What Actually Makes a Domain Premium

Domain prices look arbitrary from the outside — until you learn the five factors every serious buyer checks. They explain almost every price on this site.

1. Length

Every character costs attention. Two- and three-letter .coms sold out decades ago and now trade from five figures to seven. Four to six characters is the sweet spot where real brands live: Zoho, Wix, Canva, Etsy. Under twelve characters, clean and unhyphenated, still commands a premium.

2. Pattern

Pronounceability has a formula. Consonant-vowel alternation — CVCV, CVCVC — rolls off the tongue in any language, which is why invented words with that shape (think "Triat") outsell random strings many times over. If a stranger can hear your name once and type it correctly, the name is doing its job.

3. The TLD

.com remains the default in every market that matters. The same word on .net or .io trades at a fraction of its .com price, because every business that grows eventually wants the .com — and pays whatever it costs by then.

4. Age

Covered at length in our piece on aged domains: registration history is the one factor that cannot be manufactured at any price.

5. Exact-Match Meaning

A name that literally says what the business does — OrderDrones for a drone shop, FloorShare for space rental — carries built-in search intent and needs no explanation. Exact-match names in commercial niches are bought, not browsed.

How This Prices a Portfolio

Score any domain honestly against those five factors and its market range gets narrow, fast. A five-letter CVCVC .com belongs in one bracket; an 18-year-old exact-match in a spending niche belongs in another. That is exactly how each name in our collection was priced — and why the price on the card is the price we mean.