Category Archives: Domain names

The Chinese domain name bubble bursts

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Nearly one year ago, I asked Will .CN become the next .COM?

And perhaps I was right in more ways than one.

Because now it appears that .CN is experiencing its very own .COM bust.

Just a year ago Chinese domain registrations were booming, so quickly in fact that .CN had surpassed .DE to become the most-registered ccTLD.

Of course, registrations were cheap, really cheap.

A year later, those domains have come up for renewal. And, according to Domain Pulse, more than a million of those domains have not been renewed:

Registrations for .CN have declined from an end-of-month peak of 14,082,553 in February 2009 to 12,545,589, a decline of approximately 1.5 million

Which means Germany (.DE), at just under 13 million registrations, has regained the top spot as the number one ccTLD.

Even with ccTLDs, there are peaks and troughs, as illustrated here:

china-cctld-reg-august2009

I’m still confident that .CN will reign supreme (perhaps until .IN gives it some competition).

But first it must recover from this little bubble.

The Branding of Country Codes: A list of “countryless” ccTLDs

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A country code top-level-domains (ccTLD) has traditionally been used to signify a country-specific web site or resource, or simply to tell users where a given organization is located. For example, Russia’s leading search engine, Yandex, is hosted at www.yandex.ru and The Holy See hosts its site at www.vatican.va (.va = Vatican City).

Then along came the the marketing of .TV.

This ccTLD, owned by the island nation of Tuvalu, was licensed and packaged as the ultimate domain for any media property. And though the domain hasn’t exactly become as popular as .COM, a precedent had been set — ccTLDs weren’t just for country-specific properties anymore.

Then along came Delicio.us, a company that cleverly embedded the United States ccTLD into its brand name.

First ccTLD were freed from their borders. Then they found themselves melded into brand names.

And here we are today, with a growing number of companies that have registered country code top-level-domains (ccTLDs) not as appendages to their brand names, but part of their brand names. By my count, more than a dozen ccTLDs are now used as parts of corporate brand names.

This list of companies and the countries they have registered their domains in is not exhaustive, but it’s a start:

Have any to add to the list? Please comment below…

What does Libya have in common with Twitter? Ask Bit.ly

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libya_cctld

Bit.ly, the URL shortener now used by Twitter, is not the first company to craft its name out of a county code top-level domain (ccTLD).

But Bit.ly does appear to be the first company to do so with the Libyan ccTLD.

As some have speculated, Bit.ly could put itself into a precarious position should it begin hosting URLs for the adult industry, or any other industry that violates Libyan laws. It’s always important to keep in mind that a company can’t “own” a domain the way it owns real estate.

But this is all just speculation. The registrar Libyan Spider clearly is hoping to capitalize on all the “ly” permutations of a word or brand name. And the fact of the matter is that more and more countries are viewing their country codes as profit centers.

Which leads me to a brief inventory of the sites that I am aware of that use ccTLDs as part of their names:

I’m rather surprised at the range of countries represented here. Montenegro, by the way, has already sold more than 250,000 domains so far. Not bad for a country that’s less than a few years old.

Any companies that I missed?

UPDATE: Thanks to the commenter below I’ve added Tri.im — and I also came across Pi.pe. Any more I should include?

UPDATE 2: Just added Su.pr — yet another URL shortener.

UPDATE 3: Added good.is

UPDATE 4: Added Look.fo.  Faroe Islands. Go figure.

.EU to offer Greek and Cyrillic support

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The European Commission has announced that it will begin supporting domain registration in Greek and Cyrillic characters. This will allow for support of all 23 official EU languages.

The EC hasn’t announced when registrations will be possible. I took a stab at registering a Cyrillic domain name and got an “invalid domain” error. My guess is that we’re looking at FY10 before this becomes a reality — as ICANN is progressing slowly on a formal process for registering IDNs (internationalized domain names).

But the announcement is good news because it gives ICANN another reason to push ahead.