFGHKLMNOPRSTV.
Now since the naming convention & terminologies are all ironed out, let’s dive into stats. But, before I dive into the stats, just a note on data that is used to pull the stats:
- The LLL.IN dropping stats were regularly collected since mid-2008. So we have about eight years of solid data.
- A LLL.IN name was assumed to be dropping if it was in PENDING DELETE RESTORABLE or PENDING DELETE SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE state. In the former, it is possible that the name could have been restored & hence did not drop. Such cases although possible are very very small in number, and although the raw numbers change because of that, the conclusions derived from the stats will not be impacted by minor noise or edge cases.
Finally, all the preliminary points are covered, here is the first table:
| Number of Times a LLL.IN Has Dropped | Number of Different LLL.Ins |
|---|---|
| 1 | 4,813 |
| 2 | 2,403 |
| 3 | 2,096 |
| 4 | 1,591 |
| 5 | 829 |
| 6 | 186 |
| 7 | 3 |
The first column is the number of times a LLL.IN has dropped over eight years. So for example say a name like JTQ.IN was dropped in 2010 and registered after it was dropped, but it was again dropped in 2014, this name would be part of “2” in this column. The second column is the total count of all unique names that dropped. So basically we are trying to see how many different LLL.INs dropped over eight years and how many times did they drop. As evident from the table above, ~5000 names dropped at least once in the course of eight years. Another observation is that fewer and fewer names having been dropping multiple times. Three of the names dropped seven times in the last eight years. The names were — AFZ.IN, MGZ.IN and VDU.IN.
Remember, we talked about Western Premium, etc. above, the reason we talked about it because of the next chart:
The chart puts the dropped LLL.IN names into categories so that we can see how they fared. Clearly, you can discern that there is a huge difference between Premiums (Indian + Western) and Others. Most of the Western Premiums that dropped the first time had NOT been dropped again. No Western Premium LLL.in has dropped more than two times. There is a drop off in Indian Premium names as well, and there are fewer Indian Premium names that have dropped several times.