OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
.vip, .club, .shop and .ltd are the first 4 domain name extensions to receive approval by the Beijing Communications Administration. .VIP is an MMX extenstion, .Shop is managed by GMO Registry, Inc. and .ltd is owned by Donuts.
In December 2016, .vip, .club and .xyz were the first three foreign registries to receive central government MIIT approval allowing websites using the extensions to be hosted and function in China. In practical terms, for a website to operate in China, in addition to the central government approval for the TLD, the local regional communications department of the region where the domain owner is based must also recognize the TLD.
To date, all of the regional departments – with the exception of Beijing – have followed MIIT’s lead in allowing websites in MIIT approved TLDs to be recognized in their region. Beijing has a population of circa 22 million, GDP of circa 2 trillion CNY and a rapidly developed start-up/SME business sector. On August 16 2017, .vip, .club, .shop and .ltd were recognized by the Beijing Communications Administration.
Here are the domain name registration numbers for the 3 extensions as of today August 21, 2017 according to Namestat:
.club: 1,002,626
.VIP: 616,847
.Shop: 249,837
.LTD: 59,174
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FYI, .CLUB has also received approval in Beijing. We look forward to more live .Club sites coming online in Beijing now.
Was it approved on the 16th?
This will definitely give these four (4) extensions an adoption advantage on other gTLDs, especially in the cases of .Club and .VIP. After all, there are only 1.3bn people in China, and 700mm+ internet users.
But, no doubt, the usual suspects will come out of the woodwork and tell us – ad nauseum – that every single one of the ‘real’ sites will opt for a dot-com or dot-cn.
Except for the fact that NO ONE has ever answered the question that I have posed, over and over again, i.e., where there are multiple players in the same space, or in need of the identical key word(s), WHAT ARE THE REST OF THE COMPETITORS SUPPOSED TO DO WHEN THE ONE AND ONLY DOT-COM THEY WANT, NEED, DESIRE, IS TAKEN…AND WILL NEVER BE PUT BACK ON THE MARKET AGAIN???
Answer: They are going to find a great substitute, and live with that choice, since, in such cases, there is ZERO CHANCE that they’ll be able to “eventually upgrade” to the premier name that they’ve always wanted.
If there really are only a few thousand ‘words and phrases’ that mean anything to everyone…then I guess that the hundreds of millions of entrepreneurs out there are so disadvantaged that they’d might as well just avoid launching a site, altogether.
What’s the point, I guess, if they can’t do it right from the outset?
Or maybe,…just maybe, there really are viable alternatives to the (one-and-only) 7-figure, category-killer name.
would you want a business ending with .vip and .club? Most would not. Category killer are not the only chocies. Two word .com can work very well.
Who cares what the west wants? It’s the chinese that are buying up .top and .club.
If you do any domain investing and you haven’t figured that out you should you are a novice in my book. Don’t fight the new gTLD’s , embrace them.
.vip is already seeing very large drop rates, doubt this is going to prop things up.