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Iphone Domains
June 28th, 2007 by 
Jay Westerdal
Domain registration patterns can tell a lot about the world and what news is breaking. The number of IPhone domains skyrocketed on January 11th 2007 when the official announcement came out from Apple. 453 domains with the word “Iphone” were registered that first day and the explosion of Iphone domain names have been steady since that day. The initial spike was a lot of people going after domains so they could have the best domain for marketing purposes.
After the earth shattering announcement and the huge spike in registrations the amount of people registering IPHone type of domains names each day cooled off to a simmering registration rate that was steadily averaging a health 25 domains a day. A lot of people still feel they are clever because they have registered a good IPhone website domain prior to the launch of the product and the demand will only get better after the launch of the device.
A month before the official launch of the Apple IPhone, Apple began TV commercials which show how cool the phone is. This is definitely increasing the demand for the Phone because we see the registration volume is increasing again. In this last month prior to the launch the registration volume has been getting stronger and more pronounced.
The quality of IPhone names has been dropping, a lot of the good ones were taken on the day of the announcement by the first people that heard the name. They rushed out and got great names like IPhone Jewelery.com, but the really great names like IPhone Games.com were taken by almost psychic people over a year ago. They had the ability to guess Apple would come out with an Iphone and also that people would want games for that phone.
There are still some good names left, IPhone Web.com for example was registered in May. We expect more domains to get registered in the coming months but for those that register now they have a better chance of getting a good name then the people that wait until after Launch. There is going to be a healthy aftermarket in IPhone domain names. There are more then four thousand new IPhone domain names floating around now and we expect another four thousand by the end of the year.
Apple might have a different take on all this. They may say people are registering their trademark and they don’t deserve these domain names but we have seen that Apple has not been on the ball and even failed to secure the rights to IPhone.com so they are doing a poor job in the Domain game. When Microsoft announced the Surface Computer we saw that they had already beat the market and registered a lot of generic domains. Apple needs a good domain registration team that can rush the market and pickup good domain names prior to world wide announcements.
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June 28th, 2007 at 5:42 am
Nice article.
June 28th, 2007 at 7:08 am
Great article and research.
Can you show us the process you used to conduct your research via http://www.domaintools.com and what the cost was?
I think Apple is already hosed in the domain game for this and any of their future products because of their propensity to brand new products iApple/Product.
Registrants both psychic and not so psychic have already gobbled up likely product line extensions.
Apple isn’t the only large company to overlook the importance of domains and branding.
Xerox announced a new search engine earlier this week called Fact Spotter. They too hadn’t considered the importance of owning their newproductdomain.com as part of their corporate marketing strategy.
FactSpotter.com is owned by someone other than Xerox.
UPDATE BY JAY: Tim, this report is not available on DomainTools. We have plans to release this type of report though. I will check when those plans will be finalized.
June 28th, 2007 at 7:40 am
“There are still some good names left, IPhoneWeb.com for example was registered in May.”
DomainTools list it created May, 2005.
domain: iphoneweb.com
created: 04-May-2005
last-changed: 05-May-2007
registration-expiration: 04-May-2008
Your article has a typo.
IPhoneJewelry.com was registered June, 2007. But, IPhoneJewelery.com is not registered.
June 28th, 2007 at 7:49 am
“really great names like IPhoneGames.com were taken by almost psychic people over a year ago. They had the ability to guess Apple would come out with an Iphone and also that people would want games for that phone.”
People have been registering domains that start with “i” for 12 yrs.
It is very logical that “iphone” could really represent “internet phone”.
iPhone.com was created in 1995. iPhones.com was created in 1998.
I believe there could be a good argument that Apple is the one stepping on other people’s toes.
UPDATE BY JAY: Yes, I + Phone is a no brainer. BUT, Apple should have been proactive and bought those domains from people like Microsoft bought Surface.com.
June 28th, 2007 at 8:11 am
ActNow has a point. You would be hard pressed to register a generic category or product .com domain starting with an “i” or “e”.
eBay comes to mind as an example of e’s usage.
Haven’t these abbreviations for “internet” and “electronic” been incorporated in naming schemes since the dawn of the commercial internet?
Will A, O and U ever be able to catch up with I and E or has the race already been ran?
June 28th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Tim, the fact that “i” and “e” are vowels is, I think, coincidence, since they stand for actual words (Internet and Electronic).
What the next “big letter” will be remains to be seen. There are those who have suggested “v” for “virtual,” “m” for “mobile,” or even “r” for “remote.”
June 28th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Who knows. Seeing around domain corners is a tough business…
V looks like it rolls off the tongue more readily than R and M.
VCast is the only English brand I can think of that begins with two consonants. I wonder it they were thinking virtual cast?
Are they any others?
I don’t know what categories m’s would work in. R’s might work for pirates.
June 29th, 2007 at 8:23 am
Yeah
Even those domain start with i like iFive.com, iFour.com, Igames.com
etc Are in high demand, I am not sure if there is a connection or just people like anything with i
June 29th, 2007 at 10:34 am
It sounds like if there are any “i” domains left, they may be a good bet.
I think I only own one domain that could be construed as an “i” domain - IQHQ.com. I think I will hunt for some more.
Jay - thanks for the report on your report.
Maybe there is a market for information products and services for those of us domain buyers who aren’t as familiar with the back end of the business as you are. I don’t know.
I video site demo posted here or on YouTube would be beneficial.
July 4th, 2007 at 6:25 am
i have an E domain I recently made into a site, eFreeLoaders, and I have a few others… I guess if it makes sense, rolls off the toung easy enough, then it may be a good choice.
July 5th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
I registerd all these windows surface names and they are for sale on sedo.com for $5000.00 each.
Surfaceaid.com
Surfacefix.com
Surfacepart.com
Surfacegeek.com
Surfaceroad.com
Surfacestreet.com
Surfaceservice.com
Securesurface.com
Stickysurface.com
Tabletopsurface.com