Have You Dot Asia Yet?

Well, it’s new. Yes, we’ve talked about domain investing before and dot asia (*.asia) is now into the Landrush phase of its launch. Yay. Time for a new top-level domain investing season! (Or is it?)

Sunrise 1, 2, 3 - Basically allowing asian corporations/ corporations to register their company domains before it actually launches to the public. Land Rush is where it becomes a first come first serve basis to allow public to register their desired domains. Well, I’ve tried to, and didn’t exactly get anything much during the Sunrise period.

As stated in the DotAsia Public Relation pdf in March, most of the high value words are still available for registration, and where as Chinese and Indians are the most aggressive dot asia domain owners; not surprising since this two countries are having the highest population in the world and both are the top asian countries.

Most of the domains I registered seemed to have some value in them and went into a current auction pool whereby we have to bid for them.

During the earlier Sunrise and Land Rush phases, .Asia already received over 500,000 domain registration applications. About 45,000 domains received more than one application, and will go to auction. This proved to be successful in reducing the chaos created in previous domain launches as registrants clamour for high value domains.

Interestingly, the one that fetched the highest bid till date now is sexshop.asia at $53,607 with second placing sex.asia at $33,000. You can check the ticker here. I’d be paying more for sex.asia than sexshop.asia if I have the choice!

Controversies of Dot Asia as compared to Other Top-level Domains

There are many articles floating around with people doubting the potential of .asia domains on whether it might be another hype. As we know and see, .eu domains didn’t quite exactly, and even until now value as much as people who have punted and hope for when they rushed into the .eu registration craze in 05 (Sunrise period) and 06 (Landrush period.

Fact is till date, there’re about 2.7 million .eu registrations with close to 500 million people in Europe. If we are comparing with population numbers, Asia stands at 3.7 billion till date.

No matter how you look at it, even if it doesn’t flourish (and it shouldn’t) as well as top level domain name .com, it should worth more that what you have paid for for registering it early if its a good keyword / word domain if you hold it for long.

So Going For Dot Asia?

I’ve so far used Hostway services during the Sunrise phase, and am glad to know that GoDaddy is also an accredited registrar for dot Asia. For a full list of .Asia registrars, you can head to DotAsia’s Organisation page here.

Now back to my bidding war for some good looking domains.

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