Not lose your shirt investing in domain names for China — How to

Video explains what makes domains good — and bad — for the Chinese market.

Allegravita, a consultancy for doing business in China that has worked with a number of domain name firms, has published three info-packed sessions from the DomainFest Asia conference held in September.

The firm has packaged them together as a “Boot Camp” on the Chinese domain name market, and one video in particular is worth watching for any domainer thinking regarding investing in domains that might appeal to the Chinese.

The Boot Camp for Domain Name Investors discusses why certain domain names have value to the Chinese.

The first 25 minutes provide a good overview of the Chinese language(s) and text input, and the challenges it brings. The video then discusses why certain domain names are more valuable to the Chinese than others, but also how it can be very difficult to ascertain values.

In some cases, longer domain name can be better than shorter. But really short domains can be even better.

Allegravita founder Simon Cousins explains how a second level domain name like BJYLZXW could actually be a great second level domain name. Names like this can have great semantic meanings.

He also explains something that’s a bit of a mystery to Westerners: why short domains with certain vowels are worth less to the Chinese, but ones with “rare” characters in English can have more value.

One slide explains, “The Pinyin of a Chinese character could start with anything other than o, i, u, and v. Even letters rarely used in English, like x and z, appear regularly in Chinese Pinyin.”

When it comes to numbers, valuable combinations might represent phone numbers and area codes. Some numbers can also be puns.

Cousins also explains the the biggest threat to domains in China. It’s probably not what you think.

You might also listen to a crash course podcast with Simon Cousins I recorded last year.

I’ve embedded the boot camp video below, and you can view a number of here.