Chinese firms jump on trading opportunity in new domain names
Domain traders say more than half of domain names with the new extensions are owned by the Chinese
China's quest for internet domination has taken an unusual detour: Exotic domain names.
Chinese entities have hovered up half of all domain names with new popular generic top-level domains (gTLD) extensions such as .online, .luxury and .xyz, according to Christian Voss, chief marketing officer at domain trading marketplace Sedo.
Websites ending with popular gTLDs, such as .com, have historically seen strong demand. For global businesses, not having a .com extension reflected poorly on their brand image, Voss said.
But in recent years, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) shook things up by approving many new extensions. ICANN estimated more than 1,300 new extensions could become available in the next few years.
While these extensions are being introduced gradually, rights to some of the popular ones have already fetched large sums of money from companies that sell domain names to the public, also known as registrars. For example, the rights to offer the .shop extension - mostly to e-commerce players around the world - was snapped up by GMO Registry in Japan for about US$42 million.
Data collected by Sedo showed that currently 54 per cent of all domain names with the new gTLD extensions are owned by the Chinese. As a result of the technology boom in China, due in part from the runaway success of the likes of Alibaba and Tencent, the number of domains purchased from within China rose 400 percent between 2013 and 2015.