The Freename Forum

All good domains are already registered and concise, short and brandable terms can only be purchased for large sums of money. Really all of them? David Barnett introduces the method of ‘phonotactic evaluation’, which can be used to unearth a few gems from the riverbed of domain noise.

In an article on circleid.com, Brand Protection Strategist David Barnett (Stobbs) presents a method for generating short, articulate and brandable domains. In his study, he conducts a ‘phonotactic evaluation’ of unregistered five-character .com domains. Phonotactics is a measure of the potential readability or similarity of candidate strings to other existing words (or brands) in the corpus of a language. It is orientated towards English-language terms, but in principle this can be carried out in any language. A phonotactically usable string does not necessarily have to be attractive and brandable. This is why the result of an automated analysis must be analysed manually.

There are various phonotactic calculators. Barnett refers to the one at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he uses Hayes' BLICK model as an algorithm for the analysis. This model outputs a score for any sequence of phonemes (word candidates), which is a measure of the extent of phonotactic ‘violation’; a lower score then represents a more credible potential name. The implementation used in this analysis required each string to first be converted to its phonetic representation using ARPABET syntax, in which each phonetic element is represented as a series of Latin characters (and in some cases a trailing digit).

For his specific study, Barnett used only those 478,369 of the 9 million unregistered 5-character .com domains that begin with ‘a’ and ‘b’. As a result, the algorithm sorted out 8,893 (1.9 per cent) domains with a score of ‘0’ as unusable. The five domains with the highest scores were awbzp (59.43), bctko (65.17), anwjf (65.94), apgdj (67.26) and bchji (67.92). The majority of 5-character combinations were collected in the range between 1 and 10 points, with 25,000 (1) to over 50,000 (2) data. Thanks to the points, the result can be usefully filtered again by using certain point values as a threshold. For Barnett, it seems sensible to include further criteria in order to master the data sets. It is also impossible to avoid sorting out terms or fragments that are similar to brands. As a result, Barnett sees this method as a way of filtering out a few useful domains that can be marketed as brandable. Some domains - manually selected by Barnett - were accepted as brandable at the domain marketplace atom.com and displayed with values over US$ 2,000.

The article by David Barnett, which is well worth reading and contains numerous sources, can be found at:
https://circleid.com/posts/20240903-unr ... c-analysis

The phonotactic calculator of the UCI can be found at:
https://phonotactics.socsci.uci.edu/

Two weeks ago, we presented David Barnett's “phonotactic evaluation” method, with which he was able to dig a few more domain gems out of the riverbed of domain noise. In a 2nd part of his tips, he digs even deeper with the “Sensational Spellingz” method.

In another article on circleid.com, Brand Protection Strategist David Barnett (Stobbs) introduces another method called “Sensational Spellingz”. He searched for “quirky”, i.e. alternative spellings of well-known terms - better known as “sensational spellingz” - as potential candidates for brandable names. In his test, Barnett focuses on variants of generic, business-related buzzwords. “Sensational Spellingz” brings to mind old acquaintances such as Flickr, Tumblr and Reddit. But there are also earlier terms such as Weetabix, Blu-ray and Froot Loops. Such word variants are becoming interesting due to the ever decreasing number of domains and brands that can be registered. The use of such terms could make it easier to identify available and usable domains and secure trademark protection.

Barnett examined domain names with four, five and six characters based on 34 industry-related keywords (tech, logic, office, etc.). The algorithm for generating spelling variants takes into account a number of techniques, including the removal of vowels (as in “Flickr” and “Tumblr”), the repetition of characters and the replacement of characters or groups of characters with others that are pronounced similarly (for example). The result had to be evaluated manually in order to select really useful hits. As a result, he came up with 958 variants, with the key term “tech” proving to be the most productive with 86 variants, followed by “quote” (75) and “celeb” (66). From the 958 domains, Barnett selected eleven domains, which he then registered in order to determine their value. For the valuation, he used an AI-based domain valuation, which classified at least six of the eleven domains with a value over US$ 100. The domain sztem.com, based on the keyword “system”, was valued at US$ 1,519 and the domain logikq.com, based on “logic”, at US$ 1,445, while logiqk.com was only valued at under US$ 100.

Barnett concludes that this technique can generate useful domains that could be interesting from the point of view of potential brandability. Unfortunately, Barnett does not specify the basis on which the algorithm is based. We also miss any references to the AI-supported rating system. We don't find the process as exciting as the one Barnett presented in his previous article.

If you want to know more, you can find Barnett's article here:
https://circleid.com/posts/20240911-fur ... -spellingz