Of dual personality domains –- sequel — The beauty
Kassey Lee uncovers more “dual personality” domains that mean something in multiple languages.
Domain investing as a hobby is fun. I enjoy the thrill of finding tiny gold nuggets in the garbage dump of expiring domains. I also enjoy learning fresh things in the course of my domain research, and one of them is the dual personality feature.
In my last article on dual personality domains, I mentioned OK.cn and Alibaba.com being Chinese and English. Today I’ll introduce two domains which also display dual personalities: Danke.com (Chinese/German) and Mogu.com (Chinese/Japanese).
Danke.com may mean “thank-you” to a German speaker, but to a Chinese speaker it is Pinyin for 蛋壳 (eggshell) or 弹壳 (ammunition case). The domain was registered in 1997 and had German contents in the early days. In 2003, the website was gone and the domain remained inactive for many years.
In 2015, Jing GAO founded Danke Gongyu (蛋壳公寓=eggshell apartments) to provide rental apartments to young city dwellers by leveraging the internet and the popular “sharing economy” concept. The corporate domain was DankeGongyu.com. The idea took off and, within a few years, Danke became a unicorn. Gao also upgraded the corporate domain to Danke.com.
Mogu.com may mean もぐ (mumble) to a Japanese speaker, but to a Chinese speaker it is Pinyin for 蘑菇 (mushroom). In 1998, it was a Japanese ecommerce website called Mogu Mogu Town. In 2000, Japanese entrepreneur Ishida created a brand of Styrofoam-based pillows called Mogu and purchased the matching domain Mogu.com. The product was a runaway success but in 2005 the firm went bankrupt. The website was shut down and Mogu.com remained inactive for many years.
In 2011, three Chinese engineers established Mogu as a fashion-focused ecommerce platform using the domain Mogujie.com. Their idea worked and in 2018 the startup was even listed on NYSE. The corporate domain was also upgraded to Mogu.com.
These two stories show dual personality domains are versatile and such feature adds to value of a domain.
