When sale of a Pinyin domain name is reported in Chinese news, it is often described as 1-pin, 2-pin, etc. These terms indicates the number of Pinyin words in a domain name. The more pins a domain name has, the longer it becomes. So the question is: how many pins will Chinese companies go before loosing interest?
To answer this question, the companies on the 500 Most Valuable Chinese Brands I wrote about yesterday provide an excellent source because major brands are influential and what they do affect many companies in corporate China. So, I went through all the names on the list, checked the number of pins used in their company names, and summarized the result in the following table.
Company | Count |
---|---|
1-pin | 1 |
2-pin | 239 |
3-pin | 86 |
4-pin | 128 |
5-pin | 16 |
6-pin | 8 |
7-pin | 3 |
Others | 19 |
Total | 500 |
The result is clear. The most popular names are 2-pin, followed by 4-pin and then 3-pin. The popularity of 2-pin is quite cultural. There is even a Chinese saying: “good things come in pairs”. This also explain why 4-pin is more popular than 3-pin. If a company cannot have a name in 2-pin, the next logical step is to consider 4-pin. It’s also clear that there is little interest in 5-pin and beyond.
The implication to domain investors is that if you invest in Pinyin domain names, stick to 2- to 4-pin. Another observation is that because Chinese companies like to upgrade from Pinyin to acronym name (e.g. Jingdong.com to JD.com), we can also say that 2L to 4L are good, but 5L domain names and beyond are not suitable for end user companies.
Finally, are 1-pin (and therefore 1L) domain names worth less than other pins? Absolutely not. 1-pin names are very short and therefore very expensive for this fact alone. Often, a company has a 2-pin company name but uses a 1-pin domain name. For example, CheCheng (车城)is 2-pin but Che.com is only 1-pin. (Che.com was sold for more than $3m.)
great article. Do you have any feel for the value of a baseline (lowest quality) 2-pin .com? Is there any site that is tracking this? Sales Godaddy vary quite a bit – for example, a few weeks ago yitie.com sold for $19k. On the other hand ruanpo.com today for about $400. Also – do you have any idea of the size of the market? How many possible combinations are there of 2-pin names?
Lots of good questions but I have no answer for you, Danny. Pinyin names are tricky because depending on the Chinese character a 2-pin name can be very short e.g. Leba (乐吧=happy bar), or long e.g. QianKeng (钱坑=money pit). I’m not aware of any Chinese site tracking such sale.
thanks for the reply Kassey. I’m pretty sure that every 2-pin name has been registered. I wrote a script for that a while back to check it. Would be interesting if someone would put together a site that tracks sales, just like shortnames.com so that it would be easier to track the market.
Actually I don’t pay much attention to Pinyin domain names because most of them have no global appeal.