Are firms flocking to the .ltd domain extension?
How the .LTD “corporate identifier” domain is resonating with Chinese firms.
I was reading Chinese domain news the other day and the top level domain .ltd was mentioned, so I did a little bit of study on this extension.
On the surface, the extension makes sense since many firms in China and other countries have “Co., Ltd” or simply “Ltd” in their names. Also, .ltd domains are very affordable to own – costing less than $10 to register one.
To find such domains adopted by end users, you can use the search term site:ext where ext is the name of a domain extension. Entering site:ltd into Baidu search returned 334,000 results counting many Chinese firms such as TYmetro.ltd (road infrastructure), Max.ltd (domain registrar), and IIM.ltd (robotics).
Still, data provided by Namestat.org does not look very rosy. As stated by the site, the .ltd extension was launched in 2016 and most buyers come from China. Registrations peaked at 655,000 in 2018 and have been declining since then. Right now, the number is regarding 104,000. See the chart below taken from the site.
Noted sales of .ltd domains have been few and far between. Namebio lists only 8 transactions, as shown below.
| Domain | Price | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Co.ltd | $115,000 | 2016 |
| Home.ltd | $2,300 | 2017 |
| 1000miglia.ltd | $500 | 2018 |
| Millemiglia.ltd | $500 | 2018 |
| Scarf.ltd | $450 | 2017 |
| Law.ltd | $275 | 2017 |
| HDbank.ltd | $199 | 2018 |
| Anpaper.ltd | $199 | 2018 |
In short, do your research if you are interested in investing in this domain extension.
