Whois records reveal: Facebook, Twitter and Deutsche Telekom bought 1-letter domains last months.

This month the pre-registration of 1 and 2 letter short domains in Ireland ended. Last week now some of the whois records have become visible to the public audience. As an interesting fact we can see 3 of the biggest global internet players among the registrants of the 36 one charcater short .ie domains.

The registrant of the domain f.ie is the company Facebook Inc. The "t" letter was acquired by Germany based communications giant Deutsche Telekom, known better internationally by its mobile subsidiaries T-Mobile. Twitter finally took p.ie and v.ie. This might be the least surprising buy since Twitter is already known for its use of the 1-letter domain t.co, that was made a shortener allowing to keep the tweets compact.

The new Twitter domains already are connected to the service. The other domains did not resolve until writing of this article. One can only speculate the reasons, why the domain have been taken by the companies. Does Facebook plan a similar service like t.co? Is the domain only planned for use in Ireland or for all users? Was the reason, why the companies bought them only for marketing or did the special technological advantages play a role? (see more here). Is there maybe even some new technology field that motivated the big companies to buy 1-letters?
Time will show how the domains have been used.

However the use will be, this interest in worlds shortest domain type C.LL (character-dot-letter-letter) shows the big potential of that domains. A 2-letter country code is given only to countries. And each country can only have 36 basic Latin1 charset domains of that type. Most countries blocked the possibility to get such a domain. All this makes C.LL type domains extremly rare. And the market is bought out by investors. Now the value might go up a little again. Below some of the most current market resales of 1-character short domains according to the service DNJournal.com that show the trends.

1-char sales 2016

1-char sales 2015

By the way the highest sale value ever that we know about has been Z.com that sold at   6.800.000 USD.   Because of the unique position of .com and the fact that no new registrations of 1-char .com are possible this prove to be an excellent asset.

(JBS)

For a Chinese language translation click here 單字母域名