Is The U.S. Lagging Behind China in Domain Savvy ?

Kathy Nielsen did an article for Wired that took a look at the U.S. lagging behind China when it comes to gTLD awareness.

From the article:

The IDN movement is significant in China, which has 21.97% of the world’s Internet users, compared to just 9.58% of the world’s Internet users coming from the U.S. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last year, Fadi Chehade, CEO of the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet’s governing body, predicted that once domain names with Chinese characters were available in the gTLD program, the numbers would be “staggering”. As it turns out, he was right.

During the initial application period in 2012, companies called registries could apply to run their own gTLDs for everything from .app to .music to .游戏 meaning .game in Chinese. These aspiring registries applied for a total of 116 non-Latin script gTLDs. Seventy-three of those were in Chinese characters. This spring, as many of the new domain extensions began hitting the market, the first live auction for .在线 (Dot Chinese Online) and .中文网 (Dot Chinese Website) domain names raised nearly $200,000.

Nielsen went on to throw out some stats:

Let’s take a closer look at some comparisons:

• When discussing gTLD awareness, 54% of U.S. respondents said they were “unaware” versus only 4% in China.
• The. U.S. is more skeptical of new gTLDs – 56% said they are a good idea vs. 86% in China.
• Marketers in the U.S. appear to be especially skeptical about the launch of new gTLDs when compared to other groups. 75% of marketers in the U.S. say that the new TLDs would make the Internet more confusing, a belief held by only 43% of all respondents globally.
• China is outpacing the U.S. in usage of new gTLDs. 72% of Chinese respondents have seen gTLDs in use despite the fact that they just began to launch at the beginning of 2014. Compare this to only 21% in the U.S.
• 46% of Chinese respondents have considered purchasing a gTLD and only 1% would definitely not purchase one. Meanwhile in the U.S., only 7% have considered purchasing a gTLD and 28% would never purchase one.

Read the full article here

I will say there have been more and more articles out where some, possibly with a vested interest, possibly not, have been talking about the new Chinese gTlds. There was an article featured on the FairWinds Blog about a the changing course.

Nielsen goes on to talk about more education being needed and that 75 % of the largest global brands are applying for new gtlds. Sedo certainly wants to do specialized new gtld auctions and certainly wants to see the namespace grow.  I think it is fair to say that what is driving demand for these Chinese extensions is the IDN factor. Nielsen wonders what it will take for adoption and understanding in the U.S. ?

I think that it is a different animal here in the U.S., as Nielsen pointed out in her article, ” It’s a safe assumption that IDNs are filling a strong market need for domains names in a country’s local language and in turn generating increased awareness.” We don’t have that void here in the U.S. the Internet has worked in our dominant language since our citizens started using the commercial Internet.

Companies need to understand why they need to use them, and NO, they are not changing the way we market right now on the Internet, in the future that may be the case, but not today. The average small business in this country probably has no idea about new gtlds and the businesses that have are not building marketing campaigns around them.

Let’s also look that ICANN and a lot of registries have played games, whether it is a legal game does not matter, it still seems shady to those that don’t eat, sleep and drink domain names. When a lot of the best names are held back or on collision lists, the average business owner has to say, “For who ? For what ? I can get a three word .com and I know my clients know that extension.

The whole world is not looking to reeducate its customer base. The new gtlds have their place and I believe some of them will grow over time, others will be seen as a bad dream or a fad like the pet rock. The reasons why China seems more savvy are about very distinct reasons that don’t correlate to the U.S.