When you talk to people who are outside the industry or only look in from time to time their vision of things is always quite different. A lot of people seem to think that the internet is dominated by adult content and porn, scammers, spam and fraud.
Of course it isn’t, but maintaining some of those myths isn’t that hard to do.
So it was interesting to read the final results from the do.asiaa launch.
If you recall the mess that was the .eu launch you’ll also recall the number of disputes and problems that the launch caused (many of them are still ongoing!).
The team behind DotAsia were fortunate enough to have been able to learn from Eurid‘s mistakes. Whether that led to a better process or not is questionable, as many people, including IP holders, probably feel that the allocation of domains was a bit too random for their liking.
The top 3 sales during the .asia auctions were:
- discover.asia (US$112,111)
- sex.asia (US$ 83,334)
- buy.asia (US$73,000).
Stephane from Indom brought this rather odd situation to my attention back in July.
Does this mean that Asians are more interested in making money than satisfying their baser needs? (No need to answer that!)
So if your business was thinking of expanding into the Asian market what would you do first?
I guess the obvious answer would be to grab a .asia domain as a starting point.
Of course Asia is a big place, so maybe you might want to focus on a particular market such as China or Hong Kong. The growth of the .cn (China) has been truly stunning, with it becoming the biggest ccTLD in a very short space of time (whether it can hold that position is, of course another matter).
The next few years could be very interesting!