Wall of text incoming:
There’s 2 reasons people buy usernames, either as a status symbol or as a stat page.
An overwhelming majority of the username market revolves around the first of those two. In that case, people buy “OG (original) usernames” because they want to look cool/unique/rare and/or want to display their wealth in the case of it being a very expensive username.
OGs are 1 existing word and preferably as common, cool and short as possible. Exceptions are names of celebrities, sports teams, …
“Semi-OGs” are essentially derivatives of an OG, typically plurals or ending in -ly , -ed, or -ing. For example, a decent value OG would be “Ascend” but “Ascending” would be referred to as a semi-OG and sell for way less.
The latter reason people buy usernames is to run stat pages for monetization purposes. A stat page is an account with an existing significant amount of followers.
Usernames that are inherently good for attracting followers just due to the name but without already having significant followers are referred to as “niche usernames”, referring to the type of content the username is associated with. Typically these usernames are OGs as well, they attract followers far easier. An example I like to use is the username “Scary” vs “Scarystories” or “Fitness” vs “Dailyfitness”.
In both cases, the latter would be decent usernames but in terms of inherently attracting followers, they can’t even begin to compare against the OGs Scary and Fitness.
An at best average OG on any of the top platforms would be sold for around $100 nowadays. Most are in the $100-250 range, depending on the platform’s popularity and the rarity of usernames being sold. There can be huge outliers though.
For example, I have the rarest username on Twitch, just “50”. The reason it is so rare is because aside from a very brief exploit in 2013, Twitch requires usernames to have a minimum of 4 characters.
Out of all the 2 character usernames, only about 20 are owned by people in this business. When it comes to 2 number usernames, 50 is the only number between 10 and 99 that hasn’t been banned or forever unobtainable due to them not making the transition to Twitch from their old domain JustinTV. Users had to manually request their account to be transferred and I was the sole 2 number username that didn’t get left behind.
The highest legit offers I’ve gotten for my Twitch are one for $8k and one offering “upwards of 10k”
Belgium
ad me Ohleo NR
