The difference in clear. As reported by eName, the auction in the 2016 Global Domain Industry Summit held in Hangzhou, China brought in over 300m CNY of domain sales. That is about 46m USD!
I don’t remember if I’ve come across any auction sales of such magnitude, so I did some checking of old news about auction sales in domain conferences.
I think Namescon is the largest domain conference in the US. Namescon 2016 had over 1200 attendees. According to the January 13, 2016 blog post by Konstantinos Zournas, NamesCon 2016 auction made $1.5m USD.
Let’s compare these two figures: 46m vs 1.5m. The difference is massive. If this trend continues, China may become the center of domain sales in the future.
This also suggests that China will have great influence over the rest of the world and we need to be aware of events occurring in China.
Source: http://news.ename.cn/yumingjiaoyi_20160606_104677_1.html
Rich says
June 11, 2016 at 4:35 pmLee,
Is there a link where we can see what names sold for $46,000,000 ?
Kassey Lee says
June 12, 2016 at 3:39 amHi Rich, the Source link above leads to the Chinese news report which mentions many names sold in the auction.
Kassey Lee says
June 12, 2016 at 3:44 amThe link at the bottom of my article leads to a Chinese news article which includes many names sold during the auction.
Mike says
June 11, 2016 at 4:42 pmAre these verified sales? What are some examples of names that sold?
Kassey Lee says
June 12, 2016 at 3:41 amThe sales are sales reported in Chinese news. I have not seen any officially verified sales coming out of China yet.
gene says
June 11, 2016 at 5:19 pmThanks for reporting on this, Kassey. This is amazing – and paradigm shifting – news, if ename.cn has even half their facts correct. It would be nice to see further confirmation of this from other sources, as well.
Kassey Lee says
June 12, 2016 at 3:44 amAgreed. We live in a world of uncertainty so I never know how true the reported figure is. We can only use the limited information available and make our own judgement and then investment decision.
Gene says
June 12, 2016 at 2:26 pmOn your blog yesterday you stated:
“Some stats about the auction held during the 2016 Global Domain Industry Summit June 3 to 6 in China. Over 100,000 auction attendees. 150 domain names were sold at total value of 171m CNY. Note that this value is much smaller than the 300m CNY reported by another source (http://news.ename.cn/yumingjiaoyi_20160606_104677_1.html).”
As I said in my earlier comment, “This is amazing – and paradigm shifting – news, if ename.cn has even half their facts correct.”
And judging from these numbers, it looks like the auction sales total would be ~ $26m …which, at 57% of the originally reported number, is still a game changing result.
Kassey Lee says
June 12, 2016 at 5:12 pm“If ename.cn has even half their facts correct.” You are incredible. That’s why I’m spending a lot of tome studying the Chinese market.
Thomas says
June 13, 2016 at 2:27 am90% of those sales will never happen. It’s just to prop up the market. Banana.com for $3.5m ?? Come on guys.