Today is a pretty interesting day in the domain world, a new TLD, .在线 (which translates to .ONLINE) launched and in under an hour had over 50,000 registrations. This beat .GURU (one of the top-selling new gTLDs) literally in its first hour. So what does this mean?
Right now very little, but a year from now it could mean a whole lot. Like most things in life you can’t judge a book by its cover. A great first day is nothing compared to a great first year. That being said, it could be a sign of what’s to come, especially considering that another IDN, .中文网 (.CHINESE) also had very impressive numbers.
What I think we’re starting to see is a more global Internet and very clearly a world that still sees a lot of value in domain names. While it’s still early I do think we should all be paying very careful attention to how the market might be changing. Marketplaces like 4.cn have seen strong growth over the last year and should be good barometers to understand how these new wave of domains do in the resale market.
However the real question is what will be built on these TLDs. Only time will tell but there’s no denying that the global Internet is getting bigger by the day, and I for one am a big fan of that!
