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.
fizz says
1.3 billion people are embracing TLDs in their own characters…who would’ve thunk?
Raymond Hackney says
Right Fizz, that’s why I think the comparison to the U.S. is not one that holds up, Chinese companies and investors have spent a lot more money on Numerical domains than those in the United States. Again based on culture.
It’s a big world, some people are going to take to certain niches and naming conventions more than others do.
Domenclature.com says
It’s like saying that a homeless guy lives in many locations compared to a homeowner.
The US is solidly settled as far as the internet names are concerned; they know that .Gov is for government, .Org is for Non-profits, .Net is for losers, and .Com is for commerce and everything else.
On the other hand, the Chinese are restless, and looking everywhere to establish a home.
Finally, counting internet use by head is completely silly. One US internet user would be Facebook, and another would be Google, and yet another US internet user would be Godaddy; now that,s 3 internet users compared to 3 Chinese students? Or a billion.
ontheinterweb says
….those poor homeless known nothing chinese, staggering around looking for a place to live.
c’mon dude, if 54% of americans are UNAWARE of gTLD versus 4% of chinese – your points makes no sense.
janedoe says
It is all about the spin…
The new gTLDs have a lot of potential certainly, but until they are being actively used their value is currently questionable. Give it a few years and this may well change unless you find that one perfect domain that simply works (and at the moment, there are a lot out there)
Jeffrey A Schneider says
Hello Ray,
We seem to notice a disconnect here. The Global consumers community usage is due to the .Com extensions Traffic Grid universality used for use among all languages. China considers offshore trade as a preference. Outside China gross margins or gross profits as a percentage of sales average 40% to 50% much higher than the 15% to 20% level for chinese companies at home. Alibaba is after offshore profits and so you should be aware of their preference for Global .Com Market Penetrations profitable sales.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Domain Master)
John McCormac says
In brief: Registered domains != Active websites.
The survey consisted of 1,150 respondents in the US, UK, China and Germany. It was conducted via Survey Monkey. That’s a very low sample figure and some of those countries have very large populations. It had 608 respondents in the US, 248 in the UK, 238 in Germany and 241 in China (the country with the largest population). The sample sizes look too small to draw any reliable conclusions. As has been mentioned above, the domains per thousand of population metric is sheer numerology but I’ve seen it in many registry reports too.
SEDO is in the business of auctioning and selling domains. Being cynical about it, SEDO regularly floats such “studies” to push whatever TLD it is promoting.
Domo Sapiens says
“SEDO regularly floats such “studies” to push whatever TLD it is promoting.”
aka “the kiss of death”