Last week, CLUB’s team (including Colin Campbell and Michele Van Tilborg) visited China’s main domain registrars in their grandest China roadshow to date. All in all they visited 8+ registrars and domain sector partners in Shenzhen, Xiamen, Hangzhou, and Beijing.
The trip concluded on Saturday at an investors’ appreciation luncheon with top Chinese registrars and domainers. As of March 4th, users watched a video of their final luncheon event on iQiyi more than 13,000 times.
It was a rare occasion in Beijing to see attendance from China’s largest registrars, including HiChina (Aliyun/Alibaba), West.cn, eName and EJEE together in one room; who came from as far as Chengdu and Xiamen for the occasion. Other top domain investors in attendance included famous domainer Uncle Li (黎俭 or 黎叔), owner of Wansai (万赛), as well as Jingjing (神马), and Dragon (小龙).
They visited the large Internet companies such as 4.CN (金名网) and Duomai (多麦) in Hangzhou and 190.com in Shenzhen. 4.CN and 190.com are two of China’s largest registrars, and Duomai is one of China’s largest Internet service companies.
.CLUB also set up their packed schedule for auctions in 2016. They will be hosting their first premium domain name auction with 4.CN with many particularly valuable names. More news on this soon. 4.CN boasts a user-base of 28,000 users and domain buyers and this will be the first time it will host a new gTLD auction. There will be 24 two-character names and 8.CLUB in the auction.
The second auction will be held on Alibaba’s Wanwang (万网) platform on April 18th, which will include an auction of 18.CLUB and another one-character domain. This will be the first time that a one-character domain will be auctioned on Alibaba’s platform.
The third auction will be their largest yet, held on EJEE‘s (易介) auction platform with 58 domains up for auction. This follows the success of their first auction on EJEE’s EachNIC platform in 2015. The second auction will include 29 names from .CLUB’s reserve list and 29 names from .CLUB domain investors’ portfolios.
Their last planned auction this year will take place on West.cn‘s (西部数码) auction platform, the second they have done with this registrar. West.cn has made a name for itself selling new gTLDs in China.