I don’t understand why people are bidding on these domains.
I share the same feeling of Josh at DSAD.com when it comes to understanding the values of long numeric domains. I have studied the Chinese domain market for years, yet I don’t seem to be able to grasp the importance of long numeric domains.
In a post last month Josh wrote, “There’s about 30 random 6n’s with bids, I’m not sure why, maybe I’m missing something. You can pretty much hand reg any kind of 6n you want without paying Godaddy the extra money.”
6N domains are regularly bought and sold. In fact, Namebio shows twenty-five 6N .com domains sold for prices above $1500 just in the past year. The most expensive ones are 666777.com ($16,750), 221199.com ($10,000), and 339999.com ($8,258). Still, I wonder how likely they are to be developed into websites by end users in China.
Are numeric domains used in corporate China? Certainly. In the Fortune China 100 list published recently, only one company uses a numeric domain for its corporate website — 600795.com.cn by GD Power. In this case, 600795 is actually the ticker symbol of GD Power listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. In my opinion, 600795.com.cn is not appropriate. My recommendation would be the brand-matching Guodian.com or GDpower.com.
The top 100 internet company list published by the Internet Society of China in 2020 contains more startups willing to use numeric domains, especially in the game industry. A total of 8 companies are found to use numeric domains but none is 6N or longer, as shown below.
| Length | Count | Details |
|---|---|---|
| 1N | 1 | 6.cn |
| 2N | 2 | 37.com, 58.com |
| 3N | 2 | 253.com, 360.com, |
| 4N | 2 | 2345.com, 4399.com |
| 5N | 1 | 36588.com |
| 6N | 0 | – |
So, you can see that the use of 6N domains in corporate China is more an exception than the norm. I believe that 6N or longer domains are mainly traded among investors with a very low chance of eventually landing in the hands of end users in China.
sometimes i think my head is sooooooooo big is because it is so full of numbers.
I still have problem remembering long numbers.
The DNS translates the alphabet to numerical IP addresses specific to the index file of a web server
For example if the word amazon was a 16 digit set of numbers arranged in 4 sets of 4 digits separated by 3 decimal points (periods). Technically if the last 4 digits of amazon.com were 1234 and you owned the domain 1234.com, if you created a series of subnets under 1234, such as IP 1234.1234.1234.1234, and that was the exact same as IP address as amazon.com, theoretically typing in that set would resolve at amazon.com.
The scientific question is can you divert amazon’s traffic by creating a numerical sequence that is already resolves to their alphabetic domain.
Whatever the last 3 or 4 digits of their IP address is, if you own those numbers in dot com, what prevents you from being able to create their exact 16 digit scheme.
That’s alarming if true, Steve. I have never read about such collision issue. I thought domains are first translated to IP addresses so you can’t compare a domain with an IP address, right?
Your domain has to have a tld on the end, and you need the decimal points
What do talking about bro?
Owning a domain with .com on the end does not allow you to mimic an IP. It has .com on the end!
You’re right alphabetic domains are converted to numerics, and numerical domains are also converted to an IP. So yes creating a numerical domain that matches what an alpha domain’s IP converts to would result in an entirely unique set of numbers.