Chinese domaining activity has dominated the headlines of blogs over the past couple of years. The buying power of Chinese investors drove a renewed desire for short domain names, which in turn saw wholesale prices increase across the board.
There have been several different arguments as to why Chinese investors decided to buy up thousands of valuable domain names. One theory is that many of the domain names will be sold at a later date to Chinese end users.
The startup community in China is rapidly evolving, with recent estimates suggesting that 12,000 startups are being created in China every day. With this in mind, we wanted to take a look at a cross section of companies that are based in Beijing.
The Companies
Using Crunchbase's database, we've taken statistics from one-thousand companies whose headquarters are listed as being in Beijing. There is no limit on the company's age, their value, or industry.
In total, there were thirty-four companies that didn't list their company website, so we don't have data for them. We also had to remove several entries that did not have a dedicated domain name for the company or listed an incomplete domain name. Statistics from our remaining 948 companies will be profiled below.
Out of the companies in question, 630 companies are listed on Crunchbase as having received funding, with eight listed as receiving more than $1 billion in total funding.
The Domain Extensions
In total, our list of Beijing based companies contains thirty-one different domain name extensions. Theses are made up of the obvious extensions such as
It should be no surprise to hear that
As this article is profiling domain names of Beijing based companies, you would expect there to be a wide usage of
The remaining twenty-eight domain name extensions make up the 8.6% of domain usage, with
Length
We have learned over the past couple of years that Chinese domain investors are fans of short domain names, but is that the case amongst these Beijing based companies?
The mean average length of domain names in our list is seven, with the median and mode averages also working out to seven.
This mean average is shorter than other samples we have analyzed in the past and although we shouldn’t read too much into this statistic, it could mean that either more companies are using shorter domains, or that more companies are avoiding longer domain names.
The list contains one single-character domain name (d.cn), along with nine two-character domains. These two-character domains include six
There are also thirty-four companies using three-character domain names. These include two three-number
The award for the longest domain name on our list goes to the eighteen character domain that is ChinaSelectCapital.com.
Numbers
Numbers have deep meaning in China, with some numbers even impacting Chinese culture. For example, many elevators in Chinese buildings tend to omit the fourth floor, since the number four is considered to be very unlucky.
Our list shows that a total of eighty-one domain names include at least one number. This equates to 8.5% of our list.
In terms of the numbers used, you may assume that the number eight would be the most popular, since it is considered to be the luckiest number in Chinese culture. You would be wrong. In fact, the most popular number is the number one, followed closely behind by zero.
In fact, the number eight is the eighth most frequent number from our list, with just eleven occurrences throughout our eighty-one domains. You should not be surprised to hear that the number four is the least popular number, with only one occurrence of this number within our list.
There are two companies using five-number
Letters
You may assume that with the domain name sales to Chinese domain investors over the past couple of years that vowels are unpopular in China.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Whilst vowels are not used in Pinyin acronyms, they are frequently used elsewhere.
The most popular letter from all domain names within our list is the letter
Interestingly, the least popular letters from the domain names we sampled are
--
Unfortunately, we cannot share the complete data since the statistics in this article were obtained using a Crunchbase Pro license.
There have been several different arguments as to why Chinese investors decided to buy up thousands of valuable domain names. One theory is that many of the domain names will be sold at a later date to Chinese end users.
The startup community in China is rapidly evolving, with recent estimates suggesting that 12,000 startups are being created in China every day. With this in mind, we wanted to take a look at a cross section of companies that are based in Beijing.
The Companies
Using Crunchbase's database, we've taken statistics from one-thousand companies whose headquarters are listed as being in Beijing. There is no limit on the company's age, their value, or industry.
In total, there were thirty-four companies that didn't list their company website, so we don't have data for them. We also had to remove several entries that did not have a dedicated domain name for the company or listed an incomplete domain name. Statistics from our remaining 948 companies will be profiled below.
Out of the companies in question, 630 companies are listed on Crunchbase as having received funding, with eight listed as receiving more than $1 billion in total funding.
The Domain Extensions
In total, our list of Beijing based companies contains thirty-one different domain name extensions. Theses are made up of the obvious extensions such as
.COM or .CN, as well as many country code domains such as .COM.HK, .HK and .IO. There are also a couple of examples of new gTLD usage, but these only make up 0.42% of our entire list..COM dominates the chart. At total of 71.5% of companies in our list are using a .COM domain name to host their listed website. This number is slightly lower than many other domain data article subjects in the past, but it does show that .COM is still overwhelmingly popular.As this article is profiling domain names of Beijing based companies, you would expect there to be a wide usage of
.CN or .COM.CN, China’s primary domain extensions. Aside from .COM, China’s two primary extensions make up a total of 19.9% of all listed domain names.The remaining twenty-eight domain name extensions make up the 8.6% of domain usage, with
.CO, .NET, .ORG and .IO receiving several listings.Length
We have learned over the past couple of years that Chinese domain investors are fans of short domain names, but is that the case amongst these Beijing based companies?
The mean average length of domain names in our list is seven, with the median and mode averages also working out to seven.
This mean average is shorter than other samples we have analyzed in the past and although we shouldn’t read too much into this statistic, it could mean that either more companies are using shorter domains, or that more companies are avoiding longer domain names.
The list contains one single-character domain name (d.cn), along with nine two-character domains. These two-character domains include six
.COM’s, two of which are two-numbers and four of which are two-letters.There are also thirty-four companies using three-character domain names. These include two three-number
.COM’s, five three-letter .COM’s and three three-character .COM’s.The award for the longest domain name on our list goes to the eighteen character domain that is ChinaSelectCapital.com.
Numbers
Numbers have deep meaning in China, with some numbers even impacting Chinese culture. For example, many elevators in Chinese buildings tend to omit the fourth floor, since the number four is considered to be very unlucky.
Our list shows that a total of eighty-one domain names include at least one number. This equates to 8.5% of our list.
In terms of the numbers used, you may assume that the number eight would be the most popular, since it is considered to be the luckiest number in Chinese culture. You would be wrong. In fact, the most popular number is the number one, followed closely behind by zero.
In fact, the number eight is the eighth most frequent number from our list, with just eleven occurrences throughout our eighty-one domains. You should not be surprised to hear that the number four is the least popular number, with only one occurrence of this number within our list.
There are two companies using five-number
.COM’s, and two instances of companies using domain names containing four-numbers.Letters
You may assume that with the domain name sales to Chinese domain investors over the past couple of years that vowels are unpopular in China.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. Whilst vowels are not used in Pinyin acronyms, they are frequently used elsewhere.
The most popular letter from all domain names within our list is the letter
A, followed closely by the letters O and N.Interestingly, the least popular letters from the domain names we sampled are
Q, J and W. I was personally surprised to see W as being one of the least popular, since it is a highly desirable letter among short domain names that are sold to Chinese investors.--
Unfortunately, we cannot share the complete data since the statistics in this article were obtained using a Crunchbase Pro license.
