We have chatted about the growing influence of Chinese domain investors in the domain industry before, however today I checked out ntldstats.com to review the top 100 largest holders of new gTLD domain names and found 89 of the top 100 domain holders are from China.
That number gets even more dramatic when you take into account that of the 11 non-Chinese largest new gTLD domain holders in the top 100, 6 of those are registries or domain holders related to new gTLD registries:
North Sound Names (Uniregistry) is still the top registrant of new gTLD’s with over 230,000
Real Estate Domains LLC (RED), NAR’s official operator of the .REALTOR TLD has over 73,000 registrations and is the 7th largest domain registrant.
Emerald Names is the 27th largest new gTLD registrant and appears to be the sales arm of Minds + Machines which operates the .London TLD on behalf of the city
Famous Four Media which is a portfolio owner of new gTLD’s is number 50 on the top 100 list.
.Feedback has over 14,000 domain names registered and is number 58 on the top 100 list
DotWebsite Inc. (.website) which is operated by Radix has admin contact information for Directi is number 88.
Discounting registrants of new gTLD’s that are registries or associated with them, leaves only 5 domain holders out of the top 100 that are not from China.
Likewise, discounting those 6 registrants, the top 25 new gTLD registrants are all from China, as are 48 out of the top 50.
I would argue having 95% of your top customers in any global industry, residing in one country is a problem, and being that they are in China is a bigger problem.
It currently takes 9,905 domain names to make the top 100 domain registrant list for new gTLD’s.
Perhaps we can use as a timeline
1637: Tulips: Dutch Tulipmaniacs
1990 Beanie babies : Exuberant Collectors
1998 Many Nasdaq Tech Stocks (e.g., Pets.com, Webvan,Toys.com, Boo) “High Growth” Investors
2007 Real Estate (Cape Coral, Las Vegas, Stockton) Myopic Property investors/flippers
2015 GTLDs: Newly minted millionaires from China
Things change, but the desire to make “quick money” will always remain.
In 2001 lots of people thought the internet was over.
Just a fad. And the bubble burst.
So perhaps its worth some caution, thinking the chinese appetite for domain names is just a passing fad.
Sure, speculators can lose money, and people did back in 2001. I remember when amazon fell to $5,
because you know. The internet was dead. Just a fad, built on nothing real.
Hence! why the market is being manipulated. The Chinese can make the market at any point due to the fact they hold most of the liquid domains. Things are dead right now for short domains. Why? Investors are withholding buying liquid domain names to drive the price down. When it hits bottom, they will start buying again on the way up and sell at the top and start all over again.
It i called “Market Making”. The only way to prosper in this market is to use data. Use data to see what trends, where the market slows, where it excels…. It is all there, you just need to put all of the data together to beat them at their own game.
China appears to have a lot stronger hold than many initially predicted. The bad news is that with China’s market crash going on right now and the CHIPs looking like they are taking a slow plunge, that the rest of China’s domain holdings might also take a nose dive soon. This could upset the domain market in a big way.
Have any of you gone to any QQ registered chat rooms, where they discuss their domain GTLD’s, these guys are clueless as the next poor schmo.
Most of them have no idea what they are doing, and think they are buying a ticket on a magic carpet ride to the forbidden city of riches.
Chinese have yet to feel a renewal cycle, the tens of thousands of crap domains sheltered in their accounts, against a falling marketplace, will welcome the Year of the monkey.
The GTLD’s are quickly trying to get one years crap renewal out of them, only way to get them to renew is at under $1, still profitable for them.
Ryan
I’m pretty much on record of never going into any chatroom or forum
Well if you know the power of QQ, you will see it on most Chinese domainers emails in whois.
We can only wonder what goes thru their minds, but this way you get to see it first hand, it is about doing homework. Much like your previous post when you mentioned the .BET’s you registered, I saw on 4 those .BET’s there was nothing registered on .com, so you paid 50% premium to register the .BET, and let the .com sit unregistered.
Domaining takes so much leg work, and homework, 2015 was a great year to sell out all those laggard QTZF.com type domains to the Chinese, 2016 for the most part will not be so easy.
The Chinese have never experienced any real domain downward trend, as history predicts they tend to overreact.
Good luck to all
Everybody understands that cheap nTLDs attract speculators. Lots of little speculators, including me.
But 1 thing hasn’t been emphasized enough: Cheap nTLDs make it easy to grab a larger “controlling” share. Big Chinese investors aren’t just doing what smaller Chinese domainers do. I mean, they’re not simply placing more small bets in proportion to their budget. At scale, the rationale is (or rationally ought to be) quite different.
If these large Chinese investors know which side their bread is buttered on, they’ll see this as buying LEVERAGE. By controlling a significant share of some TLD, they can regulate supply the way diamonds or oil are held back. In other words, they can govern prices and manipulate the market to a greater degree.
Cheap new TLDs are ripe for buyouts. And if you have $100,000+ to spend, you can purchase a much bigger percentage of Chinese-style strings in this sector than you can in established, full-priced areas like .COM or .NET or even .CC.
Domain investors can’t create perfect monopoly conditions, but they wouldn’t want to. A certain fraction of domains must be left available for smaller domainers to complete the buyouts, since it is that larger group of people who create sudden buzz and spikes in market demand.
In my opinion, this is 1 of the reason so many Chinese domainers have moved on to the sub-$1 nTLDs. If they have funds, they see a chance to grab control of large chunks of a whole asset class, a miniature market. And if they play their cards right, they’ll see floor prices ramp up quickly after buyouts create artificial scarcity. That’s the quickest legal way to a high ROI I can think of. Even domainers who don’t have the funds to gain a controlling interest can see what’s likely happening, and they want to hop aboard and ride that price spike.
Everybody can see that the asset classes originally associated with the 2015 surge – e.g. LLLL.com CHIPs – have been declining or stagnant for 3 months. Naturally, they want to try their hand at recreating similar surges in cheap nTLDs. Trouble is, there are just so many of them, all competing with 1 another. At most, they’ve got 12 months to work with before renewal season knocks down that house of cards. Plus, they’d better get their boom on before any busts show up as a result of the earlier boom-and-bust cycles.
Would be interesting if the headline read “88” instead of “89.” There are 8 comments now, and I’m about to bring 8 to 9.
Pump the junk and dump the funk ( funk as in No Funking way, WTF, Whisky Funk Trot, Funk you)
What a mess. With the Macau casinos in a free-fall due to anti-corruption task forces, and so many stocks over-valued in China. AntFinance, a division of Alibaba, has a valuation of $80 Billion and it just launched last year. WTFunk
I know 2 day traders who went broke investing in Chinese penny stocks. One of the guys was a graduate of Wharton with an MBA in Finance. I know — crazy.
Most of these sub-dollar domains are like junk bonds, penny stocks, changing hands, almost equivalent to a Ponzi scheme.