Two Chinese IDN domain names have 50,000 registrations after first partial day of general availibility.
[Note: TLD Registry provided registration numbers this morning that later turned out to include registry reserved domain names. The initial numbers were about twice the updated ones in this story.]
The Chinese IDN new TLD .在线, which means “online” in Chinese, had 54,011 33,012 domain names under management as of this afternoon, according to TLD Registry. The domain name launched this morning at 9am EDT
That makes it the most successful new top level domain launch day so far. It also places it among the top four in total registrations to date, coming in ahead of other domain names that launched months ago.
Dot Chinese Website (.中文网), also launched by TLD Registry today, had 38,838 17,537 registrations. That places it comfortably in the top 10.
TLD Registry struck a deal with the Chinese government to buy about 20,000 domain names across the two TLDs, which ensured it would come out of the gate strong.
/房地产.在线 this one is now live and the first one to go live and it means realestate online.
These extensions are huge and great investments!
China has no shortage of prospective registrants. That’s for sure.
Chinese-language users make up a fifth of humanity. Very, very few of them are comfortable with ASCII and even fewer enjoy English.
Could be a few large players grabbing more than an average amount, also take into consideration how much of the male population, compared to women in the under 30 category comes into play since the 1 child rule. These guys are hard wired to something electronic 12 hours a day.
the question is who is registering these? and are keeping ‘premium’ domains and making them resolve or not?
It’s not the registry, if that’s what you’re insinuating.
Actually, I take that back. The numbers were apparently inflated due to an error. I’ll update new numbers later.
Quite right Andrew, and DNW readers. For the record, there was a critical calcluation error in a back-end routine which everyone involved thought had been programmed to exclude registry-reserved domains. The bug included them in the first report of the day — 50 minutes into GA. We celebrated of course, until correlations with our registrar network made us question where the ~20K extra domains had come from. Intensive debugging resulted in discovery of the error, which both Afilias and we signed-off on, and then immediately alerted DNW and other news outlets.
We sincerely regret the first-hour error, as we have never had any intention to include registry-reserved names in our reporting. We are explicitly opposed to the practice.
Simon Cousins, CMO, TLD Registry Ltd.
is there any registry out there thats not going to reserve tens of thousands of domains for themselves? geez.
Andrew, it looks bigger than it actually is. We have around 10K Chinese character domains registry-reserved. This is not out of order with other New gTLDs. The “other” 10K are the Pinyin equivalents. Effectively, the same name, written in ASCII. We typically have bundled the Pinyin with the Chinese character domains, for our last month of premium domain sales. Its not a gigantic reservation — in fact, by the fantastic quality of domains sold today that aren’t on our reserved list — internet.online, baby.online, diapers.online, sydney-opera-house.online, wedding-invitations.online… the list goes on and on and on — we’ve deliberately encouraged thousands of great names to get out into the wild for GA pricing. Some registries may keep all the good stuff for themselves but TLD Registry is demonstrably not one of those registries. Disclaimer: I’m with the registry.
reserved domains should be limited to 1k or so really. this does nothing but pad the registries pockets at the cost of registrants. maybe you guys aren’t as bad as others but its still a lot of domains. .com held nothing back when it was released and the domains were free! sure, it was a different time but if new gtld registries are going to tout their wares as the second coming of .com, they should act like .com. in the end the registries get rich and the registrants end up with the leftovers. so much for the ‘new internet namespace’…
I’m sure it also has something to do with the fact that China counts 1.35 billion residents and then there’s another 650 million chinese speaking people who are living in other countries? That’s 2 billion!
That’s a lot of people who can be interested in a chinese domain.
I own
000.在线
8899.在线
9999.在线
聊.在线 (chat.online)
Its also worth noting that China has major scope for internet user growth so a very lucrative market within the region.
Looking forward to the launch of the .Shopping domain there.
Adam Dicker: “These extensions are huge and great investments!”
What an interesting comment.
Very impressive numbers, even on the updated basis.
Are .在线 and .中文网 subject to control by government in China, just like ccTLD?
No