Dropping nearly all of my chinese domains

[mj]

Originally Posted by touchring

Ok, i'm trying to counter the general misconception that chinese names don't get traffic, as you know the topic of this thread is "Dropping nearly all of my chinese domains".

OK, interesting point. May I ask you what percentage of your chinese domains get more than 5 visits a day?

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[touchring]

Originally Posted by mj

OK, interesting point. May I ask you what percentage of your chinese domains get more than 5 visits a day?

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Based on my limited Chinese portfolio, very few parked chinese generics can get more than 5 visits a day. I only got a handful that has so much traffic.

But i do agree with you that one should consider dropping less meaningful chinese names that are trafficless or can't cover at least half or a third of their reg fee.

I'll be reviewing my chinese portfolio this coming renewal.

For .com, i'll keep surnames, meaningful single characters, commercial terms with baidu ovt greater than 500, all chinese city names (without the shi), regardless of their traffic.

For .net, i will only consider primary commercial terms like finance.net, autoinsurance.net, franchise.net, rent.net, just to name a few i own off hand, and major city .nets.

Many of my Chinese names, i'll be renewing for the 3rd year so it will be unwise to just keep on renewing without trimming. For all we know, we may need to renew this way for another 5 years without PPC covering the renewals.

[Jay]

Touchring, can I ask if this traffic is coming from the mainland, or is it from Taiwan or elsewhere abroad?

[mj]

For the record, I have absolutely nothing against Chinese domains.

I owned a good number of them, and many of them were good - statistically speaking (search volume, serps, etc). However, they didn't get any traffic.

If the Chinese government is going to play this sort of politics (arbitrarily blocking stuff at the GFW), and Baidu won't index them, then as an investment class they are beyond my capabilities. I don't speak Chinese, so I can't develop them. I tried to find Chinese partners over time, but it was nearly impossible to establish any sort of meaningful business relationship. Therefore, as an investment class, Chinese domains are not for me.

I would love to see the NXDOMAIN logs from a Chinese ISP for just one month. Or even better, the logs from the GFW for all blocked requests beginning with "xn--". I bet the numbers are mindblowing. But it doesn't help me if they don't let the traffic out of the country.

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[touchring]

Originally Posted by Jay

Touchring, can I ask if this traffic is coming from the mainland, or is it from Taiwan or elsewhere abroad?

SC does a breakdown for local and foreign ppc earnings, from what i've observed, earnings is 100% from china at least the last 3 mths.

[mgrohan]

I think Chinese is a huge market and will be very lucrative in the future.

The problem at the moment is mainly with parking. With most foreign parking companies blocked the only real alternative is development.

Plus if development is not done properly (full blown sites Vs. mini sites) it is also hard to see any results.. As there are way too many competing pages.

[touchring]

Originally Posted by mgrohan

I think Chinese is a huge market and will be very lucrative in the future.

The problem at the moment is mainly with parking. With most foreign parking companies blocked the only real alternative is development.

Plus if development is not done properly (full blown sites Vs. mini sites) it is also hard to see any results.. As there are way too many competing pages.

That's true.

But this future is quite far away, they still have to overcome the habit of using Pinyin for domains, as you are aware, unlike japanese or korean, the chinese are very comfortable with the romanized form of their language. Kids learn pinyin even before they learn chinese characters proper. Pinyin, to the chinese is like kana is to the japanese or hangul (basically the language proper!) is to the Koreans.

I estimate the real takeoff for chinese domains, anywhere between 2015-2020. In the meantime, there will be plenty of opportunity to acquire good names along the way as people give up waiting. Already this year, so many chinese names, especially dot nets are dropped intentionally and caught by flippers. In contrast, you don't see latins dropping that way do you?