China's Internet Censorship - How will it impact on Domain Sales?

[deez007]

Hey Folks

Just came across this today...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-china-censoring-internet-20160523-story.html

It has introduced new rules restricting foreign companies from publishing online content and proposed tighter rules requiring websites to register domain names with the government.

Apple was an early victim, announcing in April that its iTunes Movies and iBooks services were no longer available in China, six months after their launch here (though shortly after it announced a $1 billion investment in a Chinese car service).

As it pursues a broad crackdown on free speech and civil society, China has tightened the screws on virtual private network (VPN) providers that allow people to tunnel under the Firewall.

What do you guys think...what sort of impact could this have on Domain sales?

 

[dordomai]

I don't think you are aware of the business circles that sell whole websites instead of domain names on a mass scale.

You mean blog spam networks? Why would a business want to be associated with 'mass scale website production'?

If you were you would understand the value of "exact match" domains, especially in an extension that is about to beat .org, and than .net in registrations.

Reality check 1#: .TK is one of the 'most successful' extensions on earth based on these metrics. Registration volume alone tells us very little about what is going on. What matters is who is registering these domains and why.

The majority of registrations that we see today are domainers buying them hoping to resell them at a profit. Not end-users and the main reason for buying is the hype that some are believing and the low price which is less than $0.2 at the moment. Not because there is massive development happening on large scale.

People like you are buying large volumes of it that is why it appears to be successful.

Every time you guys say Daniel Negari can't do it and that the extension will flop during the next renewal cycle, he pulls a rabbit out of a hat again and again.

Reality check 2#: The registry had to run a birthday promotion and give away millions of domains at $0.01 to cover up the fact that there were mass drops of the $1 registrations from the last year. The promotion was targeted towards domainers not end-users. Presumably because end-users weren't interested in grabbing .xyz