.JP: Vindication on the Horizon?
About a year ago, I was receiving a lot of reasonable criticism about my .JP domain name buying binge. The criticism was justified; .JP domains are some of the most expensive out there @ about $100 per name per year, and the fact that .JP domain owners were (and still are) required to have a Japanese snail mail address didn't help.
Certain Internet savvy folks living in Japan also speculated that the .JP name space would fail because .CO.JP was the extension of choice for some of the world's best known brands (a good example of this is microsoft.co.jp which resolves to MS's Japanese language homepage. MS also owns microsoft.jp but they haven't even bothered to setup any kind of domain forwarding for this name!) It was assumed that everyone would simply follow the lead of the MS's of the world and favor .CO.JP over .JP. Not me. In the domain game, shorter names are invariably more desirable than longer ones, and my thinking was that this would apply to domain extensions as well. I was willing to bet that--in the long term--.JP would eventually triumph over the longer and less efficient .CO.JP.
Well, according to the news Japan Registry Services, I may be proven right after all.
Though I still have a lot of faith in the .JP name space, I have recently cancelled a number of .JP domain names I was holding. I am still holding onto a select group of exceptionally strong keyword .JP domains like:
Buying.jp
Cellular.jp
Debt.jp
Feet.jp
Pills.jp
PrimeRate.jp
Rates.jp
The above names are generating enough traffic to pay for themselves so I can keep them without losing my shirt. The domains I ended up canceling were also great names but the mediocre traffic they were generating wasn't enough to justify the annual fees I'd need to cough-up in order to hang onto them, so they had to get cut!
.JP will continue to grow in lock step with the growth of the Internet in general; the name space has a lot going for it: Japan is a very strong, technology driven economy with some of the best educated people in the world. Furthermore, new registrars are offering creative (and legal) ways around the snail mail address requirement, while at the same time lowering the cost of ownership. I think we'll see some very exciting .JP activity in the near future.
Certain Internet savvy folks living in Japan also speculated that the .JP name space would fail because .CO.JP was the extension of choice for some of the world's best known brands (a good example of this is microsoft.co.jp which resolves to MS's Japanese language homepage. MS also owns microsoft.jp but they haven't even bothered to setup any kind of domain forwarding for this name!) It was assumed that everyone would simply follow the lead of the MS's of the world and favor .CO.JP over .JP. Not me. In the domain game, shorter names are invariably more desirable than longer ones, and my thinking was that this would apply to domain extensions as well. I was willing to bet that--in the long term--.JP would eventually triumph over the longer and less efficient .CO.JP.
Well, according to the news Japan Registry Services, I may be proven right after all.
Though I still have a lot of faith in the .JP name space, I have recently cancelled a number of .JP domain names I was holding. I am still holding onto a select group of exceptionally strong keyword .JP domains like:
Buying.jp
Cellular.jp
Debt.jp
Feet.jp
Pills.jp
PrimeRate.jp
Rates.jp
The above names are generating enough traffic to pay for themselves so I can keep them without losing my shirt. The domains I ended up canceling were also great names but the mediocre traffic they were generating wasn't enough to justify the annual fees I'd need to cough-up in order to hang onto them, so they had to get cut!
.JP will continue to grow in lock step with the growth of the Internet in general; the name space has a lot going for it: Japan is a very strong, technology driven economy with some of the best educated people in the world. Furthermore, new registrars are offering creative (and legal) ways around the snail mail address requirement, while at the same time lowering the cost of ownership. I think we'll see some very exciting .JP activity in the near future.
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posted by Steve Brown | Thursday, March 17, 2005
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