"Shorter domains are worth more" is repeated everywhere. We checked 5,126 sales and it barely holds.

Every naming guide says the same thing: keep it short. Fewer characters, higher value. It is stated as a law, usually without a number attached.

We had 5,126 reported .com sales sitting in a file, so we attached a number.

Grouping by length

We took every .com sale DNJournal reported between February 2025 and September 2026, stripped the extension, and grouped by how many characters were left.

There is a slope. A five-character name sold for about 35% more than a thirteen-character one.

But look at the size of it. Across a range where the name goes from five characters to thirteen — from zorby to smartoriginlab — the median moves by about $1,100. In a market where a single-word name sells for $55,000, a $1,100 spread is close to noise.

Compare that to shape. Sorted by what the name is rather than how long it is, the same 5,126 sales split from $2,900 to $55,000. Shape moved the price nineteen times harder than length did.

Why the myth survives

Because the two are tangled, and the tangle runs one way.

Single dictionary words are short. little is six characters. craft is five. When you line up the most expensive sales, they are dominated by one-word names, and one-word names are short — so "short" appears at the top of the table.

But the shortness is a side effect. The value is in being a word.

Our data shows the direction: one-word names in the set averaged 6.8 characters. Many-word names averaged 17.5. The length difference is real. It just is not the cause.

If length were doing the work, a five-character coined name like zorby would sell near a five-character dictionary word. It does not. Coined names sold at a median of $3,900 regardless of how tight they were.

What this changes in practice

If you are naming something and you can register the domain today, you are choosing among coined names, word-plus-fragment names, and two-word names. All three sold within $400 of each other.

So the advice we would actually give:

Stop trimming characters to hit a number. Going from nine letters to seven does not buy you value it is not already worth. It buys you a name that is harder to say.

Do avoid hyphens and digits. Those two sat at $2,900 and $3,500 and made up only 6% of sales combined. This is the one piece of conventional advice the data supports cleanly.

Say it out loud before you check its length. The names that carried price were the ones that read as a word. Whether that word is five letters or eight moved the number far less than whether it was a word at all.

The part we cannot tell you

The same limits apply here as anywhere in this data, and they are worth repeating because they are usually left out.

DNJournal records sales that someone chose to disclose. Names that never sold are not in the file, so none of this speaks to the probability that a name sells — only to what sold names fetched. A median is not a forecast.

And three quarters of the rows do not say where the sale happened. We can describe the market's prices; we cannot describe its channels.

Method: 5,126 reported .com sales, DNJournal bi-weekly reports, Feb 2025 – Sep 2026. Length measured on the name without the extension. Medians throughout.