Kassey Lee examines usage of Sino in domains instead of China.
Recently a reader asked me a very interesting question. He wanted my opinion on “sino” vs “china” in a domain. As a matter of fact, I never thought about this issue in the past, so I decided to research a little bit to see if I could learn something about it.
Many readers know that I own a collection of “china” domains. However, I was never aware of the “sino” possibility so do not own any “sino” domains. To compare their popularity, I tried several sources.
The first one was dotDB.com. I looked at all domains, including those containing digits, hyphens, and IDNs. dotDB reported 292,000 “sino” domains registered across a variety of extensions, but the result on “china” was much bigger at 454,000 domains.
Next was domain sales reported by Namebio. I particularly focused on 2-word dictionary domains prefixed with “sino” and “china”. This is because otherwise a lot of “casino” domains would be included in the result. Anyway, dotDB reported 18 “sino” domains and 242 “china” domains.
Then, I entered “sino” into Baidu search which was set to display 50 results. I checked the results and found 31 of them using a “sino” domain, as shown below.
Sino.com, SinoFSX.com, SinoBiopharm.com, SinoRestaurant.com, SinoAutoid.com, SinoPowers.com, TianjinSino.com, SinoMachinegroup.com, SinoIndustry.com, Sino-mold.com, SinoSources.com, euSinoBC.com, Sino-i.com, ubmSinoExpo.com, Sino-laser.com, ChinaSinoPack.com, Sino-leasing.com, Sino-biochemlab.com, SinoFaith-ip.com, SinoPromise.com, SinoUnitedhealth.com.cn, SinoSola.cn, SinoIntl.com.cn, Sino-e.com.cn, SinoJobs.com.cn, LiveSino.net, SinoCard.sg, SinoTv.us, SinoMicro.org, SinoAlice.jp, SinoCoin.io
Then I repeated the same with “china” but found only 11 entries. I was surprised by the result. A wide guess is that “china” is a very popular word so there is a lot of good contents, which take priority over domain names in the search result. Here are the domains found in the search results:
China.com, LillyChina.com, Made-in-china.com, Assab-china.com, Chinadaily.com.cn, China.cn, China.com.cn, China.org.cn, ChinaDaily.com.cn, v-koolchina.com.cn, ThorlabsChina.cn.
While I have no definite answer to the “sino” vs “china” popularity question, my preference is still “china”. Nevertheless, I was surprised to see more “sino” domains than I thought.
Rubens Kuhl says
The adjective to use in compound words in Portuguese to say it’s related to China is indeed “sino”. But very few people know that, and media prefer using “with China” / “from China” instead of a word most people wouldn’t understand.
I don’t how this affects perceptions with English or Chinese speakers, though.
Kassey Lee says
Interesting piece of information. Thanks Rubens. I’m a fan of “china” domains and have no intention to own any “sino” ones.
WhoaDomain.com says
Also I think many “China” domains are parked or unused or developed so Google doesn’t rank them much so they won’t show up in search results. Now since those domains are taken I think many holders if “China” domains want “big” money for them and there for never get sold . But business is always always rolling along so perhaps since China domains are expensive and all taken. The cheaper option is to register available Sino domains?
Kassey Lee says
Can the same be said about very expensive one-word .com domain? Will they never be sold?
Logan says
I looked and all I have are SinoCapital.com and ChinaCenter.com. I would think adding “ca” in front of “sino” would be a better investment. 😉
Kassey Lee says
I like the humor, Logan! That’s what I realized too. I saw a lot of “casino” than “sino”. I like the “china” prefix though and own a collection of them.