BSF: Beautiful Single Female.
It seems crazy, but LLL .com domains – the “hard currency” of domainers – are still expiring and dropping, more than a decade after the last freely available one got registered.
In the late 90’s and very early 2000’s, domain investors from the US and Canada, registered the last remaining combinations of three-letter .com domains.
Out of 17,576 possible combinations of three letters, not a single one is available to register as a .com today.
Except, that one such domain, BSF.com, dropped and got re-registered, thus starting afresh with a new registration date of September 3, 2013.
BSF.com was originally registered in 1998 by Bekaert LLC as a product showcase of Bekaert Specialty Films. The company, founded in 1880 in Belgium, had combined sales of 4.4 billion euro in 2012. They could virtually buy every LLL .com on the planet! 😀
The domain BSF.com is most likely going to be auctioned at a drop-catching service soon.
This post is 100% true!
The auction ended 3 days ago, $16,500 was the winning bid.
Nuno – Thanks for the info, that’s a fair price for these letters, but shame about the original registration date being lost.
Glad I could help, I was one of the bidders 🙂
Everyone gets the number of combination wrong of LLL.coms, its not 17,576 because you are counting AAA.com 3 times by doing the simple sum of 26x26x26. Actual number is 15,600 26x25X24
betthelot – While you are correct that the number 17,576 is inaccurate, your answer of 15,600 is not correct either.
Since there are 26 letters, we will be subtracting two duplicate sets of 26, for a total of 52, so the correct answer is 17,524 valid LLL combinations.
Using the same logic, there are (26*26)-26 LL .com domains, for a total of 650.
@betthelot
Your figure, 15600 (26*25*24), doesn’t account for repeat letters, and “LLL dot-com”s definitely have repeat letters… At least, I hope they do, otherwise I have a couple of invalid ones. 🙂
The author was using the term “combinations” loosely (like I often do), but was still correct; There are 17576 (26*26*26) “LLL dot-com”s out there. In a similar vein, there are 1000 (10*10*10) “NNN dot-coms” registered. Look up “Permutations with Repetition,” if you’re still not convinced.
Either way, I’m sure everyone agrees that some companies out there should give their domain assets more respect than they sometimes do.