.Asia IDN Landrush in Full Swing
08. Oct, 2011 
3 Comments
As you may already know, Asia is the largest Internet marketplace in the world. However, only 20% of the market is online and that number is expected to grow dramatically over the next five years. That being said, it’s important to realize that 20% penetration still means 800 million users online, more than twice the population of the United States!
This is what I like about ccTLDs – there are so many major markets that have yet to see even close to the kind of broadband penetration that the US has seen. For everyone that feels like they missed their chance not buying domains in the 90′s it’s always important to remember – this is the 90′s (in a matter of speaking) in other parts of the world. There are ccTLDs that will take-off and haven’t even started to bloom yet.
Now .Asia has introduced IDN .Asia domains which make a lot of sense given how many people in Asia speak Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. IDN’s just make sense to me, why would I want to type a website in a different character-set that I use on a daily basis?
Edmon Chung, the CEO of .Asia had this to say about the .Asia IDN landrush:
“DotAsia is committed to promoting Internet development and adoption in Asia, and native language domain names (i.e. IDN) is an important part of driving accessibility to the hundreds of millions of users coming online in Asia. As both a tool for direct navigation and for enhancing SEO (Search Engine Optimization), IDN also helps businesses around the world to reach the Asian Internet marketplace, where users are actively searching online in their own language.” (Read Press Release)
I am excited about the .Asia IDN landrush and will definitely share with all of you the names I personally decide to invest in. IDN’s make a lot of sense to me, owning domains that use the same characterset that people use on a daily basis just makes sense. Investing in a market like Asia that still dramatically lags the US in broadband penetration means that it’s still early. I can’t wait to watch this market grow and develop and of course as always I’ll keep all of you up-to-date!
Don’t I have to reside in or at least have an address in asia? If not I would be interested.
Great question @DomainDon – there are many registrars that offer services so you can live anywhere in the world and have a representative in Asia. My top pick for ccTLD registrations is 101Domain.com
Great info Morgan. Remember though, .ASIA is not a ccTLD. By definition it is a sponsored TLD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.asia