When the restrictions on owning Chinese (.cn) domain names were lifted in March 2003, I registered a few single-word generic names. I was hoping that something would come of these, but to date I have had almost zero traffic/ parking revenue and zero buying offers.
I am wondering if it is worth holding onto these names or not. If yes, where is the potential?
I have also subsequently (after the event of course) wondered about the wisdom of having domains in English for a Chinese market, who must surely operate in their own language first & foremost and aren't the Chinese using their own alphabet to access the web, etc.,?
I have seen other .cn domains that were snapped up from buyers outside China. Typing in these foreign-owned .cn names often result in sites/pages written in the Chinese language, but as I do not read Chinese in any shape or from, I can't work out whether these sites are devleoped or just parked/generic pages.
Is owning Chinese domains a "ground floor" opportunity not to be relinquished or am I wasting my time and money ($25 + VAT each) holding onto them?
Any widsom/knowledge/pointers would be greatly appreciated. This is my first post and it's great to have found a forum such as this instead of floating in an electronic void.
I think they make great investments IF you get the right domains and have a lot of patience.
I don't own any. I'm not that patient.
Right domains for the extension: Hotels.tld, Business.tld, etc. Mega topic domains.
Outside the mega (standard) traffic domains I don't see current or near term value.
.cn in English are good for foreign English speaking visitors and to some extent SEO, as the keyword in the URL is given some weight. The .cn will signify that the website destination has something to do with China.
If you want to tap into the 1.3B strong local Chinese market and are looking for coveted type-in visitors as well as much greater mindshare, you'll want to use IDN. Same goes for Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Russian, Hindi, Vietnamese, Thai (et al) markets. The vast majority of people prefer to read and write in their native languages, and indeed they do. I think that's something we can all understand.
The extensions like .cn, .jp, .com, .net will soon be aliased and mapped into unique IDN.
A native user in Japan, for instance, will never have to type anything else but Japanese.
If they wanted to look for a hotel, they would type-in something like:
(( For some reason WebmasterWorld editor is parsing unicode into special characters, so my example will have to wait ))
.日本 (which means 'Japan') will be aliased to .jp.
[edited by: Webwork at 7:20 pm (utc) on Feb. 16, 2006]
[edit reason] Tidying up [/edit]
BTW you are paying way too much for $25. Registrars outside China are charging through the root since most local chinese registrar do not offer english registration and international credit card payment.
The cost in China for domain is about 60yuan or about US$8. Of course you got to get someone who knows Chinese to do that for you.
.com and .net registrations are going to go through the roof with new IDN in Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, Urdu, Russian scripts -- in addition to latin-based character set IDN like spanish, german, french, swedish.
IDN have been around since late 2000, and many rushed to register the best terms during the testbed period, hoping that browsers would be able to resolve them. They waited for 5 long years... and many gave up hope and dropped many of them, only to have them snatched up by speculators waiting in the wings.
But now, finally, IE7 resolves IDN.
This has been a much bigger landrush than .eu by a magnitude across multiple languages.
All you needed was a translator and some mojo...
Unfortunately, the database collation of WebmasterWorld seems not to be utf-8 or unicode, so my native character domain examples get rendered as rubbish characters.
