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TLD Registry sells $584k of new gTLD domains, expects million-dollar sale next month
TLD Registry, the company behind two Chinese new gTLDs, says it has sold over $584,000 of premium domain names already and expects to make a seven-figure sale next month.
The Finnish-founded company is launching .中文网 and .在线, which mean “Chinese web site” and “online” respectively.
Marketing director Simon Cousins told DI this week that the company has sold $584,000 of domains so far and was “confident” of making a seven-figure sale — sounds like a multiple-domain batch — next month
The $584,000 figure includes the $182,000 worth of domains sold at a live/hybrid auction in Macau last month and 101 other domains sold privately for $402,000, Cousins claimed.
“We’re working on some blockbuster tranches right now, and are confident we’ll have a 7-fig sale to report in May,” he said in an email.
The company has been working with Sedo on premium auctions.
The landrush period ended yesterday. The gTLDs are due to go to general availability April 28.
Hi Kevin, just to clarify, the $584,000 figure quoted is correct, and is for *premium domain names*. Sales of regular domains during Sunrise and Landrush are not included in that figure. We will be reporting our Landrush performance in coming days — we entered a 3-day quiet period between end-of-Landrush and beginning-of-GA at 3:55AM UTC yesterday, to allow us to sift through any competitive Landrush registrations and to re-set the registry for full GA on Monday.
Best regards,
Simon Cousins, CMO, TLD Registry Ltd.
Thanks, I’ve clarified the post.
Duh! There are a billion people that speak Chinese and a lot of them don’t speak any English. Also the Chinese advance in tech way faster than the US. These Chinese IDNs will be successful.
That will depend on IDN usability by Chinese devices and software. In Japanese, one has to type the IDN SLD, switch the keyboard to ASCII, type the dot, switch the keyboard back again to local mode and then type the IDN TLD. Quite a painful operation.
Rubens, that was the case years ago, but practically all modern browsers and all mobile browsers in use in China gracefully accept the “Chinese dot” and send an ASCII dot in place, for the URL request.
From the user’s perspective, the Chinese dot works as expected in every level of the URL. Not painful at all.
In fact, removing the pain point of having to use ASCII is a relief for average Chinese which we non-Chinese have difficulty in comprehending.
During ICANN Beijing I noticed the difficulty. For the first night in town I was at a small hotel, and my communication with the hotel staff was quite a challenge, even trying written Latin characters. Using a tablet with visual translation was the only way thru.
Good to know that the Chinese already did the IDN dot ASCII dot trick, but now the other languages need similar workarounds for IDNs.
Yeah, it is really great, actually, that browsers are now good enough to replace the Chinese dot (for those unfamiliar, it looks like a little circle) with the “URL-legal” ASCII dot. I don’t know too much about non-Chinese IDN character sets but I would assume that good browsers would support most non-ASCII dots. The DNA is doing good work advocating Universal Access.
I have many Chinese friends and contacts and at the moment IDN of any form are barely scratching the surface in China. There are an unknown quantity generally apart from maybe the domain community.
ALL the top sales are are either ASCII.cn or .com the most recent being Xiaomi buying up MI.com etc.
Cool story bro.
Dot Chinese Online (.在线) launched in GA at 13:00 UTC today and 50 minutes later had 54,011 domains under management (DUMs). The TLD’s stablemate Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) was at 38,838 DUMs at the same time.
Mother and children doing well.