TLD Registry releases tool for discovering Chinese terms available for registration.
Last week in London I sat down with TLD Registry, the company behind the Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) domain names.
These IDNs have been a success so far, with over 50,000 registrations combined. They are easily within the top twenty new TLDs launched to date and are the top two IDN TLDs in terms of registrations.
As an English speaker with little knowledge of Chinese languages, I’ve sat on the sidelines. But TLD Registry showed me a tool last week that might change my mind: ChineseLandrush.com.
The site is designed to help English speakers discover good domain names to register under these Chinese top level domain names.
Basically, a group of Chinese speakers are curating a list of available domain names that match common terms. They aren’t namespinning; it’s all done by hand and updated daily.
You can select the ones you’re interested in and “check out” by downloading a CSV to copy-and-paste at a domain registrar. Some domain name registrars may integrate the tool in the future.
Based on feedback I provided, TLD Registry is making an additional tweak to the site shortly that will suggest which of their TLDs are the best match for the domain name. It’s important to note that Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) is what searchers look for when they’re seeking the Chinese version of an international website. It doesn’t simply translate to “website”. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense for every single term.
Sounds like a good idea in principle. The Chinese are ahead of the crown in awareness of the new TLDs and are looking at major growth in their economy as well as overall internet useage. It would be amiss if non chinese english speakers were denied a bite of that cherry.
I’m really looking forward to the chinese dotShopping TLD being launched. What a monster of a TLD to be able to invest in given an accessable channel.
beyond the intial grab (largely by the chinese government) no one else seems to be buying these domains.
Idn.com are available for $10/yr. Verisign has dropped the ball bigtime on promotions. Idn.com’s get natural traffic as visitors expect to see idnwhatever.com in every language when they go to the .com
Yeah, but right now you still have to type in Latin at the end.
Idn.idn for .com is being introduced hopefully this year. They where supposed to introduce it with idn.cctlds. they dropped the ball.
“hopefully”. Verisign doesn’t seem to be in a huge rush to release these.
Then the issue will be if people take to transliterations of .com.
Yes some of the transliterations are poor for some of the languages. Still people use
.com as the gold standard address regardless of the translit issue. I see the traffic to the .com names so it’s hard to ignore.
after reviewing some of my idn.com names I can confirm that most of the traffic is going to Russianidn.com and Chineseidn.com
xn--80xxxxxx8a.com 1832
xn--80xxxxxxxxxxo.com 392
xn--b1xxxxxxxd.com 628
xn--6xxxxxxx.com 626
thousands more hits all to parked pages. Imagine if they were actually developed into what they described?? Traffic would/will only increase once a live site was indexed by the engines.
whatever.idn may gain some traction as long as $$$ are spent reminding people to use it.
.com has been burnt into everyone’s brain on the planet for over 20 years.
imo the safe bet is idn.com and idn.cctld
Widespread adoption of fully Chinese IDNs is an intriguing possibility.
If the government uses those it bought, then maybe the general population will follow suit. China would seem to be a country where government influence is more significant when it comes to setting standards and commercial trends.
There’s a natural argument in favor of a population using its own script to communicate.
But I don’t understand China. And latin characters are by now a Chinese habit, much invested in. So who knows?