Larry Fischer over at DirectNavigation.com writes:
Here’s a no brainer. In China, Microsoft has bought 2 short domains, W.cn and 9.cn and set them up so that users can access the Microsoft site by typing in the shorter domain name. Previously Google did the exact same thing with G.cn. The article notes that others may follow and single letter domains will only rise in value. No kidding. As I previously said, an auction of single letter .com’s will eventually bring millions of dollars. If such an auction was held today, I think it could fetch the highest prices ever for domain names. For complete story click here
Some one-letter .com domains:
X.com (Owned by ebay/paypal, x.com history)
Q.com (Owned by QWest)
Z.com (Owned by Nissan, I will never buy one, they don’t even deserve a link)
We always hear the comparison of domains to real estate however the other comparison I heard many years ago from a fellow domainer is that domains are like collectibles. If one can collect cards or memorabilia one should be able to collect domains. Is it any wonder that many in the domain space are people with prior collectible interests? In Rick’s house, in the living room, there’s a jar full of hotel keys from his salesmanship/tradeshows days. Another highly successful domainer started first collecting sports cards, and yet another started collecting watches. Why not collect domains for their rarity/scarcity value? And if this is acceptable (as it should) then it is essentially a bona fide use of a domain and should hold against trademark owners. If the world was as it should be..
In any event, short domain names = $$$. Majority of one-letter domains are still held by ICANN. More about it here.
Big firms have realized that Chinese users do not want (or not able) to type English language domain names. This is why so many big Chinese websites use numbers rather than English letters.
The message is clear - users want domains in their own language.
ICANN do hold most of the ASCII single characters - but not those in other languages