As shorter domain names are increasingly unavailable, longer names are inevitably becoming more common.  How long is too long?

Let's look at the top 100, 250, and 1000 domain names listed on Alexa (from http://en.wikipopia.org/toplist/alexa), and examine the distribution of the lengths of all .com/.net/.org names.  Here's the result:

The length counts here include the four characters ".(com|net|org)", so #1 "google.com" counts as length 10, and #2 "facebook.com" counts as length 12.

The median length of a top 100 domain is 10 (for example, "google.com", six plus .com), and the median length in the top 250 or 1000 buckets is 11 (for example, "weather.com").  And roughly 90% of all of the top 1000 are of length 15 or less!  That's just 11 characters of creativity, plus four characters of ".TLD".

Sure, short names correlate with older, established companies that were founded when short names were more easily available.  And we shouldn't confuse correlation with causation.  However, there's no doubt that at some point, names become too long to be easily remembered and brandable in the eyes of consumers.

I'd like to see a syllable count if anyone has such data!