Will .Africa Go the .Asia Way?

[elevatoria]

As for me I am ready to register business.africa, trade.africa, market.africa, markets.africa, buy.africa, explore.africa, culture.africa and more. The extension will give opportunities to some and losses to some. Let's forget wether the successful or not all I know is, it is a good development to Africans. Cheers

 

[DomainScoop.Com]

.afria will go the way .asia .

BIG FAIL!

 

[elevatoria]

It's interesting to note that most African TLDs are underutilized. .za is the only major extension, a few others are doing okay but registration numbers are not very high (compared to European extensions for example).
Quite a few African extensions have just a few hundreds registrations, sometimes even less than one hundred if you look at the poorer countries like Chad.

Does not mean there is a market for .africa: imo it suffers from the same relevancy problem as .asia as it covers a large territory with little pan-continental sentiment. But people like to dream

You are rightly said. But supposing application for .ng is given to Nigeria instead of .com.ng; I believe the whole world will embrace the extension because of the usefulness of that .ng as it can go with so many generics like wi.ng, buyi.ng, clothi.ng selli.ng etc. But the extension given to africa are mostly useless to other world and more so that african nations are not so much internet inclined.
Cheers.

 

[BladeMaster]

It will be a failure than .Asia

If you look at the stats of internet user and domainers, majority from Asia rather than Africa. So i don't expect it will be successful. Even the domainers would avoid .Africa with the experience gained through the launch of .Asia

Just my 0.02 opinion

 

[amplify]

Ehhh, I have to admit when I made the purchase of DJW.net from BuyDomains, I noticed DJW.asia for sale as well. I asked the price and it was $400. I attempted to talk them down, but it was a private seller. I was about to make the purchase, for my .asia travels (I plan to visit every Asia country and have been to quite a few already) and blog about site seeing spots and "sight seeing" spots. However, $400 was too much to purchase my initials in .asia and decided to just do it on DJW.net as a noindex sub-blog. That was the slightest value that I have seen in .asia.

For .africa, DJW will not be visiting unless one day I want to go on a safari or something. But who needs that when you can see wild monkeys run around in the streets in Asia?

As far as having .Africa, only 10% natively speak English or use it as a secondary language. It'll be hard to target the 3000+ languages used in Africa with the 1.1 billion people. (And of them, who has internet access?)

Whereas out of 3.9 billion people in Asia, 1.4 billion speak English fluently or as a second language (35%) and are "connected".

Though, where Asia failed I believe is that Asian countries have strong pride. Natively, they will speak their official language and thus most likely use their own ccTLD's instead of uniting as one.

.Africa will fail with both language barrier, the constant battles between countries and lack of connectivity though.

If you do go out and register .Africa go for all languages of one product (games.africa, Afrikaans: speletjies.africa) and you may have a higher chance of succeeding, once they have computers ... that support Flash ... and internet.

I foresee .africa falling on its face quicker than .asia though.