Happy New Year and welcome to 2017!
With an entirely new year ahead of us, a lot of speculation, strategizing, and planning will be an integral role for domain investors while looking forward to the attractiveness and potential held by the Chinese e-commerce market.
So what sort of strategies do domain investors apply when forecasting the domain market in China or otherwise?
Well, there are several methods to employ when determing the value of a domain name, and many prominent domain investors make their money by applying these various methods and investing in domains that fit the criteria of what makes a domain name valuable. The ins-and-outs of how to value a domain name would require a blog post of its own, so I won’t go into detail here, however I will go over one key indicator of determining the value of domain name: keyword search volume.
Specific keywords or keyphrases that receive, say, millions of exact-match searches per month will almost always be more valuable than a different keyword or keyphrase that only receives, say a few thousand exact-match searches per month among the bevy of search engines, including Baidu, which is the most popular search engine used in China.
Exact-match and generic keywords derive value from simple supply and demand– there is only a limited supply of meaningful, relevant, and powerful keywords and keyphrases in the human vocabulary, therefore the more “exact” or “generic” it is, the more likely people are to search for it (demand) on Google or Baidu, increasing its value.
In other words, website owners generally want to see a high volume of traffic to their site, and if their domain name contains a valuable keyword or keyphrase to the left of the dot, the more likely someone will search for it on a search engine, or by directly typing it in as a URL, resulting in a higher number of people visiting the website about the exact thing they may be looking for.
Unfortunately, most, if not all valuable exact-match and generic keywords and keyphrases used to the left of the .COM extension are likely registered, and probably have been for many years. Typically, in today’s overly-saturated .COM domain market, the only way to acquire meaningful exact-match and generic keyword domain names is to pay an exorbitant amount of money to the domain owner. That is not an option for everyone. Thankfully, the expansion of over 1,500 new domain extensions and counting have helped to mitigate the high costs of generic and exact-match .COM domain names. Now, business owners large and small, domain investors, and everyday internet users can register meaningful exact-match and generic keyword domains that end in something other than the “legacy” domain extensions, at a cost that is comparitively miniscule.
This definitely rings true for the .在线 (Dot Chinese Online) and .中文网 (Dot Chinese Website) extensions, especially for Chinese businesses, investors, and consumers who wish to utilize the internet in their own native language, which is also spoken by nearly a quarter of all humanity.
After taking a look at a nice infographic about 2016’s top-searched keywords and keyphrases from Baidu, we found that these most searched terms have received hundreds of millions of views over the last 12 months, and many of these terms are still available to register in both .在线 and .中文网!
See below for a breakdown of the keyword or keyphrase, how many hits it receives in Baidu every month, and its price. DO NOT miss out on the opportunity to register these domain names!
Domain: 房价.在线
Translation: House Price
Price: USD $588
Buy: SEDO
Baidu Hits: 100 Million
Context: “Soaring House Prices” keyphrase was #2 in the Top 10 overall for most searched on Baidu in 2016.
Domain: 疫苗.在线
Translation: Vaccine
Price: USD $588
Buy: SEDO
Baidu Hits: 100 Million
Context: “Vaccine Safety” keyphrase was #5 in the Top 10 overall for most searched on Baidu in 2016.
Domain: 人工智能.在线
Translation: Artificial Intelligence
Price: USD $588
Buy: SEDO
Baidu Hits: 40 Million
Context: “Artificial Intelligence” keyphrase was #7 in the Top 10 overall for most searched on Baidu in 2016.
Domain: 财务.在线
Translation: Finance
Price: USD $588
Buy: SEDO
Baidu Hits: 100 Million
Context: “Internet Finance” keyphrase was #8 in the Top 10 overall for most searched on Baidu in 2016.
Domain: 民间借贷.在线
Translation: Micro-Finance
Price: USD $588
Buy: SEDO
Baidu Hits: 50 Million
Context: The same keyphrase as before, “Internet Finance” was #8 in the Top 10 overall for most searched on Baidu in 2016.
Some other top-searched keywords and phrases in 2016 coming from Baidu, costing even less than the premium domains above, include:
Domain: 虚拟现实技术.在线
Translation: Virtual Reality Technology
Price: USD $90 minimum (Make An Offer)
Buy: SEDO
Baidu Hits: 4 Million
Context: “Virtual Reality” was a among the most-searched tech terms on Baidu in 2016.
Domain: 阿特拉斯.在线
Translation: Atlas
Price: USD $9.88/year
Buy: ChopChop.domains
Baidu Hits: Unreachable
Context: “Atlas” was a among the most-searched tech terms on Baidu in 2016.
All of the above domain names are available, cost-effective, and extremely powerful exact-match keywords and phrases that millions to hundreds of millions of searches in Baidu, thus making them very valuable digital commodities.
These domain names are sound investments for the sole reason that the search volume is in the top tier, and people are simply searching for these words in Baidu at an extraordinarily high rate. People clearly want to find websites about the keywords they are searching for, so make your business stand out above the rest with an exact-match, fully-Chinese domain name!
– ChopChop Domains Team
ANNOUNCEMENT: Members of the ChopChop Domains team will be attending this year’s NamesCon at the end of January. If you will be attending and would like to learn more about the Chinese domain market and the future of IDN domain name investing, feel free to contact us here, or tweet at us to set up a meeting.
*This is a courtesy republishing of the original blog posted over at ChopChop.news