Chatting with Arto

You and your team are like kids on Christmas morning. What gives?

Our two Chinese TLDs are creating a huge buzz in the Chinese media and we are tremendously excited. They are Chinese characters in constant use on the Internet and already adopted by localized brands of MSN, the Financial Times, the New York Times, AOL, Reuters, etc. When an internationalized domain matches the brand and content language it becomes a very powerful SEO tool, creating more trust and traffic.

Tell us about your Foundation Partner Program, apparently some of the members are quite angry!

Our Partner Program members provide technical innovation and financial support, they are as committed as we are to the success of Dot Chinese Online and Dot Chinese Website. It’s a real partnership so the give and take works both ways; hence our partners receive their portfolio of domain names at no cost.

Sounds excellent, so who’s angry?

Ah, that will be Rovio Entertainment, the creators of the Angry Birds video games. Rovio was the first member of our founders program and will be registering its domain names with our two Chinese TLDs; Angry by name, not nature.

How have you promoted your TLDs to the Chinese market, anything specific?

Taoism philosophy is a huge influence on Chinese culture and part of this is their use of the Taoist (bagua) cosmological system that defines particular days as lucky for certain activities. To honour this belief we have scheduled the go-live dates of our domains for days deemed auspicious for starting new businesses. Yes, it’s unconventional and our registration periods are not following the norm – but our registrants and our TLDs come before everything else.

Thank you Arto, an enlightening chat. To wrap up; as a registry offering new gTLDs we would love to know how you see the future.

As a highly mobile registry with exceptional international coverage we were very interested in the internationalized domain names. Imagine if the inventor of the Internet had been a Chinese guy, we’d all be using Chinese characters online. Realizing how difficult that would have been gave us our mission; to ‘Chinalize’ the Internet and reduce language restrictions.

Personally, I am excited to see what some of the big names are going to do with their portfolios of new gTLDs, they have invested heavily and have the power to promote and then promote some more. Ultimately, I think the whole program has brought some much needed press coverage of the domain industry, which is good news for all of us.

UPDATE

Since going to press, things have progressed and we have exciting news. Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) have both passed pre-delegation testing.

The TLD Registry has announced the following launch period dates:

• Sunrise period opens Friday, January 17, closes Monday, March 17 Chinese lucky day – starting new businesses
• Landrush period opens Thursday, March 20, closes Thursday, April 24 Chinese lucky day – breaking ground
• General Availability – opens Monday, April 28 Chinese lucky day – starting new businesses & grand openings

Huge congratulations to the team at TLD Registry!

The Chinese media is heralding the TLD Registry as a model for culturally relevant and linguistically correct Chinese TLDs; they are benefitting their partners, registrants and the Chinese Internet.

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