Updated 12th August:
I do love 3 letter domain names. Who doesn’t?!
But it is incredibly difficult to value them when on auction more than seeing what others are prepared to pay.
The latest 3 letter domain name to appear on Godaddy Auctions Expired list is jfx.com. J and X are fairly weak letters when it comes to valuing short domains, but there are some pretty interesting features of this domain which is what led me to write about it at all.
From an SEO point of view, it is not ranking for any keywords apart from the domain name itself. It does have some incoming links, but most of them are either weak and low quality or fairly old.
It doesn’t really look like any attention was given since about 2012 when it was announced that jfx.com was being launched as a forex market.
The main company that launched it is Jiffix Leveraged Trading which is/was registered in Cyprus and has 1 employee on LinkedIn. However, their domain name jiffix.com has now expired and has been put up for resell for $3k by BrandBucket.
So, where is the value in the domain name?
Firstly, it is short being just 3 letters.
Secondly, JFX can stand for a number of things including:
- JavaFX, a software platform
- Jones Falls Expressway, a freeway in Baltimore, Maryland
- Walker County Airport, in Alabama, United States
Thank you Wikipedia!
Interestingly, there are 2 live trademark registrations on JFX. Both from Chinese companies on a product. They are both registered in the past couple of years, so could be a potential problem. My non-legal opinion is that there are too many possible meanings of jfx to claim the domain but could be interesting if ends up in court.
The value also lies in the fact that fx can be effects as in Visual FX or can refer to Forex.
At the moment, it is on sale for around $11,850 with 9 days left. It’s hard to make a prediction without knowing whether end-users are watching it, but I would be surprised if it were to go for less than $20 or more than $30k. However, with the way that domain names are being bought at the moment it could be many multiples of that!
Will update here once the auction is finished.
EDIT: The domain name sold for $43.5k and is currently unused or parked.