Kathy Nielsen from Sedo did a guest post on Venture Beat discussing domain names and the upcoming Chinese new gtlds.
From the article:
By now, many savvy businesses and investors have heard about the expansion of the domain name system. New extensions (known as “top-level domains” or “TLDs”) are joining .com, .org, .net and the others we’ve grown accustomed to – extensions including generic names such as .bike, .camera and .club, as well as brand name extensions such as .Canon, .Deloitte and .Hitachi.
Lesser discussed in the U.S. are Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). These are domain names written in multiple scripts and languages that allow users to navigate the Internet without using English. During the application period in 2012 when companies could apply to run their own domain extension, 116 IDNs were applied for, 73 of which were Chinese character TLDs.
Approximately half of these Chinese TLD applications came from groups in China, but a significant number were applied for by non-Chinese companies.
Recently, the first live auction of premium names from these two Chinese character domain extensions was held in Macau. The auction raised $182,000 from the sale of 33 domain name lots including “games.online” (游戏.在线) for $25,388, “casino.online” (赌场.在线) for $25,000, “realestate.online” (房地产.在线) for $16,000. In addition, buyers at the auction expressed interest in hundreds of additional premium domain names that weren’t listed on the auction block. Some in attendance even requested portfolios of hundreds of Chinese character domain names. These strong results further verify the strength of these new IDNs in Asia and indicate that the new Chinese character TLDs are experiencing a gold rush similar to the buying-up of dot com domain names in the 90s.
Read the full article here
