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Pinyin to beat IDN? .wang ready to overtake .在线
The .wang gTLD has seen great success, relatively, in its first week of general availability, crossing the 30,000 mark yesterday and entering the top 10 new gTLDs by registration volume.
At its current rate of growth, the Zodiac Holdings domain is going to overtake .在线, the highest-ranking Chinese gTLD so far, this week.
.wang went to GA June 30. After its initial spike, it’s added one to two thousand names per day and, with 31,011 names today, currently sits at 9th place in the new gTLD program’s league table.
That’s a whisker behind TLD Registry’s .在线 (“.online”), which had a strong start when it launched at the end of April but has since plateaued at around 33,000 names, adding just a handful each day.
A skim through the zone files reveals that the vast majority of the names in .wang appear to be, like .wang itself, Pinyin — the official Latin-script transliterations of Chinese-script words.
.wang, which would be “网” in Chinese script, means “net”.
To pluck a couple of names from the zone at random, I see tanpan.wang, which could mean something like “negotiation.net” and xingshi.wang, which may or may not mean “shape.net”.
I suspect that many of the registered domains are personal names rather than dictionary words. Wang is a popular surname in China.
The vast majority of the names also appear to be registered via China-based registrars, some of which are promoting the TLD strongly on their home pages.
There certainly appears to be a lot of domainer activity in .wang, but I haven’t seen anything yet to suggest a massive orchestrated effort that would throw out the numbers considerably.
Either way, I find it fascinating that a Latin transliteration of a Chinese word seems set to out-perform the actual Chinese IDNs currently on the market.
While “wang” is indeed a very popular surname in China, the Chinese character is “王,” not “网.” They mean two different things in Chinese. “网” means net or network, and “王” means king.
But they’re both “wang” in Pinyin, right?
Yes and no,
王 = wáng
网 = wǎng
It’s hard enough to get this stuff straight without bringing tones into it as well, so I’ll stick to “wang” without the diacritics for now. 🙂
Here’s a little primer for you on the tones: http://chinesepod.com/tools/pronunciation/section/17
Chinese can be quite the tricky language to learn.
I’ve no intention of learning any flavor of Chinese. The TLD is “.wang”, so that’s what I’m going to write.