How do you calculate what the WORST or LEAST VALUABLE number is?

Yeah, I know that’s a weird question, even for a number geek like me. I’ve put an amazing amount of thought and analysis into calculating what the most valuable numbers are, in multiple different ways, but I realized recently that I had never tried to figure out what the worst or least valuable number was. We’re doing that now though.



I don’t reveal all the secret ingredients in the calculations and analysis to find the valuable numbers, but I figured maybe I should show a little more about this, since probably nobody else wants to find the worst numbers, LOL!I will explain this one though to give you an idea of the amount of analysis that goes into our scores.



Phone companies and customers have spent decades selecting the numbers they like best from all of the available numbers, over and over again. How can we tap into all of that accumulated decision making?Simple, we just measure the availability of every number over the past 10ish years. In order to do this, we just added up which toll free numbers were available the most in the past 10 years, analyzing over 5 billion records.



This doesn’t do a great job at showing which numbers are most valuable, since all of the numbers are taken in every area code of even moderately desirable numbers. But it does an amazing job of showing which numbers are least valuable and allows us to put the bottom half of the 8 million possible 7 digit numbers in descending value, better than anything else. The secondary sort for them is the numeric score. The numeric score is a whole different ranking system and I might write about as well. In short, we analyze and calculated hundreds of possible numeric patterns to give a value to everything that could possibly make a 7 digit number desirable a score. Oh and the numeric value also included measuring the finger movement between each pair of numbers too.



Anyway, when you combine the numeric scores, finger movements and even more importantly, the cumulative decision making of millions of customers and every phone company over the years, you get a pretty accurate ranking system for bottom half of the numbers that really don’t spell anything of value. This probably isn’t exciting to very many people, but it does give you an idea of how much work and ‘Big Data’ goes into our analysis of numbers to bring this to you.