Posted By: Gustavo¿Jordi, cuál puedes leer?
¿El segundo?Sociedad de la Información.Galería de Dominios IDN en Español.

The Birth of a Gold Rush.

Back in the 1980’s, Japan was an emerging economic and cultural force and Japanese was the language to learn. Japanese culture expanded to influence the world partly because they had advanced technology, as well as the know-how, it seemed that the future was in the hands of this previously suppressed country of the Pacific ‘Rising Sun’. Throughout the 1990’s, China was and still is today continuing to ascend in influence. People are now feeling a need to learn Chinese. Given this global pattern, it is quite possible that India could be the next cultural contender, thus learning Hindi would be necessary.

This tendency of emerging cultural and linguistic influence is developing with the growth of Hispanic culture that is permeating America and beyond in ways we could not imagine twenty-five years ago when the first PC was created. Most Americans have a neighbor or know someone who speaks Spanish, or have taken Spanish classes some time in their lives and somehow they believe they can understand Spanish even if they don’t. Spanish has replaced others languages as the first option when choosing to study a second language. It makes sense if we consider that there are forty-five million Hispanic people of many nations living in the US. Thus making this the largest fastest-growing ethnic minority in the nation, composed of the average age of 27.2, compared with 36 of the rest of the population.

The fact that the Internet first developed in America, together with a practically common Latin alphabet, has made the Internet a promising, accessible and easy field to explore by the Spanish speaking population in the American continent. Back in the 1990’s when the first domainers started registering domain names in English, Hispanic pioneers in the States and abroad decided to do the same but with names in Spanish. Unlike domain names in English, many years had to pass before the birth of a market could be seen. The specific Spanish characters - ñ and accents – did not impede the majority of juicy keywords such as viajes (trips), juegos (games), negocios (business), ofertas (sales), sexo (sex) etc… winning their place in the Internet market, as they don’t need any additional accent out of the normal ASCII characters.

It has been more than sixteen years since the invention of the web, and the rapid development of technology has made it an integral part of our lives. The Web not only has changed the way American society lives, but it has changed life around the world. It was just a matter of time before Spanish-speaking countries realized the value of generic domain names in Spanish. That day came in 2004 with Christian Chena, a 27 years old entrepreneur from Paraguay. Christian gave to an engineer from Chicago two domains: supernova.org and grandcasino.com. In exchange, him gave Chena juegos.com. In October of 2006, Christian sold the domain to a European gambling company according to different sources, for an undisclosed amount that ranged between 10 and 15 million dollars. The result of that exchange made Mr. Chena one of the most successful sellers of domains in history. Juegos.com is probably one of the most expensive domain ever sold in any language today.

Back in 2004, Chena surprised the incipient world of Hispanic domainers by acquiring eight domains worth half a million dollars. Chena knew at the time that “According to an AOL study, Hispanic people spend 43% more time online when at work and 13% more time online when at home than the rest of the online population.”

Chena was not the first Hispanic domainer, but without doubt, he has done more than all the other domainers in Spanish put together for pushing the market. Currently, opportunities in the domain area are enormous. It is estimated than more than 440 million people speak Spanish as their first language, and more than half speak it as a second language – since Brazil opted for Spanish as their second language, mainly because they are surrounded by Spanish-speaking countries with whom they trade on a day-to-day basis.

Spanish is the third most spoken language used in the world after English and Chinese. It is the fourth language in terms of Internet usage, with a difference of just six million users against Japanese, according to Nielsen. This fact is expected to change very soon, since the exponential growth of Spanish usage on the Internet and the limited population growth of Japan.

Good examples of Hispanic generic names include: Bogota.com $159.500, Uruguay.com $175.000, Vuelos.com (flights) $300.000, Futbol.com (soccer) $150.000, Exito.com (success) $121.650, Amistad.com (friendship) $100.000, Dominio.com (domain) $120.000, Viajando.com (traveling) $90.000, Publicidad.com (advertising) $80.000, Ofertas.com (offers) $76.829, Empleo.com (jobs) $70.000, VideosGratis.com (free videos) $66.204, Servidores.com (servers) $54.100, Cultura.com (culture) $50.000, Universidad.com (university) $45.000, Telefonos.com (telephones) $40.000, Ventas.com (sales) $40.000, Pasion.com (passion) $39.552, Registro.com (register) $38.000, Inmobiliario.com $35.250, Punto.com (dot) $33.862, Justicia.com (justice) $31.480, Mensajes.com (messages) $30.000, Cocina.com (kitchen) $30.000, Sida.com (aids) $27.000, Cartas.com (letters) $25.000, Reservas.com (reservations) $25.250, ApuestasDeportivas.com (sport booking) $22.788, Digame.com (tell me) $22.000, Espacio.com (space) $21.100. All of these domains and more, are very precious investments since their value is only likely to increase.

The equivalent in English for premium generic names in Spanish are quite valuable, and the rules for appraising a domain name in Spanish apply the same way. There are some exceptions, such as when the name in singular may be more valuable than in English, but those are the exceptions that do not affect the value of the domains as a whole.

With the advent of Internet Explorer 7, users will be able to type special characters on the keyboard, which will make Internationalized Domain names the second Gold Rush for domain seekers of practically any country in the world, although not at the same speed. Meanwhile IE7 is going to benefit the Chinese marketplace of Domain Names, Chinese political restrictions for the Internet will delay the expansion of the market. Alternatively, the Hispanic market will experience a rapid increase with Spanish words consisting of special characters such as “ñ”. Ironically, the word español (Spanish) is one of them and accents will change a bad spelling for a good one.

Another pioneer of domaining in Spanish was Rufi Guerrero, who achieved this by accident. In 2000, the then 17 year-old Venezuelan heard in the news that multilingual domain names, also known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), were going to be enabled in the late 2000. He then decided to try to register some names in Spanish not knowing that technically he couldn’t – or so Verisign thought. Nevertheless, his attempts to register españa.com and español.com were miraculously successful.

The next morning Rufi became a superstar. Ever since, he has been known as the master of the “ñ” (el dueño de la ñ). English, Spanish, and of course Venezuelan newspapers wanted an interview with this young man who now owned the two most important and representative domains in the Spanish world. Rufi decided that an attorney in Boston would be in charge of negotiating any issues related to the domains and decided to wait.

In 2004, in a non-transparent transaction, Rufi’s España.com went to a young controversial German investor with a long history of disputing and acquiring trademarks of generic names. When this domain was bought the actual amount of the transaction was never disclosed. Today, the value of this domain and español.com could be worth around several millions dollars.

Most of the good Spanish domain names were taken a while ago and a new Gold Rush is going on right now with the new IDN Spanish domain names, which has included hundreds of words with accents and eñes. How far this market will go is hard to predict, but one thing is for sure, El dorado is no longer a Legend.


Gustavo is a full time professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he teaches Interactive Design, he has an MFA in Computer Graphics and Interactive Media from Pratt Institute in New York where he was a Fulbright Scholar. His blog is domaininglab.com

1. http://www.escribiendo.net/Jan_2007.pdf



2. http://www.escribiendo.net/Mar_2007.pdf

desafortunadamente me editaron la parte que hablo de Demene por considerarlo self-promotion.