Vietnam and .vn extension

[Amphibia07]

Is anyone registering .vn? What's your view of the extension - next .cn and .in, plateuing, post peak?

Vietnam is an emerging market, nearly 100mn population. Looking from traffic stats to registrars you can see an increase in traffic that now even puts Vietnam in Top 5 for NameCheap, as an example. 20% growth. Of course, a large number of visits are from Vietnam based domainers registering .com, .in and similar, but how popular do you think .vn itself is? There must be a lot of companies looking to establish presence as Vietnam is slowly opening to outside investment and many global brands will be looking to enter the market.

Where are you registering .vn now?

 

[GeorgeQuang]

1> In VietNam, we prefer using .com than .vn or .com.vn.
2> If you invest in VietNamese ccTLD, you must invest in both .vn and .com.vn, because Vietnamese prefer to reg a domain .vn or .com.vn if the .com version and one of those ccTLD are taken than buying one from domainer.
3 > Vietnam has a young population, but 70% of us don't use English daily, which mean we often using Vietnamese to reg a domain, not English.
4> The Vietnamese's average income is just 2000 USD per year, so that people are willing to pay a small amount of money for having a domain name.
5> I'm Vietnamese, but i have not invested in Viet Name ccTLD yet.

 

[Amphibia07]

Thank you, this is very useful insight! I was thinking of looking for one/ two word domains in the adjective+product fashion (eg smart water) that are representing brands elsewhere that are still free to reg in Vietnam. So the audience for domain purchases would not be Vietnamese, but large companies entering Vietnam.

But looking at your post and given .com popularity I am beginning to reconsider this. I looked up a few domains, pepsi(dot)vn, aquafina(dot)vn, and both seem to be owned by domainers. I suppose if Pepsi didn't bother to buy/chase these, then .com should work just as well. Coke, on the other hand, seems to have .vn domains, but they point back to .com

How much do you pay to register .vn?

 

[GeorgeQuang]

$12-15$ /year