.in My recent trip to India - .IN Usage

[LeDomain]

Was in India last few weeks and as a true domainer/developer, ended up shooting pictures of .IN usage. This has been an interesting journey since 2005 when .IN was introduced to the public. The growth has been organic (to say the least) but my recent visit showed a substantial change from just a year ago. I was able to capture some newspaper ads and roadside banners in Chennai and Kochi .

Summary:
- .IN banners are easily spotted this time around in both cities
- Everyday newspaper ads with .in and somedays .in dominated the big banners
- .in had much better looking domains than .com
- An estimate would be 60:40 in favor of .in today, a few years ago it was 80:20 .com . Its headed to 80:20 .in very soon in my opinion
- English language keywords and acronyms are quite popular.
- Car companies and real estate business are biggest advertisers
- Some of India's largest companies continue to use .co.in and advertise them regularly
- There is also a need for .org.in for non profits
- Government and universities regularly advertise gov.in and ac.in websites
- The eyeballs that .in domains receive today are probably already huge considering India's population. More companies moving online and ecommerce picking up. The future of .in is clearly on an upward trend with bigger money flowing in. The next decade this is going to be the story.

Check out the attached powerpoint to view all the ads I captured.

There is nothing like Real Usage and Real Need in the Market for domains and that is the story my friends.

Note: I have been investor in .com since 1998 and .in/.co.in since 2005 .

 

[LeDomain]

Great Post! Nice efforts , and great points there. Keep up the good work! Would be nice to have some info of what are the .IN prices that had been sold to end users.

Domains that have been sold publicly can be seen on Namebio.com or other similar sites. There have been some private sales - one that Sedo had over $100k and others that I can't confirm. Personally I would recommend looking at prices for comparable .co.uk , .de and .ca and price your .in or .co.in domains accordingly.

Eventually India would have a larger market for most products than UK, Germany or Canada, but there is a learning curve for end users (Big and small companies) with their domain name strategy,

 

[Black Sun]

There are few aspects of India's internet that are key to increased domain pricing and recognition of Category Killer domains. I do believe it is headed that way.

- Always ON High speed internet connections are still around 20 million . The large numbers that are reported (300 million) have access to internet but don't have unlimited access at high speeds (atlhough Reliance and others are now rolling them out). The same goes with Internet at Home, numbers will only grow dramatically from current levels

- e-Commerce in India is still at a very early stage, quite similar to late 90's here in the US. Amazon, Flipkart and many small business are obviously shaking things up and soon we can expect a hypercompetitive ecommerce market. Many exact matching domains (EMD) are being used - Tyres.in , Tyres.co.in, TyreExpress.co.in for example. When the big established business see increased competition, they will be looking at Category Killer domains more seriously.

- Google adwords would be a key indicator of trends. Increased competition will drive companies to increase bids on "keywords", which in turn will drive them to category killer domains or exact match domains

Again these are my opinions based on past history of internet growth in the US. India is just taking a bit longer to get there.

Great analysis and insight. Could you please enlighten me about "Exact Matching Domains" & "Category Killer Domains" ? (since I am a beginner and not acquainted with much of the sophisticated domaining terminology) What are these actually ?

Thanks

 

[Mr. Deleted]

Great analysis and insight. Could you please enlighten me about "Exact Matching Domains" & "Category Killer Domains" ? (since I am a beginner and not acquainted with much of the sophisticated domaining terminology) What are these actually ?

Thanks

Exact match is terms that people search for on google, like "Amish recipes" and a category killer would be a name like diamonds.com that would be a little doubt about what the visitor wants to buy.

 

[LeDomain]

Exact match is terms that people search for on google, like "Amish recipes" and a category killer would be a name like diamonds.com that would be a little doubt about what the visitor wants to buy.

And I would add to look at India specific Words and Search Phrases for Exact matching domains. There are some English words that are used differently in India, so I would look that as well. There are many common categories across the board whether its India, US or UK etc, again there are categories specifically that have huge markets in India, so suggest looking at them as well (for category killer domains). As long as the market for the product or service category is huge, the domain name prices will reflect that in my opinion as the market matures.