The Domain Name Wire published a description of a curious way for a cursory assessment of the potential value of short (3-4 characters) domain names. The well-known domain investor Nat Cohen shared the method. According to him, since the mid-2000s, he has been using the so-called scrabble account for evaluation. Its essence is very simple and is based on the popular Scrabble game.
In this game where you have to make words from letter tiles, each letter has its own value. The more often this or that letter is used in the language, the lower the cost. So, in English Scrabble, all vowels are worth 1 point, as well as L, N, S, T and R. And the most expensive - 10 points - are the letters Q and Z. Cohen is sure that the lower the sum of scrabble points of all letters of the domain name, the potentially more expensive the domain is. Thus, the absolute conditional domain name star.tld will have the lowest possible scrabble score for four-letter names - 4 points out of 4 possible. And therefore, it will be very expensive.
Of course, the method requires many reservations. First of all, it only makes sense for domains addressed to English-speaking users. In the Scrabble game in other languages, even those using the Latin alphabet, the cost of the letters will be different (not to mention the Russian version of the same game). Then, as already noted, the scrabble score is only suitable for short names: for domains of 5 letters or more, other evaluation factors come into play, primarily semantics. And, finally, a lot depends on the position of the letter in the name. So, the letter U is worth 1 point in English Scrabble. At the same time, it occurs from time to time at the beginning of words, very often in the middle and almost never at the end. Conversely, the letter X (8 points) rarely appears at the beginning of a word, but quite often at the end. Accordingly, the investor should make an adjustment by increasing or decreasing the value of the letter depending on its position in the domain name.
Nat Cohen himself is well aware of all these limitations. He emphasizes that domain investors cannot be limited to one way to evaluate a domain name and should carefully consider all possible factors. However, for a cursory preliminary assessment, the scrabble score is quite good.
