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“Go East, Young Man!” Landrush is Very Strong!

February 25th, 2008

DotAsia’s First Day of Landrush
By Chuck Kisselburg

I recently had a brief chat with Edmon Chung, CEO of DotAsia regarding DotAsia’s first day of Landrush. There was no doubt why Edmon was upbeat as DotAsia reported 266,663 applications received on the first day of DotAsia’s Landrush program. 266,663!!!! That is double what Edmon was expecting! This brings the total of applications received for domain names since Pre-Sunrise, Sunrise, the Pioneer Programs and the first day of Landrush up to 298,861 applications received.

Since fall of last year I have been hearing a small but persistent undercurrent from the domainer community that the domains will mainly be from North America and Europe, thus “basically” nullifying the true reason of DotAsia; being a gTLD that will happen to foster business and development within the rather expansive and diverse Asian region. While 40% came from North America and 24% came from Europe, over 35% of the applications came from Asia. Rough calculations show that over 93,000 applications were received from Asia alone – ON THE FIRST DAY! With respect to that small amount of skepticism, my thought is imagine the number of Asia-region-based applications that would have arrived had IDNs been in use. As mentioned in a previous blog post of mine, “.asia” IS a social networking goldmine; especially with the eventual rollout of IDNs.

So my congratulations to continued success of the DotAsia team. You can read more about DotAsia’s first day of Landrush through their recent press release.

Entry Filed under: Site News, TLDs, domaining, Community, ICANN Community