It does not make sense. I just read that China Citic Bank recently changed its site from Bank.ecitic.com to Citicbank.com. Wait a minute. Another .com again? Wasn’t .citic launched two years ago? Why would an important member of the Citic group not reside on their own land (.citic) but still choose to live under somebody […]

At the Global Mobile Internet Conference in 2013, Tencent CEO Hua Teng MA famously said, “We even think that the internet may not need domain names in the future.” Few years later, what do we see in China now? It appears the opposite is actually happening. Chinese consumers welcome short domain names such as Le.com, […]

Numbers don’t lie. They tell you direction, and the direction is up. I’m talking about the importance and therefore the value of domain names in China. Baidu has released the latest (April) numbers on how Internet users come to a website, and the trend is very favorable to domain names. Visit Method Percentage Direct 42.40% […]

Two news stories caught my attention today. One is the listing of Chinese company 51 Talk on New York Stock Exchange. 51 Talk is an online English education service founded in 2011. Its corporate site is 51talk.com. Why 51? 51 rhymes with 无忧 (no worries) and 我要 (I want), so the brand becomes “I want […]

While .com is king in China, sometimes I wonder what’s happening to .org. In the west, .org has a distinctive identity as a domain extension for non-profit organizations. In China, it is still a question mark. I’m not sure many Chinese can understand the meaning of .org with its low visibility. Translating “org” to “organization” […]

Today I came across a long article written by a domain investor called Wei Tian LI (李伟天). While copies of this article can be found in some Chinese news and forums, I could not locate its source. However, because its content is very interesting, I decided to reorganize and summarize its main points here. This […]

Chinese firms score 12 of the top 100 names in the 2016 Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands released recently by Millward Brown and WPP. Since my interest is always domain name, I want to know what kind of domain names these 12 Chinese companies are using for the Chinese consumers. To get this information, […]

In China, people who own domain names are considered very smart, but this is not always true. Suppose you registered a domain name a year ago. One day someone who claims to be the sales director of a domain brokerage firm calls you. He says that you have a very good domain name and he […]

A domain investor recently sent me a list of Pinyin .com names and asked me to find buyers for him. Unfortunately, I’m not a broker so I can’t help much in this case. However, here’s a simple tip that you can try and find potential buyers. I’ll use YFW.com which I talked about in yesterday’s […]

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 […]