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.in Reasons behind MASSIVE GROWTH in the .IN extension

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Now before I start to give my opinion on the Indian extension, I wish to convey the fact that I am definitely NOT trying to hype up the .IN scene to propagate my own portfolio or investments, which many people often believe when domainers make positive comments on certain extensions. Although I must say that I am the owner of a fair few nice .IN names, I feel that I am quite behind with .IN and therefore playing catch up on pretty much a daily basis now through hand regs and buying on reseller market, trying to build up a decent portfolio of .in at reasonable prices, before its too late. Many strong key (and clever) players have been in the .IN game for many many years, secretly trading amongst themselves and waiting for the explosion that is about to occur in the next few months.

I started investing in .IN a few years back but it has only been over the last couple of years, that I have realized the true potential in this amazing extension. Many years ago, I had initially thought that .in was only good for domain hacks, with quite a few companies all over the globe buying .in names primarily for only that purpose ( many still do) and not even thinking about the traffic from India but I only fully realized a couple of years ago that I was very wrong about .in and wished that I had got in much earlier and I think that the Chinese are also realising that now too.

I am sure you are all aware of the recent rapid momentum with NNN.ins & LLL.ins which are showing growth at an unprecedented speed, prices increasing on a daily basis. This shows the potential of .IN and also a precursor of what is going to happen in the coming months. And in a matter of speaking, I guess it is already starting to happen right now as we speak, with more and more end users buying .Ins and interesting being sparked all over India and globally too. After rapid increases in NNN.ins & LLL.ins sparked by the Chinese, then will come massive increases in sale prices of .IN keywords, which are already becoming hot property in India right now anyway.

The .IN extension is definitely the future of the Indian Webspace and the market is starting to move extremely fast at this moment in time, some very exciting times ahead! Not sure if you guys have been keeping up to date with the news, but over the last few months, there has been some very big news about the Indian webspace market. Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce company, raised $6 Billion in total venture capitalists, and $1 Billion just last year and the company is now valued at $15 Billion. This funding figure matches facebook’s fundraising back in 2011 and makes it the third largest deal of its kind in the world!

Also during the same week last year, Amazon announced a $2 Billion investment in its India unit and has recently stated that India is the next ‘Trillion Dollar’ market, stating that the size of opportunity in India is so large it will be measured in trillions, not billions!

There are many excellent figures for India's internet entrepreneurs from the commitment and faith in India of the larger firms & global corporations. There have been many such multi-billion/million deals last year and this year seems just as exciting, if not more. There are also major rumors now that Walmart's entry into Indian e-commerce is very imminent! Things are starting to move extremely quickly over there and the market is about to mature to a completely new level guys! Just yesterday, the Prime Minister of India launched a $1.5 Billion fund for new startups. India truly is on the cusp of a digital revolution. Mobile phone subscriptions in the country have already passed the 1 Billion mark and these are now quickly being replaced by smartphones. This is pretty much a once in a lifetime moment, and the prime minister has stated that “the transformation occuring is on a scale that is, perhaps, unmatched in human history”.

The changing landscape in India is now moving at neck breaking speed. Internet access has rapidly expanded and the Reliance Group is due to make a move by summer of this year that will totally change everything in India, with EXTREMELY cheap access to 4G! Already mostly through mobile devices, Indians are now increasingly shifting daily activity online, like reading the newspaper, doing bank transactions and buying goods and services, from shoes to refrigerators etc….

Nowadays in India, billboards, text messages and emails bombard people every day with news of deep online-only discounts and special offers. By June, more Indians are expected to access the Internet on their cellphones — 371 million — than the entire population of the United States! And we are just talking about cellphone internet connections here, not even including the other initiatives in fixed line, fibre optic, cable connections etc…

Just this week, an indian firm just released a smartphone that is priced under 500 rupees, less than 5 USD (1% of the price of the latest Apple iPhone). The current median in India age is 27, nearly a full decade younger than in China!

E-commerce in India is growing at a compound annual rate of 34 percent, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

By next year, many experts agree on the fact that there will be half a billion Indians online. India has already surpassed the USA in terms of number of users. A flood of cheap smartphones in the market is encouraging rapid internet adoption and an online revolution is taking place. Unlike the other BRIC countries such a China, Russia and Brazil, the consumers in India are largely Anglophone which means that as Indians become the second-largest nationality online (after the Chinese), they simultaneously will become the single largest group on the English-language internet. A vast majority of them using the English language as the preferred way to communicate online!


On top of that mobile increase, fibre optic subscribers through the Indian government's NOFN project are likely to reach over 600 million by 2020! With average Internet speeds in India set to triple over the next couple of years, this is going to be the LARGEST MARKET in the world and it will all start kicking off towards sometime this summer!



India is the worlds largest democracy and has the second largest population of English speakers in the world. It also currently has the world's largest youth population. In total the population of India is equivalent of more than the populations of Europe and the US combined! Just think about this sort of opportunity guys!

Just literally a few months ago, Japans richest man (owner of SoftBank) invested $627million in an Indian web company and stated that is had plans to invest $10Billion over the next couple of years due to the vast market potential of India.



India's population has now crossed over the 1 billion mark, more than half of its population are younger than 25 and nearly 70 percent of its 1.25 billion population is under 40. Therefore in absolute numbers, this is actually unprecedented anywhere in the history of the world. It also comes at a time when much of the developed world and also China have aging populations. Overall, India will overtake China as the largest population in the world before 2030. At the current growth rate, India will easily exceed 600 million internet users by 2018 or much before that. This will make India the biggest open internet access market in the world and therefore this is the place to capitalize on some serious growth. And remember guys, India is the largest DEMOCRACY in the world, and that word democracy is what is changing the minds of Google, Twitter, Facebook, Uber etc…to start moving away from China and more into India.

India is also set to overtake the U.S. as the world's largest Facebook market by number of users before the end of this year, which already at over 135 million users, is the only country specific market in the world where Facebook is aspiring to have 1 billion users, nowhere else are they or can they even aspire for this guys. It was literally just a few months ago that Zuckerberg met with Modi to discuss the push forward of internet useage in India and has been in India yet again to push his ideas. Discussions are always continuing with the top web corporations and the politicians of India, to push forward Internet useage in the country.

India added 100 million new users to the Internet in 2015, taking the country to more than 400 million users -- more than there are residents of the US. But with another 800 million yet to be connected, the world's biggest tech companies are eager to be a part of India's consumer tech boom in the next few years. Between Google last month beginning its mission to hook up train stations around India with free Wi-Fi and Facebook's controversial Free Basics initiative, which will give limited e-services to the poor at no cost, expect the numbers to only accelerate. In 2015, smartphone sales in India eclipsed those in the US for the first time ever, according to Counterpoint Research. China remains the world's largest phone market, but it's nearing saturation point, with growth stalling in 2015 for the first time. The US is a similarly tough nut to crack, with 79 percent of people already owning smartphones, according to ComScore.

Due to these statistics and current initiatives and business projects taking place in this country, India is of course set to shortly become the largest population of web users in the world!

I realize guys that many of you may primarily be involved in .COM and you may ask that although India is rapidly becoming a massive user base in the online world, why would the users move to a cctld like .IN rather than .COM or another of the many new/old extensions? My belief is that .COM is becoming slightly saturated or which I why I chose .IN over .COM when concentrating on ROI.


Of course, I believe that .COM is still CURRENTLY king globally and will be king for a long long time, there is no denying that. I personally started off in domaining over 12 years ago with primarily .coms, .orgs and .nets. I now have no .coms in my portfolio and have also sold most of my .nets and .orgs too to generate enough funds to buy into .IN which I believe is the next big thing for sure! .Com is great for primarily international/USA traffic, but Google has a local search site for many individual countries, for example Google.ca for Canada, Google.fr for France & Google.co.uk for the UK. These local search engines tend to give priority to local domains and Google in India will tend to give priority for .IN extensions when end users are searching for specific items. Therefore IF any major corporation is interested in gaining traffic from INDIAN customers then they will need the .IN extension to further this cause and create a highly ranked online portal to their store/services through the Indian webspace, which now many of them are already doing. I know that algorithms are continually changing and take into account many more other factors than this, and I may not be completely correct in my understanding. But using the .IN extension to start operations in India is a growing market and many global/Indian corporations are already doing this. .IN is now the primary extension for India and is unbeatable in generating traffic for businesses through the web whom want to capitalize on India’s enormous population. 



Most companies based within India are using .IN sites as their primary websites and redirecting their .com sites to the .IN ones and having been doing so for many years now. Also, many international companies are already using .IN sites as their primary portals for Indian originated specific traffic and then transferring into their .com sites or even just using the .IN sites as their primary sites over there, built specifically for the Indian market. Most international companies use ccTLDs in this manner and they are not just bought as a defensive move to protect their trademark and name, although this is definitely also a major advantage of owning all important extensions of a brand in new major emerging markets. Also another great stat is that the IMF have concluded that the total size of the Indian economy is set to surpass that of Japan and Germany combined by 2019.

Again, why not .com for Indians? Well .com is still used by Indians and it always will be just as it is still used by Germans or the British. But INDIAN users do often prefer the .IN extension over .com, unless of course they are specifically looking for products or services that are based outside of India. This is similar to markets such as the UK in which .co.uk is the predominant extension used, German market where .de is used over .com unless looking for global services etc.....Yet India is even more nationalistic than most of these other countries and in a similar manner to China, Indians always prefer to use INDIAN identifiable services & options due to long established trust and pride in their country and this is exactly why the .IN extension is prime real estate for the Indian webspace. It is also the preferred extension that is being pushed by the Indian government and that is exactly why many are now investing in .IN names.



Guys, im sure you're pretty much up to date with the current marketplace anyway but yeah go ahead and check out the statistics for yourself in regards to India and i'm pretty sure that you'll agree with me when I say that it is going to blow up in a massive way! All of these stats that I have mentioned can be verified on many established global business/news sites with a simple google search.

There's literally $Billions currently being poured into the Indian Webspace and Indian Internet usage right now, every single western/global company is dying to get in and many Indian companies are racking up their arsenal as we speak. The newly formed government is extremely pro-digital and the word on the street is that they are going to quickly start easing out a lot of national policies, making it easier to carry out business/services online. This already occurred yesterday in the start up sector.

I'm not sure if you guys are aware of what occurred just over a decade ago in relation to the telecoms industry over there but it went absolutely crazy and led to a full on price war in relation to tariffs and mobile phone products, which led to India rapidly becoming the number two country of the highest users of mobile devices in the world (soon to become number one). Yet this time, the rate of growth is expected to be more than triple that in relation to web usage, smartphone adoption ect.... Extremely cheap 4G with subsidised smartphones, tablets is expected to be rolled out on a national scale in 2016 by major companies such as Reliance ect.....

The number of end users in India is already set to surpass the number in USA, and we've not even reached the quarter way point in terms of the size of population in India.

The major western corporates are already betting big on India and by the end of the year, it'll be far too late to get in on the game as many old school players would've already got a foothold on the major keywords and won't be letting go for spare change. I myself wish I had go in earlier on the .IN game. BUT there is still massive opportunity RIGHT NOW, as it is STILL a buyer’s market which I don’t believe will be the case in one years time!
And since the market is on the cusp of exploding in India and I know the potential worth of these names in a year or two time will be immense.



Guys, you have to realise that by 2018, India will have twice the number of Internet users as the US does and has already overtaken the US in terms of number of user at the end of last year. Of course the market will take a while to fully mature, but in sheer advertising potential alone, this is amazing! And plus the speed of adoption nowadays both in web services and ecommerce is incredibly fast!
India already at this moment in time has over 400 million internet users, which is nearly 17 times the full actual population of the country of Australia guys. And as I write this email this very moment, India is adding 1.25 millions internet users to the web every single week which is nearly 180,000 new unique users of the internet per day! By the end of today, another 180,000 users would've come online and have started searching for things on the web and the same will happening again tomorrow, and the day after and the day after that....ect..... Those figures are just too wild to ignore! Yes of course, all of these users are not mature users as in the west, they will not all buy lots of items on through the web, they may not all spend hours on the web every single day BUT these aspects are rapidly changing and these users are quickly changing their habits and many are starting to replicate our habits here in the west.

Once an Indian picks up a smartphone, they will never go back! I think that investors in the web game tend not to pay too much attention on new emerging markets in the beginning, always instead looking towards .com & the western markets which I believe have now started to slowly saturate in terms of growth. Why buy up in Beverly Hills when there is no further growth happening there? When instead we can look at a new neighbourhood that is growing beyond all expectations and will soon be the new Beverly Hills of the East! The time is now, the buyers market is now! I don’t think investors here should miss out on this chance! Obviously no one here will take this information as gospel, so therefore I request anyone whom finds all of this interesting, then please research into this for yourself and I am sure that you will find that adding some nice .ins into your portfolio NOW rather than later will be a good financial decision. B-)
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Interesting discussion folks...the value of .in/.co.in is directly tied to the buying power in India and the growth of ecommerce. When everything comes together - increase in broadband access, growth in internet usage, spending increases, change in user behavior (buying more online) , then it becomes second nature. It becomes a necessity. How does .in cctld fit in the equation, its when small/medium and large corporations operating in India and globally ramp up their online presence. Yes, they can use a .com but to target your products/services to India (specific), its a clear message to use .in extension.There is a list of .com keywords owned by large corporations out there, but to get those keywords you will be spending millions of dollars. Eventually you may want to acquire those, but you may want to start with .in keywords targeting your industry.

I always loved an old Heineken Ad which said "When you make a great beer, you don't have to make a lot of fuss" . After seeing the progression in usage and value of .com domain names since 1998, can tell you .in is on a similar path. So we don't need to make a lot of fuss...(unlike some of the newer gtlds which obviously have to make a lot of fuss) :)
 
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Very much agree with you LeDomain, not much fuss is needed as eventually .IN will rise as IT HAS TO RISE, the sheer size of India's population combined with rapid take up of broadband access will see to the fact that .IN will become one of the most popular cctlds on this planet.
 
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DEMOCRACY = CORUPTION

Democracy = The Power To Expose CORRUPTION, things in PUBLIC DOMAIN

Dictatorship = Cover up, things look all clean, while the facts is, the mess is suppresed & not available to you, us (PUBLIC) to discuss.
 
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Democracy = The Power To Expose CORRUPTION, things in PUBLIC DOMAIN

Dictatorship = Cover up, things look all clean, while the facts is, the mess is suppresed & not available to you, us (PUBLIC) to discuss.

i am not a fan of democratic regimes and neither of those dictatorships!

I prefer the Neo-Socialism, the man, the person has precedence over poilitic regime!
 
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I prefer the Neo-Socialism, the man, the person has precedence over poilitic regime!

If you mean freedom then I think Libertarianism is the proper word. Socialism leads to the opposite.
 
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had been regged prior to 2006 and reseller prices were already high, so started regging Indian domain names in 2011/12. It's been a long game and I sold virtually nothing for the first few years, but it's really only just started to kick off since mid 2015. This year sales have been steady at one or more a week, averaging about $100/sale for me (I sell wholesale to reseller).
Curious why after holding the names and waiting so long, you are selling wholesale instead of waiting a bit more and selling to end users?
 
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I have been investing in .in domains for 8 years. I can see the interest skyrocketing judging by the number of enquirers I receive
 
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Very good conversation going on. Thanks a lot to the author for such a long and heavy post on .in domains. Also happy to see different perceptions from different people. I would like to add few observations to this thread:

Few perceptions are right in past situations. But now things have got changed a lot and still changing more with new government in India. Make in India and Digital India have entire scope of business in India.

New government is encouraging a lot of startups who can comeup with new innovative ideas that would be really helpful in growing India's economy. They also have initiated pilot project of digiatlizing small scale business and increasing their business options in few areas. Also Indian economy is currently very strong when compared to the rest of the world. Now a days investments are happening huge in numbers compared to earlier in India.

With digital India programme people also realized the key role of having brand and value coming with the good domain name. Under awareness programme government started converting all their process / activities into online communication system first. In order to make this much more bigger they have started laying internet lines in Villages too with atleast 2gbps speed. So that products being produced in villages can be directly sold to the world. Like these many things are happening in India subject to online market.

By seeing with this just few things itself i strongly believe there is greater scope of increasing need of .in domains as India is wide range of cultures, languages, religions,etc.
 
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Even bigger is that the govt will indirectly fund 10,000 startups all across the country in the next two years.

http://10000startups.com/
 
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Thats great. Most things needed for growth are in place and with this new initiative by the government then India is ready for take off. The Israelis have a government fund just for start ups. And its yielding results already.
 
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IMO .IN/.CO.IN is currently one of the best investments in the "domainsphere". An extension that, apart from being the ccTLD for a country with almost one fifth of the world's population, can stand for many things (INternet and INfo are just the first two that come to my mind) and, for the creative people out there, are even extremely hack-friendly (take all the someth.in hacks). No reason not to get an .IN/.CO.IN ;)
 
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I find the Automotive Market is a great predictor of the overall economy in the country. In 2016 India is expected to be the 3rd largest in the world with around 4 million passenger vehicles. It is still quite behind US (around 17 million) and China (around 20 million). The trajectory for the Indian market is quite good and in 5 years we could be closing in quite a bit.

In the late 1990's in the US, not many believed in the Chinese auto market, at that time China was making about a million vehicles. In 2014 or so China became the largest market. The point being, we can't underestimate the momentum and growth that is possible when a 500 million people reach the middle class.

The domain market will track the Automotive market very closely in terms of domain valuations in my opinion. So hang in there folks..
 
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Well it's been a week of some very promising announcements. Alibaba which has been predicted to surpass Walmart as the world biggest retailer, this week announced that they will be entering the Indian ecommerce sector this year. The Andhra Pradesh state government has announced that it will be taking affordable and cost effective high speed fibre optic broadband to all households and businesses in the state by the end of this year, this will only encourage other states to do the same. Indian railways announced high-speed WiFi availability at all major stations this year.

And on top of all this good news, a top Nasscom official has stated that India will capture 20 per cent market share in Internet of Things (IoT), an emerging sector which would be worth $300 billion by 2020. A 20% global market share of this industry is massive! With all of this growth happening at such a rapid rate, interest in the .IN extension is picking up on an enormous scale with many companies now taking a big interest in setting up on the .IN extension. I and many other .IN portfolio holders are seeing many more enquiries coming through on a daily basis and it seems as if this momentum is picking up pace. India, the previously sleeping Tiger has now awakened and is rising to challenge the global order, and the .IN extension is riding on its back! It is going to be an exciting ride indeed! :)
 
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As per Registry.in, the current .in registrations are above 2 million. Obviously some ways to go to reach Top 10 cctlds or a Top 5. A trend have noticed in the last 3 months is that its getting tough to find good keyword domain names (one word or 2 word .in or .co.in), they are being picked up as drops or people are holding on for the future/developing.

Unlike many of the gtlds, cctlds don't need the hype for the most part, large country cctlds have enough market internally or global interest in the market. Its been 10 yrs since .in domains have been in the market and it has percolated enough in my opinion. The trajectory is definitely changing now, the only question is how rapidly .in registrations reach the 5 million mark, 10 million mark and so on, is it 5 yrs or 10 yrs.
 
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Anyone has the breakdown of the different tlds in the Indian market?
 
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Anyone has the breakdown of the different tlds in the Indian market?
Good question. I did a sampling some time ago, when there were about 1.5M domains registered.
It was roughly 1M .in and 500K .co.in, the rest scattered across the other third levels. Anyway it's clear that .in has taken over .co.in long ago.
 
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Good question. I did a sampling some time ago, when there were about 1.5M domains registered.
It was roughly 1M .in and 500K .co.in, the rest scattered across the other third levels. Anyway it's clear that .in has taken over .co.in long ago.
Thanks bro. Any idea of the number of .com used in India?
 
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I did a sampling some time ago, when there were about 1.5M domains registered

How did you know which names to check?
 
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Great share, thank you for the same. What is interesting to me its correcting its positions from
2013 --> 94
2014-->85
2015 --> 76

Author of the article stated the below details
"
Denmark topped the CPI, while North Korea and Somalia were the worst performer, earning the dubious distinction of being the most corrupt countries in the world. The United States earned a score of 76, while China fared slightly worse than India, receiving a 36.


India’s score remained unchanged from last year, but its overall position in the index improved notably compared to years past. Transparency International ranked the world’s largest democracy the 85th and 94th most corrupt country in the world in 2014 and 2013, respectively.

Some may see this as evidence of receding corruption in India. More likely, however, is that other nations have become comparatively more corrupt, improving India’s relative position in the rankings."


China is performing worser than India , however chinese domains are selling like hot cakes.. from domains invest point of view its already proven corruption is nothing to do with the success of domain investment to large extent offcourse its good to have corruption free and its further add to the investment friendly atmosphere what is interesting is at the speed the democracy nation is maturing and also India is relatively young country and compare to the most corruption free nations , Indian PM has identified the need and pushing "Digital India" to reduce the amount of corruption ..
Oh... I was hoping to find Nigeria as topping the list of corrupt countries in the world. :) LOL
 
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Finding it difficult to get a buyer for lll.in domain name for $300+
 
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Finding it difficult to get a buyer for lll.in domain name for $300+
You can start an auction just here on Namepros, and I'm sure the final price will be above $300 :)
 
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The problem for businesses in India is the mess with legislation across the states and nationwide, corruption, lack of infrastructure (third of country does not have electricity).

In short, it is not business friendly and hence the reason its per capita is 1/5 of China's. It might grow slightly better because of starting very low, but that might as well come to screeching halt.

Indian government does not have tools and means China has to overcome any issues, change direction, adapt.

While people outsource to India for some services (calls, accounting etc.), they don't take there any production. Even Bangladesh gets more of western production.
 
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