I have posted the same on my Forum one year ago. I decide to repost it in my blog since more and more non-Chinese speaker and looking for making deals with Chinese End Users.

Here I am not talking about Chinese IDN domain, or ccTLD .com.cn, .cn. My investment focus on .COM domains but have better value for End Users or Domainers from China.

Chinese is a very complex lauguage so please DO NOT put in money on this kind of domains after reading my posts. This is NOT a textbook for how to invest your money on Chinese User Targeted Doamins, but just share what are the points behind my deals, and share it with you for fun …

Before we started, we must know what is Chinese Pinyin

From wikipedia.org
Pinyin, more formally Hanyu Pinyin, is the most common Standard Mandarin romanization system in use. Hanyu means the Chinese language[1], and pinyin means “spell sound”, or the spelling of the sound.[1] the system was initially approved by the Chinese government on February 11, 1958 [2]. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as the international standard in 1979, and since then it has been adopted by many organizations worldwide. It is used to teach Chinese schoolchildren and foreign learners the standard pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese, to spell Chinese names in foreign publications and to enter Chinese characters on computers.

The same, Pinyin also used in Domains to enter the url with your browser. For example, zhongguo.com, is a very high value domain for Chinese, because of “zhongguo” is the Pinyin of “中国”, which is “China” in English.

As said above, Pinyin also used in Domains to enter the url with browser, so a domain with good combination of Pinyin is high valueable for Chinese.

For example, the domain “zhifubao.com” was drooped on Aug 2007 and backordered by Pool.com. There are more than 20 domainers raised bids and the winner’s bid as about USD10K. I don’t think any domainer or end user will pay such a big amount for this kind of domain unless he know Chinese well.

Zhifubao.com, which is consits of Pinyin “Zhi Fu Bao”, the Chinese pronunceation of “支付宝”, which is the brand of the leading local online payment system. Currently using domain for this online payment side is alipay.com because it is a member site of Alibaba.com group.

Now, you may find that some useless domains for you maybe is gold for Chinese. Everyday I spend some time to earch the dropped list for this kind of domains. I am luck to find 1 or 2 good Pinyin domains every month, won it at a relative low cost and sale it to Chinese for reasonable profit.

same as English Keywords domains, 2 words combination in right place have much high value than 3 words names, and I think same for all languages.

Crappy LLLL.COM? Maybe Top 4L domains in Chinese
We see many LLLL.Coms sold at high $xxx even low $x,xxx these days. They are valuable because of all letters are premium, and these 4 letters are acronyms of many good words, or with repeated letters very easy be remembered.

For example, bzzz.com sold at $1,120 and srsr.com sold at $461 on Namejet.com recently, and many nice LLLL.com domains sold at $xxx on Sedo, domain forums… everyday.

But what about those domains with crappy letters?
Any value for a 4L domain consist of j, q, x, k ? It is easy to find lots of this kind of low quality domains asking $18-$30 on many forums…. And looks the price is actually decreasing

Here are 2 domains I bought GJZQ.COM, and CFZG.COM. Why I spend money on these kind of domains you even don’t want to spend $15 on them?

OK, let’s see what is the answer behind:
GJZQ is the acronym of “Guo Ji Zheng Quan”, which means “International Securities” in English
CFZG is the acronym of “Cai Fu Zhong Guo”, which means “Fortune China”

I am sure both of them can be sold at a good price to Chinese end user soon future.

Not as English domains which you can find what is stand for through acronyms.thefreedictionary.com, there has NO this kind of site provide what stands for in Chinese. So you must try to find the meaning of a crappy 4L.com by youself, and you must know Chinese well if you want to try

And plz keep in mind that NOT every crappy 4L.com domain has some good meaning in Chinese Pinyin. for example, V is not a letter in Chinese Pinyin system, so domain as kvjv doesn’t has Chinese special meaning at all.

Numeric domains in China
Go to Alexa and check global top 100 sites, you will find there are only 3 sites with Numeric domain, and 2 of them are from China which are 163.com and ku6.com (The 3rd is fc2.com from Japan)

But if you have a look at the Top 100 sites in China, there have 16 sites in top100 use Numeric domains, include pure Numbers, such as 163.com, 17173.com, and letter+number combination, such as 51job.com, ku6.com.

I think Chinese is the No. 1 coutry which loves Numeric domains. I am not knowledgeable to tell you the full story of why but at least there are 2 reasons I know
- All numbers ( 0 - 9 ) are Monosyllabic in Chinese, which make Numbers are more readable in Chinese than English
- Some numbers have same or similar pronumceation with other Character(s), so special meaning are given to those numbers in Chinese

Generally, numbers are devided into good or bad group in Chinese based on the pronounceations

Good Numbers:
- 8 Similar pronounceation to “Fa” which Means “be rich”, “make big money” in Chinese. Also has the same pronounceation as “Bar”, so “Car8″ also means “Car Club” in Chinese
- 6 Means “Good Luck” in Chines. I don’t know why “6″ is luck but just everybody thinks so. However this is not related to pronounceation
- 9 Pronunceation is “Jiu”, which means “for ever”, so be used for marrige/dating site frequently
- 3 Means “Growth” or “Reproduction” because of similar pronunceation.
- 5 Pronunceation is “Wu”, which is same to another Character “屋” (House in English), and similiar to “Wo” which is “I” (or Me) in English

Bad Numbers:
- 4 is the worst number in Chinese because of have the very similar Pronunceation to “Death”
- 7 is a Semi-good number because of Pronunced like “Worse”, but also like the Pronunceation of “Go” in Chinese. So depends on how you use it in Domain.

Other numbers (0, 1, 2) are no special meaning in most situation.

Since 4N.coms are gone already and expensive now, many 5N.coms are buy and sell between chinese users. Obviously, Numeric domains include 4 should be avoid if your target marketing is Chinese

More complex, Numbers combinations also have different meaning in Chinese, which same based on the pronunceations.
For example, 51 means “I need“, 17 means “Go together”, 52 menas “I love”, 520 means “I love You”… and so on.

There are hundres different combinations so not possible to list all of them. If you really interested in this, plz learn Chinese