Buying domain names is not a simple science. Buying "3 letter domain names" is a far more complex science especially with the .com extension. If you are buying domain names as investments it is a lot easier because you do not have to be emotional about your decisions. A few years back I was out with my friend and we were going to start a website called BeMoreWeb or bemoreweb.com. I thought why not create a network of websites like go.com and do bmw.com. The shorter domain name allows you to create a better subdomain naming convention. It looks better to do movies.bmw.com instead of movies.bemoreweb.com. It then hit me that the domain I wanted bmw.com would be impossible to buy because it was owned by the car company and why would they want to sell it unless I bought the company. I then tried to research how to buy a domain name that was 3 letters or less and that was a .com.

When buying an iPad 16GB on eBay you know you are probably going to pay around $450 to $470. Looking at the chart above I sampled 1,000 recent 3 letter domain name sales. If you wanted to buy a 3 letter domain name you could spend anywhere from $1,000 to $1,000,000+. If you were looking at "3 letter domain name auctions" a domain name like fly.com that recently sold would cost you $1,600,000 or looking at another recent sale hnk.com would cost you $3,250. Looking at the chart above almost 64% of the sales are between $2,500 and $10,000 and if expanded to $25,000 it jumps up to 87%. If you really wanted a 3 digit .com domain and only had a $160 you could buy a domain name like 9kl.com.

.com extensions are by far the most popular extension. With the recent sale of fly.com I noticed on eBay that the domain name fly.ca was selling for $39,000 or best offer. That is a mere 2.5% of the .com domain name. It just shows you that .com extensions are far more desirable. It is also thought that .com domain names index better on google. Another similar example from eBay is a domain name e8z.net that sold for $9.99 and another domain name e3g.com selling for $1,000. The .net extension with a similar spelling sold for 1% of the similar .com sale. If that example doesn't work for you a fair comparison could be made for a3e.net selling for $9.99 and a3s.com selling for $1,500.

Below are 50 recent .com sales and the sale price: