It works in the same way in China as well as the rest of the world: The best money gets you the best domain names.
This rule also hints at something useful too: that the second best and the third best and so forth may still have value. Such domain names may give hope to end users and opportunity to investors.
One big money word in China is CHE. Che is a single Pinyin word which can refer to more than 60 Chinese characters such as 车 (car), 测 (test), 策 (plan), and 厕 (toilet). The best representation of Che in terms of money potential is 车 (car). China has about 172 millions of cars and this number is poised to increase and Che represents a huge potential.
上海寰新汽车销售有 限公司 (Shang Hai Huan Xin Qi Che Xiao Shou You Xian Gong Si) is a car dealer. Few years ago they wanted to start a marketplace for used cars. They named it Che Cheng (车城=car city). To match this name, they also spent reportedly 6 figures CNY to acquire CheCheng.com.
Last year they went for the best domain name and secured Che.com for 22 million CNY. (Currently, CheCheng.com redirects to Che.com). They now own the best domain name in the car industry.
The fact is, there are many entrepreneurs in China who also aspire to become the best in the car industry one day. What could they do if they could not afford to get the best domain name? The answer is derivatives — adding a prefix or suffix to the word “Che”.
A casual search on Baidu proves that many entrepreneurs have done exactly that and turned domain derivatives into operating websites such as cn2che.com, diyichecheng.com, tiantianchecheng.com, checheng.co, chexun.com, che168.com, 52che.com, che300.com, 315che.com, yangche51.com, and youche.com.
Here’s the idea for domain investment. If end users are willing to acquire domain derivatives of “che”, that also means the derivatives have value. A good example is the recent purchase of Che800.com by a domain investor for mid 5 figures CNY.
If this observation is correct, then domain investors can learn from it and find derivatives for other big money words in China. Some words that come to my mind are Fang (房=house), Dai (贷=loan), and Mei (美=beauty).
I thought car is 汽车.
In addition if IDN.IDN makes more sense for targeting Chinese consumers then why not go for the chinese names rather than a deravitive of not as good name?
Good question, Mo. Che is the base word, like car in English. First you have car, then you can have gas-driven car, electric car, etc. Same in Chinese. Che (车) is the base word. Chinese IDN.IDN is best used in consumer marketing as a label or pointer, but the best corporate domain name should be ascii and .com simply because the Internet is global. While I do think Chinese .IDN have great potential, the fact is, currently they are not popular yet. Their registration numbers are still tiny. I think in a company’s domain strategy, they need to include many different extensions for different purposes, e.g. Amazon.news, Amazon.club, Amazon.app, Amazon.gifts, Amazon.coupons, 亚马逊 公司, etc. but they are all labels sending visitors to a specific page on Amazon.com, the center of its domain universe.
Kassey – Interesting but from what I can see 汽车 is better than 车. On Baidu index it shows that 汽车 gets 33,000 searches a day while 车 only 13,000 a day. That is a big difference..
I agree that they are not yet popular but instead of commending derivatives of “Che” is it not better to recommend names that say exactly what you want and get higher searches?
For SEO they are much better and for branding!
Beyond that, I believe it makes most sense that for customers in your own country you should use your own language.
For a western person there is no meaning at all to che168.com, 52che.com, che300.com, 315che.com. So these companies are using these names for their Chinese customers. Hence if they are indeed targeting their Chinese customers, they might as well use CDN’s which get more searches and are just better. The only reason they are not doing it is because they are just not aware that they exist.
I dont think it is the same like other gTLD’s like .club, .coupon or .whatever… In Chinese the .公司
中国 are very different than those. Its like .com in Chinese and .CN in Chinese. One is a gTLD and the other a ccTLD.
I agree with you that for Chinese consumers Chinese IDN.IDN domain names are perfect. Instead of using a long derivative ascii name, a one- or two character Chinese .IDN may be a better choice.