touchring said:
It's better to avoid .cn.
abc.cn are mostly speculative and have almost no local resale market (only foreigners, e.g. on dnf, trade in them), with the exception of probably trademark domains, where the objective is to sell it back to the trademark owner, e.g. google.cn and google.com.cn were sold back to Google for 1 million yuan.
.com rules in China - the top 50 websites in China are virtually .coms.
That's taking things at a very shallow/surfacial level, ring. Web addresses exist for reasons other than resale, the first and foremost of them is to reflect what the site content carries.
In the first innings of the Internet, .COM was meant to signify "we have a website on the Internet".
We are now in the second innings of the Internet, a far deeper and much more complex web that requires new addressing options that say more than just "we have a website on the Internet".
Of course, if a developer were to invest millions of dollars into a website, chances are it will be a .COM eg. baidu.com. At the first level of ecommerce activation, that may be the sensible thing to do.
When you start getting down to 2nd level engagement opportunities, then a ccTLD may serve a nice tactical role to supplement the .COM mothership. Don't forget that getting a blue-chip generic catch-all .COM can be a ridiculously expensive exercise, sometimes requiring you buy out the company behind the name. These "extension" options are generally much more feasible and practical at the ccTLD level.
Having said that, the fast emerging new space sprouting around old and aging addresses like .COM can only serve to remould people's perspective about the Internet, and web addresses as a whole. .COM may be preferred, but no longer a do-or-die name to have, especial
generic names. Generic names mean stiff all to companies who would rather invest their precious marketing dollars into their own brand names rather than build the category for competitors, eg Google, Microsoft.
If you thought "type-in" was a big thing and a key source of traffic, you got to be joking. I've personally seen logs of sites generate millions of uniques through marketing campaigns, sites driven by branding of company names rather than category "descriptors" aka generic names.
I digress, but you get my drift on .CN's value proposition.