Daily Poll: Will the Chinese Domain Market Rebound?

A few years ago, the Chinese market was on fire. “CHiPs” (Chinese premium domain names) sold for huge amounts of money. Numeric domain names appreciated even more, and people were registering somewhat nonsensical domain names (7, 8, and 9 numbers) because they speculated the China-based domain name buyers would buy them and drive the values up.

Over the last couple of years, the Chinese domain market has faltered a bit. Numeric and 3-4 letter domain names still sell for a considerable amount of money, but they remain off the high water mark set when the Chinese domain market was in its heyday.

Today’s poll question: Will the Chinese Domain Market Rebound? You are invited to vote in the poll below and are welcome to share additional thoughts in the comment section.


Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

15 COMMENTS

  1. I do not own any, i sold them all for small losses…but Yes it will rebound like all Chinese investments…
    They love to drive prices down to the ground and bring them back up!!!

  2. I don’t think so. The Chinese are just looking for a place to put there money where they can sell higher later on. They realized the kind of domains they were buying couldn’t be continuously flipped so they moved on to crypto. once crypto train runs out of steam, they’ll move somewhere else.

  3. Is this a joke?

    The Chinese don’t care about domains, never did, as JZ stated they were moving money, or finding ways around it.

    They are locusts they found finite supply and demand in short names, and created a market, and I thank them for it everyday I drive my Tesla.

    I seear earlier in the year I actually printed off all these 4L I had collected over the years for $10-100, and said what am I going to do with these ones that end in Q X Z etc… thankfully they didn’t want the ones with A or E or I , so I got rid of them between $1700-$2400 from sept to dec.

    Thank you communism

  4. I think the poll question should be “Will the CHiPs market rebound.”

    In my opinion, the overall Chinese market for typical Premium Domains was much higher in 2017 than in previous years (removing CHiPs from the equation.) While that news is not impactful to large CHiP portfolios and may not be as noticeable as large CHiP sales, it is great news for the average domain investor who has invested in quality domains. China is a huge market and continues to be responsible for more and more end user sales of Premium Domains.

  5. I don’t think the Chinese market was ever a fad. Yes, there was a time when the Chinese market was over-inflated because everyone had money and was excited about the investment opps. The Chinese are investors – it’s in their nature.

    But now the market has settled so I think there is stability. And then when you consider China, their population, and their growing Internet presence I can only be bullish on them.

    My point is don’t be short-sighted; look beyond the domain market. Look at their Internet usage. Look at how many new websites China is building everyday. What do you need for websites? Yes, domains!

    Do I think Chinese CHIPs can go back up? Yes, but I think it’ll be more of a gradual process. The Chinese are still buying, but very quietly.

    Just my opinion.

  6. This article shows how little people in this industry actually know about the domain market. Everyone is a homemade expert.

    CHIPS were money laundering vehicles.

  7. Once they finished buying all the 2/3Ls , they will go after every damn 4Ls

    They already have all the NNNNs

    They have lots of corrupted money and they need to do their Laundering.

    They have almost finished buying all the real estate on the west coast …so what next?

  8. China population 1,412,858,279 The state will recognise the cash cow this will be a competitive Baidu. Domain assets are the same as Google in 2000 WTF has this to do with chips ? You have hindsight ? two letter domains are finite what does that leave ?

  9. There are 6000 new startups founded in China every single DAY folks, do the math . The Chinese domain market was about speculation and it was about ownership of key assets. Money is cheap in China and they just print it, devalue their currency and buy asset with it. Just the way the Japanese did it in the 80’s until the bubble bursted. Difference between China and Japan ist that China has real underlying growth in the real economy and not just speculative growth like in 80’s Japan. Companies like JD.com and Bailian grabbed 2-letter .com domains, Thousands of Chinese companies are running their websites on 3-letter .com’s, 3-number .com’s or 4 and 5 number .com’s.
    4-letter CHIPS was speculation, I agree. They invented it but with Cryptos (especially NEO which is the Chinese Ethereum they no longer need to trade these 4-letters.
    But make no mistake, Chinese companies will continue to buy up the prime digital real estate in the future.

    • Your better than this “they just print it” lose the software anchor baggage you never put it in your head, other than that spot on.

    • OK in reality it is a little bit more complicated of course. First they (the PBOC) “print it” (they create RMB’s electronically) then they distribute it to commercial chinese banks. These banks then buy US paper (T-Bills), effectively exchanging RMB into USD, then pledge the bills to the PBOC as collateral for new loans. Then they use these loans to buy up foreign assets. Thereby they devalue their currency, making their products cheaper for the rest of the world to buy, and they acquire hard key assets around the world with fiat at the same time. Of course domains are just a small-change part of that deal, more or less a random consequence. The real trade is in commerical real estate and infrastructural projects like airports and harbors.

    • Agree nothing unusual other then the state leveraging the machine that is China plc. as you know printing/borrowing vat sums of money leads to devaluation/ long term problems Japan & poss Trump strategy. I would be very interesting to see the internally controlled Chinese centric state develop a crypto/blockchain model that might expand into China’s Asian / African satraps !! Liking the fact that Cyber/Crypto will become universal generic terms CyberSuo CryptoHuobi ? “Time is information we don’t have” 🙂

  10. Yes, it already started in the 4th quarter of 2017.
    They are more about buying quality this time around though, rather than quantity.
    The chinese domain market never really went away, it just consolidated.
    Just like the crypto-currency market is doing right now.
    Have to weed out the scammers before you can move forward.

  11. Excellent subject and excellent comments. The only thing I think I can add is my sense that we will see continued cross-culturalization in the coming years, with Chinese companies using and Chinese investors more interested in the kinds of domains which have traditionally sold well in the west, while western companies which do business with Chinese businesses or consumers will increasingly make use, in their marketing strategies, of the kinds of domains which are popular and considered prestigious in China. The common thread will be the continued growth of the global interconnectedness which is the Internet revolution, coupled with the growing recognition by businesses around the world of the power and value of great domain names.

  12. My thoughts: If they do rebound, it will be a short/small window of pump and dump like the last CHIP trend, leaving the people holding the bags that got in too late on the higher end of them arc with a loss.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Recent Posts

Squadhelp Adds Escrow.com as a Payment Option

1
Squadhelp has added Escrow.com as a payment option for buyers. The addition of the Escrow.com option was shared by ARIYAS on X this morning: 👍...

Some Thoughts on .AI Domain Names

14
There is no question that .AI domain names have become a hot topic of late. With considerable amounts of venture funding flowing into AI...

Handoff to Dan on Imported Leads Can be Confusing

0
I've been using the lead import option at Dan.com more regularly. Although the 5% commission is not ideal, transactions tend to move more quickly...

ArtificialIntelligence.com Goes Up for Sale

11
I tried to buy the ArtificialIntelligence.com domain name multiple times over the last 10 years. The emails I sent to the registrant went unanswered,...

EU Gives More IP Protection to Food & Drink Producers

0
Did you know that some well-known food and drink varieties are protected intellectual property regulations? Popular types of drinks and foods that are protected...