New gTLD became open for registration from 2014. So far there’vebeen over 700 delegated new gTLDs by ICANN, which meant more choices for domain investors. Let’s see more about the popular new gTLDs in China from below.

1..TOP

.Top went into General Availability on 18th Nov 2014, a few months later than other popular TLDs, and has more than 260k registrations so far, the fifth most registered new gTLD in the world. .Top means the best, top-notch, and it is a three-letter word, easy to type and remember, understandable and acceptable in any part of the world. Images of brand companies are lifted greatly when integrated with .top website. World famous companies like Google, Baidu and Yahoo registered their trademark related .top domains in the first time.

.Top become more and more popular home and abroad. Tens of thousands of .top domain are listed and sold on domain marketplaces like Sedo, Ename, West263 etc. Sales information are reported on famous domain media as well, a few of which are 55.yop, 58.top, 66.top and 77.top.

2..xyz

.xyz is one of the most registered new gTLDs, open for registration from 1st June 2014, operated by XYZ company.

.xyz are the last three letters in the alphabet. After Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc chose abc.xyz as its new website to show relevance between their website and the company name.

3..club

.club went into market from May 2014. .club domains are suitable for socialization related websites. It has some sales reported overseas like wine.club sold for $140k, coffee.club $100k, vegas.club $10k; But .club doesn’t have high price sales in China yet. A Chinesedomainer once purchased che(car).club for 10k CNY.

4..wang

.wang was operated by Zodiac registry, open for public registration from June 2014. .wang is a new gTLD targeted at Chinese users. Pinyin “wang” caters to Chinese typing habbit. And also gives meaning of “net” to the website. .wang has a registration volume of 200k at present, being the sixth most registerd new gTLD in the world.

.wang attracted certain attention on Ename auction, with their baoxian(insurance).wang sold at 71k CNY, tuangou(group buying).wang 50k CNY and 188.wang 78k CNY.

5..ren

.ren is an extension with obvious Chinese characteristic since its pronunciation can easily lead people to associating it with “People(人/ren)”.It was launched by Beijing Oakpacific Company, the owner of well-known RenRen.com, and was into general availability on October 15th 2014. However, there were few transactions of .ren domains in the market, except geo-domains like Jiangsu.ren, Zhejiang.ren and Shandong.ren, sold at a price of 100,000 CNY respectively.

Two Challenges for New gTLD Development

1.Marketing: New gTLDshould strive for better brand promotion and benign market environment with good government policy before it can penetrate to end-users. MIIT emphasizes internet security and has strict control over the use of new gTLD for the long-term strategy. So in the foreseeable future many new gTLDs couldn’t get license from MIIT, thus couldn’t be used to build website in China.

2.Technology: The application of new gTLDs in different fields should be accelerated so as to consolidate its brand image and attract end-users to build high-end websites. To achieve this goal, technology plays an important role, like port connection, SEO, etc, which could enhance customer experience and thus become a “commodity” they can trust.

Summary

A large number of new gTLDs will emerge in domain market, which will bring out lots of premium and short domains, even single letter/digit ones. It’s advisory that never buy too many domains with extensions that lack comprehensive promotion channels, or those couldn’t be widely accepted/used.  The only criteria of whether an extension will survive or not is whether it’s useful or not. For example, Google chose .TOP and .XYZ, injecting new vitality to the new gTLD market.

Therefore, in comparison with long-established .com/.net, new gTLD has abundant resources and great potential in value increase, thus providing a good opportunity both for end-users to build websites and domainers to invest in premium domains. The kernel is to match a good keyword with mainstream extension, and expand the application in building website.