How many letters are too long in a domain name? What's the longest domain name you've ever seen?

Websites have corresponding IP addresses, and the reason for the existence of domain names is that IP addresses are too difficult to remember. However, some domain names are not necessarily easier to remember than IP addresses. Have you ever seen the longest domain name in terms of the number of letters? I have seen one with 30 letters.

Earlier, ScienceAndTechnologyResearchNews.com was sold on a domain trading platform for $2025. This is the first sale of a non-hyphenated domain with more than 30 letters for over $2000 in the past five years, at least from the sales recorded by NameBio. However, this is not the longest name sold so far. For instance, in 2019, TheLongestListOfTheLongestStuffAtTheLongestDomainNameAtLongLast.com was sold for $1025 on a certain platform. So, how long is too long for a domain name? The answer is not as clear-cut as one might think.

1. Special Domain Names

Let's first consider the two sales mentioned in the introduction. They are undoubtedly special sales, and their value is based on the development history rather than necessarily the intrinsic quality of the names. TheLongestListOfTheLongestStuffAtTheLongestDomainNameAtLongLast.com is a well-developed website that has been around for a while, covering topics like the longest roads, rivers, and life.

2. What Does Domain Name Length Mean?

The answer to this question seems obvious at first glance, but there are other ways to consider length besides just looking at the number of characters in the second-level domain. Here are some possibilities:

- The number of characters on the left side of the dot.

- The combined number of characters on both sides of the dot.

- The number of words in the domain name.

- The number of syllables in the domain name.

There is also a difference between visual length and audio length. For example, the brand KFC has only 3 characters in writing and is shorter than the brand Lyft. However, when pronounced, Lyft is a monosyllabic "lift," while KFC has three syllables pronounced as "kay-eff-see." A large number of syllables can sometimes lead to audio confusion, while a short visual appearance is important for names you want customers to see and remember.

3. Length and Prices

For several domain extensions, I used the NameBio database to look at the average prices as a function of domain length. I focused on sales over the past five years and looked at .com, .org, .co, .io, .cyou, .top, .dev, .technology, and .international extensions. I excluded domain names with hyphens or numbers from this study. The results are shown in the graph below, with the blue line indicating the average price, and the corresponding .com, .org, .co, .io, .cyou, .top, .dev, .technology, and .international results displayed below.

Please note that I did not include results for 2 and 3-character domain names, where the average sale price for 2-letter .com domains is $1 million, with a median price of $900,000. The average price for 3-letter .com domains over the past five years is approximately $66,200. If we exclude sales for 2 and 3-letter domains, the correlation between average price and domain length, although present, is weaker than expected. The rise in the average price for the 5th and 15th characters in the results is due to the influence of single-star auctions, where voice.com was sold for $30 million in 2019, and HealthInsurance.com was sold for $8.133 million in 2019. The relative average prices have changed with domain extensions. Except for the length affected by voice.com, .co has higher average prices than .com for domain names with lengths of 4 to 9 letters, while .com names longer than that are significantly higher.

If we only consider long domain names, the difference between .org and .com prices is negligible. For long names, the relationship between average price and length is weaker.

4. Length and Sales Volume

While average prices do not strongly depend on length for certain lengths, what I'm interested in is how the sales volume differs for domain names of different lengths. I plotted the sales data for .com over the past five years below. At around 16 letters in length, the sales volume for all lengths remains strong. This may reflect that many sales are for 2-word .com domains, and many words are 6 to 9 letters long.

The sales volume for long names drops more quickly. For .io, sales volume for all lengths over 11 letters is less than 100. The drop in length is even greater for .co, with sales volumes for each length of 10 or more letters being less than 100.

While maintaining the number of characters and word and syllable counts is important, simple rules won't tell you whether a specific domain name is too long.

I believe the key is to keep the domain name as short as possible to clearly express the idea. For example, NewYorkCityAirConditioning.com, strictly speaking, requires 5 words, 8 syllables, and 26 letters, but none of them are absolutely necessary to express the idea.