The Chinese domain boom, which gave a clear boost to the domain market awhile back, is clearly in decline. In many ways, this was related to the launch and promotion of new domain zones. Domain Name Wire decided to find out what relations between Chinese registrants and new domains are like today. Using Namestat.org statistics, the total number of registrations in the ten most popular new gTLDs was matched with the number of registrations in China. Note that the statistics are not complete; registrants may choose to hide their data, in which case it is impossible to determine the country of origin. The .LIVE domain is a special case, because 97% of all the registrations are hidden. So it is impossible to say how many Chinese registrants it has, although the domain is in the top ten. Nevertheless, the rest of the domain zones show a clear picture: at least 25%-30% of names are registered in China. The .WANG domain must be singled out, because 99% of registrations are Chinese (about 950,000), which can be easily explained by the fact that the domain was originally designed for China, and the word ‘wang’ is the Latin transcription of the Chinese glyph 网, which means ‘network.’ The popularity of .TOP, .VIP, .CLUB, and .SHOP in China can also be explained easily: these English words are adopted and commonly used all over the world, and China is no exception.
It is harder to explain the popularity of .ICU. It’s ranked first with 4,152,307 registrations, including 3,660,320 in China, although ICU is, in a way, an acronym for ‘I see you,’ a phrase not very popular in China, but perhaps this is because of low fees and promotional campaigns. Domain names in .ICU can be registered at $1 or $2. Of course, this promotes fast growth in registrations. However, most domain names are registered without any serious objective: Google and Alexa data show that the number of active .ICU names is not high.
