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English-based domains DO have a market in China

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Kassey Lee shows some more examples of Chinese companies using English-language domains.

Image with the words "English domains in China"

It thrills me almost every day to come across well-funded startups in China using English brand names and domains. The more I read about them, the more I am convinced there are selling opportunities for English-based domains to the second-largest economy in the world.

For example, below are some Chinese startups with funding raised recently.

Company Business line Domain
Compass (鑫蜂维) Business IT CompassHZ.com
Duckbill (鸭嘴兽) Container trucking DuckbillSCM.com
LinkDoc (零氪) Medical tech Linkdoc.com
inxmed (应世) Medical tech inxmed.com
Sunmnet (三盟) Smart education Sunmnet.com

As you can see, even though these companies have Chinese names, they use domains based on their English brand names. Also, .com is the first choice in corporate China. All five startups in the list above use .com.

You may also notice that some of the domains do not precisely match their English brand names, for example CompassHZ.com and DuckbillSCM.com. This is where you may find selling opportunities if you own the shorter domains (Compass .com and Duckbill .com).

My daily observation reflects what I see in the 2019 Top 100 Chinese Internet Companies list, where a significant 30% of the companies own English-based domains. Below are some examples.

Rank Company Domain
1 Alibaba (阿里巴巴) Alibaba.com
2 Tencent (腾讯) Tencent.com
5 Ant Financial (蚂蚁金服) Antfin.com
18 Cheetah Mobile (猎豹移动) CheetahMobile.com
19 Autohome (汽车之家) Autohome.com

Clearly, English-based domains do have a market in China. If you own such domains, be sure your domains are available to buyers in China too. This can be achieved by listing your domains at a marketplace that has retail outlets in China, such as Afternic (fast transfer). This approach also helps you avoid language and payment issues when selling to China.

Two thoughts from GoDaddy’s conference call yesterday

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

GoDaddy execs comment on WordPress and the domain aftermarket.

GoDaddy logoGoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) released Q4 2018 and full-year earnings yesterday and held its investor conference call.

Two things in the call stood out to me.

First, the company discussed continued progress on GoCentral and its growth in managed WordPress.

GoCentral is GoDaddy’s homegrown website builder. It’s designed to be extremely easy for any type of business to start a website. I’ve tested the product and it’s definitely an easy way for a restaurant, mechanic, or any of hundreds of other types of businesses to create a web presence quickly and without the help of a developer.

On the call, GoDaddy CEO Scott Wagner noted, “Our Managed WordPress offering automates the entire process of starting and maintaining a secure WordPress website, which saves our customers literally hours of work, frustration and distraction.”

Later, in response to an analyst’s question, he said (quoted from SeekingAlpha transcript):

The biggest issues with WordPress, if you are working and using on it, are plug-in maintenance and overall security and just the level of time and attention that it takes to actually run that. Look, our managed platform, managed WordPress platform, totally automates and simplifies that process and we are making it easier and easier and easier. And so the feature improvement is both security layer, but more importantly, on app plug-in and theme updates to just make it super easy for performance and reliability. So I think you are seeing it not just for pros, but also for pros handing sites like that off to individuals or small businesses that are managing it for themselves.

I think that starting a WordPress website is something in which GoDaddy really shines. It uses onboarding wizards similar to GoCentral to get you started quickly. I’ve used WordPress since 2005 and, despite all the improvements in the platform, still find it hard to spin up a site with a good design. It’s much, much easier with GoDaddy.

Wagner noted that GoDaddy is now the largest host of paid WordPress instances.

One future opportunity for GoDaddy is to help companies make the leap from GoCentral to managed WordPress. GoCentral is a good product and will meet many companies’ needs. Over time, though, they might want to get the flexibility of WordPress. It would be very powerful to have a one-click migration from CoCentral to managed WordPress.

Dreamhost is doing this to a degree with its Remixer product. Remixer is a much simpler website builder, though.

The other thing on the call that caught my attention was CFO Ray Winborne’s comment on the domain aftermarket:

For the first quarter, we expect revenue of $705 million to $715 million, representing 11% to 13% growth versus the first quarter of 2018, as we began to lap the gains from changes in merchandising of aftermarket domain sales in early 2018.

This reconfirms that GoDaddy saw a marked improvement to aftermarket domain sales when it changed how it presented premium domains in domain search results. At NamesCon this year, GoDaddy GM Paul Nicks said conversions increased 30% with this change. It apparently had a material impact on GoDaddy’s revenue. I think there’s other low-hanging fruit here that GoDaddy can tap in 2019.

Domain sales in 2018 Jeff Gabriel – DNW Podcast #204

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What’s impacting the domain aftermarket in 2018?

dnw-podcastFew people have the view of the domain name market that Jeff Gabriel has as VP of Sales at Uniregistry. On today’s show, Jeff explains what he’s seeing in the aftermarket right now and why he expects Uniregistry to sell $60 million in domains this year, up 50% from last year. He also discusses domain payment plans and the best way to use them in a negotiation. You’ll learn a lot. Also, if you’re going to ICANN 63 in Barcelona, drop Jeff’s colleague Matthew Holden an email at mholden (at) uniregistry.com for an invite to the Uniregistry party.

Also: Cloudflare tries to shake up the domain business, NameSilo doubles in size, earnings announcements and the State Bar of California needs a new lawyer.

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Oops: Network Solutions tells customers that their domain is now available

by — Domain Registrars 7 Comments

Aftermarket sales email worries customers because of wrong subject line.

Domain name registrar Network Solutions mixed up an aftermarket promotion email blast, accidentally informing its customers that their domain name was available for purchase. It seems that someone used the wrong mail merge token in the subject line of the emails.

The first errant message was delivered on February 27. In my case, the subject line read “astounding.com is now available. Don’t miss this chance!”

I own Astounding.com.

The contents of the email were correct and pitched another domain for sale on the aftermarket:

The same email with the subject line error was sent out yesterday.

Apparently, at least one customer was concerned that they’d lost their domain because Network Solutions sent a follow-up message with the subject line “Our Mistake: astounding.com is safe”.

The message read:

We Hit Send Too Soon

This morning you received an email with a subject line indicating that astounding.com was “available”. This may have caused you concern as this is a domain you currently own. The email’s subject line was a mistake and included your existing domain name instead of an alternate, available name we thought you might be interested in. Please know, your domain is safe and is not available for sale. Network Solutions will never sell or offer your domain name without your prior knowledge or consent. We apologize for any concern this may have caused.

Sincerely,
Network Solutions Customer Support

These aftermarket promotions can be quite effective for selling domains listed on a marketplace’s distributed listing service. So it’s good that Network Solutions markets these…and I imagine they’ll double check these emails before sending them in the future.

Interesting GoDaddy patent applications and data

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

Could these ideas increase aftermarket domain name sales?

GoDaddy has filed two patent applications that contain interesting concepts and data. If fully implemented as described, the systems could increase aftermarket domain name transactions.

The applications are number 14/591778 (pdf) for “Notifying users of available searched domain names” and 14/591758 (pdf) for “Notifying registrants of domain name valuations”. Both were filed last year and published yesterday.

The idea is to make it easier for potential domain registrants to buy existing domain names and become available (either for registration or aftermarket purchase) after they did their initial search.

Even if a domain owner’s name isn’t listed for sale, domain owners can get concrete feedback about the level of interest in their domain name, and perhaps how much people are willing to pay for it.

Practically, the registrar would store information about searches made by a potential domain registrant. It will notify the domain searcher if the domain later expires and becomes available. It will also notify the searcher if the domain owner later offers the domain for sale on the aftermarket.

There’s also a way for a searcher to express an interest in buying a domain name that’s registered but not listed for sale and to indicate an offering price. This data can be forwarded to the domain owner, perhaps prompting them to list the domain for sale or to get an idea of valuation from potential buyers.

This would be much more valuable data than what’s currently made available to domain owners. GoDaddy provides data about how many whois searches have occurred for a domain in your account, but there’s a lot of noise in this data.

GoDaddy hopes that such a system would “incentivize current domain name registrants to consolidate their current domain names into a consolidated portfolio and list the domain names more frequently on the domain name aftermarket.”

The patent applications also reveal some data that I haven’t seen before:

1. Roughly 65% of searches today result in the user not finding the available domain name that they originally searched.

(I’m surprised this number isn’t higher.)

2. The high unavailability of domain names may cause users to search for domain names an average of 4-5 times before they find a domain name to register that fits their needs. The high end of this average may be as many as 10-12 searches before the user finds an acceptable domain name.

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