Although there are millions of .UK domain names registered, there are still many that are not, when compared to the huge .com zone list, which lists every .com domain that is currently registered. The fact is, the .UK namespace simply hasn’t been mined to the extent that the .COM namespace has. Not every single niche has been covered, not so many people have tried to start up sites.
This has pros and cons. The pros are that if you have such a list of scanned names, you are able to find names that have been forgotten about about are just sitting there waiting to be registered. The cons are that there are huge numbers of unregistered names waiting to be registered that are OK for most purposes. This has two effects: it means that selling a premium generic becomes harder, as there are many “almost” names available, but it should also have the effect of improving and stabilising the price of generics, as the “almost” names simply don’t tick all the right boxes.
Here’s an example. We have scanned over 2.5million names recently, and have a list of over 700,000 UK names that have been registered at some point, but are now sitting idle, waiting to registered again. Naturally, many of these are junk names are not worth the registration fee. But if you dig a bit, you can find some moderately useful names.
In our recent trawls through the list, we have found large numbers of names with searches estimated at around 500 per month, some in the 1000-5000 range, and others that are over 14,500… Now some of them might not be what they seem - never trust the Google search numbers 100%! But others are, and we are working our way through looking for nuggets.
And remember, each name we find in this way costs us a registration fee only. Even if we buy for £5 and flip for £10, we’ve doubled our money. Which isn’t a bad return on investment in this day and age!