Today I was reading an article about the new dotAsia domains in the South China Morning Post, where they announced that next week the dotAsia registry will go live. Spill Group Asia, however, already managed to get several of the best game-related names. Among others game.asia and games.asia, and both sites went live today! The current sites will be improved over the next couple of weeks and should become top destinations for online game players in Asia. I typed in several other .asia domains today, and it seems we are one of the first companies that went live on this top-level domain (or maybe even the very first!).
I was amazed to see that over 500,000 applications were filed for dotAsia domain names already, with 45,000 domains that received multiple applications. Some of the most sought-after names were buy.asia (more than 400 applicants), hot.asia, gold.asia, fun.asia, girl.asia, and of course sex.asia. According to the CEO of a leading domain-name acquisition firm “The .asia names have limitless potential. With over 510 million people online in the Asia-Pacific region, it’s the fastest-growing audience in the world.” I am therefore very happy that we managed to obtain these names, and that we can now start building great sites there.
Some domain names are already being auctioned, and I am surprised at the high prices that they fetch. For a domain like ace.asia a total price of more than USD 20,000 was paid, and mediaworld.asia went for over USD 10,000. Today bingo.asia and dating.asia will be auctioned off, giving an indication of the potential value of game.asia and games.asia. We will probably never sell these names, but it’s always nice to know 🙂