Rubber Duck

Yes for traffic derived from outside Asia. But this really should not be the primary interest in the Asian market. The real target should be traffic derived from inside Asia. Realistically, how many Americans are evern going to be planning excursions to Asia in the current economic climate?

Look, China and other Major Asian resources are just using Australia which has a relatively tiny population to source mineral resources, much in the same way that other Western Countries have exploited Africa. Australia just should not be your main target. And the interest of the general population in Australia to Asia on a day to day basis is going to be relatively limited.
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/domain-name-discussion/476538-search-engine-optimization-benefit-asia-domains.html

Even if Australians start thinking about destinations or Markets in Asia, they are going to segment them into countries. Asia is such a vague and varied concept that it is not particularly meaningful when try to source or sell.

Asia has over half the population of the globe and a very large proportion of the land mass as well. It will also account for a very large proportion of the World's wealth. But, how many people actually know what is meant by Asia? Is Russia or Turkey in Asia? Do they consider themselves Asian? We know Iran is not in Asia because the registry has told us, but what about the rest of the Middle East. Is Egypt in Asia or Africa? Some us think Asia stops in Malaysia, others think it goes right down to Stewart Island. But the real question is still do the Chinese and Japanese think of themselves as Asian, or are we limited to expatriate groups from the Indian sub-continent?

If you are really going to cast your net so wide, why not just go Global and be done with it!

netfleet

[QUOTE=Rubber Duck] Realistically, how many Americans are evern going to be planning excursions to Asia in the current economic climate?
[QUOTE]

It's all about American traffic is it? I don't think so.... and I think you know that with your IDN support.

[QUOTE=Rubber Duck]If you are really going to cast your net so wide, why not just go Global and be done with it![QUOTE]
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=476538

And how do we do that exactly?

Look, from an SEO perspecive, maybe this theory would be even more exciting if the extension was .free or .loans or .mortgage but it's not - it's .asia. Domaining is all about finding markets & niches and, whilst .asia may have a much broader field of use, all I'm saying is that one particular area of use might have an additional benefit.

Namely, English speakers whereever they may be in the world searching on Google using a search term which contains the word 'asia' or 'asian'.

The fact is people do search for these terms. Maybe as you say they are more likely to specify individual countries, maybe as you suggest 'Asians' do not immediately consider themselves as part of Asia (there's definitely an argument for that here in Australia) but regardless, these searches exist and if one can convert some of these searches into traffic by development & taking advantage of this 'edge', then it's a worthwile commercial pusuit. IMHO

Rubber Duck

[QUOTE=netfleet]That is because Australia was never in Asia, until the dot Asia registry conveniently put it there.

martina2061

Do me a favour and type 'asia' into the Baidu search page. 18 million plus responses. I think they realise they are in asia and this is the traffic that .asia would be targeting.

As far as I'm concerned, as long as China and India know they are part of the Asian continent (which they obviously do), then that makes it a worthwhile investment.

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Diamonds

Rubber Duck

I would not read too much into that. Baidu like all other major search languages indexes page content in all Unicode scripts including ASCII.
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=476538

It is a bit like using your thumb to measure a pulse. You simply end up counting your own heartbeats.

More interestingly, see how many Ads Baidu pulls up for the term Asia. I get one from Singapore Air.

martina2061

I'm glad Baidu is like all other major search languages, good to know. The fact is, there are major results of 'asia' with the chinese results listed. This is just one search engine of one country's listings in the Asian market.

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Diamonds

Rubber Duck

Well this is what I get in Google:
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=476538

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...cn&btnG=Search

and Baidu:

http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=asia%2C+url%3A+cn

by contrast a simple search on 亚洲 in Google yields 122 Million Results.

If I go to Google.co.in and search on Asia, I get 502 Million results. If I then restrict to "pages from India", I only get 2,230,000.

Restricting to China on Google.cn I get 793,000

http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=Asia&btnG=Google+%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2&meta=lr%3 Dlang_zh-CN|lang_zh-TW&aq=f

This confirms to me that Asia is a term predominantly used by Westerners rather than Asians.

martina2061

Maybe it shows the vast number of western developed sites over the number developed in the growing asia region.

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Diamonds

Rubber Duck

No it doesn't. Some Chinese character terms return Billions of results in Google.

It won't be that long before there are more Chinese sites than English ones.

The numbers for 2002 were as follows:

http://www.netz-tipp.de/languages.html

Internet Statistics:
Distribution of languages on the Internet
Chart of Web content (milions of webpages by language) 2002
English 1142,5 56,4%
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=476538
German 156,2 7,7%
French 113,1 5,6%
Japanese 98,3 4,9%
Spanish 59,9 3,0%
Chinese 48,2 2,4%
Italian 41,1 2,0%
Dutch 38,8 1,9%
Russian 33,7 1,7%
Korean 30,8 1,5%
Portuguese 29,4 1,5%
Swedish 15,1 0,7%
Polish 14,8 0,7%
Danish 12,3 0,6%
Czech 11,5 0,6%
Turkish 4,9 0,2%
Hungarian 4,1 0,2%
Greek 2,0 0,1%
Other 168,0 8,3%
Total Web pages 2024,7 100,0%

But things have changed a lot since then!

james2002

Robber Duck

It does not matter that much about the language, as far as the domain names are concerned.

For example.

www.baidu.com is the leading chinese language search engine.

Bidu.com is ranked 13 in Alexa.

Note here that the domain baidu.com is not IDN, only in English language. visit the site , you will see chinese language.

Therefore,

People in asia can use whatever.asia domain names in English language to create websites with their own language.

Rubber Duck

If you are going to succeed in this game, the first lesson is that you cannot expect things to come true simply because you wish them.

Baidu is a Megabrand that has been established for years through the provision of an important and unique service, but even then:

http://www.baidu.com/s?ie=gb2312&bs=...%B6%C8%22&ct=0
????: NamePros.com http://www.namepros.com/showthread.php?t=476538

http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=baidu

You can expect Latin character version to persist for a handful of big brands even if the local version is more used. This does not mean, however, they are going to all learn to speak English and then use it as their language of preference. If the Martians decided to start trading with the US, do you think they would put forward all their publicity material in Martian?

Even if you can get them to adopt the dot Asia domain, which in any case will probably require Aliasing in Chinese characters, they just are not going to type in English Keywords for domains or start searching on English Keywords either.

Frankly, if you believe otherwise, you need to get out this business before you lose your shirt like a whole slew of dot Mobi investors are in the process of doing, just as whole crowd of dot IN investors have previously squandered a good deal of their life saving in absolute rubbish.

martina2061

I think one nation, despite how large that nation is, will find it harder to change almost every other nation in the world to cease using english as the international language for business. The chinese are already learning english at a greater speed than the western word is learning mandarin or cantonese.
Trust me, Rubber Duck, we'll still be doing international trade in english despite asia's impending growth.

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Diamonds

james2002

Man, here is the list of top chinese sites. All domains are in English.

http://www.chinesetop100.com/

I used to have a chinese girlfriend and she said www.Chinaren.com is very popular for chinese people. Its domain is also in English. But visit it, you will see full of chinese letters.

The point here is you don't need to learn English alot just to type in whatever.asia. because once you are inside , then you can use your language like chinese etc.... That is why IDN domains are not compatible in price with english domain TLD.

I am just saying they can use English .asia domains for their language orientated websites.

Nowadays, English is one of the major subjects in high school and almost all educated people can at least know a,b,c,d,e etc.... They don't need to learn. They already know about basics. For domain names like baidu.com, they can easily type in.

So I think englishlanguagewords.asia will do better than IDNdomainnames.asia. Definitely.