Why is it that I can dial the 8-digit number to call my mom yet can’t recall the 4-digit zip code of my home address? Because I call my mom frequently. Why is it that I can remember 1688.com but struggle for other similar names? Because 1688 has meaning (making a fortune all the way). […]

I don’t know exactly how much May Cheung (张红梅) paid for 98EP.com, but I’m sure she hand registered the domain name in 2013 because Wayback Machine shows no other person before her. So, I can safely say she paid about $10 for the domain name registration. Why did May acquire 98EP.com? Because it has meaning […]

Yi Fang Wang (易房网) is a real estate service started in 2009 by an internet startup to help customers buy or rent apartments in the Qingdao area. House hunting in China is a crowded space with many companies fighting for a bigger share. This competition extends to domain names as well, making it difficult to […]

Domain investor Hao Nan CHEN (陈浩南) is doing it again. According to a June 29 news article by eName, Chen made a good profit out of his $1.5m (10m yuan) investment in 2C domain names last year, so he is putting the same amount of money back into investing — this time in 3C domain […]

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 […]