In the mobile era, do you still need a domain name?

With the decline of PC, the domain name that was once the entrance to the Internet has long lost its glory. The development of mobile Internet has caused subtle changes in the process of domain names from PC to mobile. Browsers are no longer the only entrance, and the competition with apps has always been evenly matched. In addition, due to the defects of mobile device input functions, fewer and fewer users enter domain names in mobile browsers, and users are more likely to choose navigation jump or add to favorites.

Most mobile websites are secondary domain names of PC websites, that is, they are slightly added to the original domain name, such as Taobao 's mobile website is m.taobao.com, and Sina's is 3g.sina.com.cn. Although such domain names are highly consistent with the PC side, they are not conducive to user memory.

We have also seen that navigation websites have become increasingly popular in recent years.

With a market value of 2.65 billion and listed on the A-share market, 2345 Navigation has brought the once-useless website navigation back into people's view, and has also made people re-examine the value of website navigation in the mobile Internet era. 2345 Navigation ranks in the second tier of domestic navigation websites, second only to hao123 and 360 .

The person in charge of a website navigation company in the second echelon told us, "The business model of each website navigation company is to share revenue after converting traffic, and the main revenue comes from e-commerce, web games, and search." Low technical barriers and poor user stickiness have always been regarded as the Achilles' heel of website navigation. In sharp contrast to its disadvantages is its unshakable advantage in traffic monetization. Website navigation has long replaced domain names as the entrance to the Internet, and has responded to the impact of mobile Internet with eye-catching performance.

At the same time, as high-quality domain names become increasingly scarce, domain name transaction prices are also constantly reaching new highs.

In the first half of this year, Sedo.cn, the world's largest high-end domain name trading platform and monetization provider, facilitated 16,216 domain name transactions with a total transaction volume of US$35.9 million. Domain name prices have been rising year by year, with the average transaction price rising by 17% to US$2,214 and the median price rising by 7% to US$616. Its market research report shows that the number of buyers in China has increased by 3%, making it the fastest growing market for domain name buyers.

Since domain names are so expensive and inputting them is extremely inconvenient in the mobile era, do you still need domain names in the future?

Sky-high priced domain names continue to emerge in the mobile era

Although it seems that domain names are becoming less and less important in the mobile era, we have seen Luo Yonghao purchase Trinidad and Tobago's top-level domain name - t.tt for 2 million yuan; Xiaomi launched mi.com with a transaction price of 22.45 million yuan, which became the "most expensive domain name in the history of China's Internet" in one fell swoop.

Why is this? To answer this question, we must first understand the history of the domain name business itself.

The birth of domain names is to simplify people's access behavior. Before the emergence of domain names, IP addresses were the only way to browse websites. This 32-bit binary string was a headache. Domain names are very different. They start with WWW. as the network name, and end with .com or .net as suffixes. The middle is the domain name body, which often appears in the English name of the company. In 1985, Symbolics registered the first .com domain name. That year, a total of 6 domain names were registered worldwide. According to Verisign's third quarter report last year, this number has become 265 million.

The impact of domain names in China and abroad is very different. Even if the main part of the domain name consists of two English words, foreign users can type it accurately, so they will directly enter the domain name on the PC instead of opening Google search and then visiting the website. This is also one of the main reasons why there is no navigation page in foreign browsers.

Take the Microsoft domain name as an example. Although "Microsoft" is only 9 letters long, it is a big challenge for domestic users. Therefore, the length and form of the domain name have a significant impact on domestic companies, and it is more likely to cost a lot to change the domain name.

Chen Benfeng, founder and CEO of Yunshipei and HTML5 evangelist of W3C China, told Business Value that "domestic domain names are mostly in the form of Chinese pinyin, and pinyin abbreviations or pure numbers are more popular. Of course, the prices of these two types of domain names are also very high."

Not long ago, the total transaction price of 13 short, catchy and high-quality domain names including game.com and mm.com was nearly 100 million yuan.

In addition, domain names and website weights are also closely related. Among all types of domain names, gov and edu, which are government and university domain names, have higher weights, followed by com, net, and org, international general domain names. Domain names that have been registered for a long time are more likely to gain the trust of search engines and thus have more opportunities to be displayed.

Therefore, it is generally impossible for enterprises to abandon domain names. Personalized domain names such as t.tt are more popular in the mobile era, attracting attention and easy to input. However, when the reporter searched for "Smartisan Technology", the domain name that appeared was still smartisan.com. After entering "t.tt" in the address bar, you can jump directly to the smartisan.com webpage. In this way, not only will it not affect the weight of Smartisan's website, but it can also bring a large number of direct visits with the help of personalized domain names.

Domain names are getting shorter and shorter, and their value is getting higher and higher

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg attaches great importance to domain names. When FaceBook was first founded, the domain name was the FaceBook.com. As Facebook's financial resources increased, the domain name became shorter and shorter, and was successively changed to FaceBook.com and FB.com.

Before the launch of jd.com, JD.com's domain name was 360buy.com. At that time, many small shopping websites in China followed JD.com's footsteps and used domain names in the form of "number + buy", which caused great trouble to JD.com. As 360 continued to grow, the 360buy.com domain name was easily misunderstood by consumers as a platform under 360.

A relevant person in charge of JD.com told Business Value, "The change to a simpler domain name - JD is to facilitate users to remember and log in directly. In addition, as the pinyin initials of the two words "JD.com", jd.com is easier to associate with the JD.com brand, which is conducive to the dissemination and improvement of JD.com's brand image. It has been more than a year since JD.com changed its domain name. Through continuous promotion at the brand level, the new domain name has been accepted and remembered by the majority of users. More people are accustomed to directly entering jd.com in the address bar to visit JD.com, which is easier to operate. Since the change of the domain name, JD.com's business volume has been rising."

While mobile Internet reduces the importance of domain names, it also gives more room for imagination for short domain names and personalized domain names.

To some extent, personalized domain names are more closely integrated with brands. For example, t.tt is highly integrated with the logo of Smartisan Technology and the naming of mobile phones. In addition, foreign Internet giants have also made moves in personalized domain names. Amazon has acquired ".talk" and ".you", while ".play", ".drive" and ".dev" belong to Google. In the first half of this year, Sex.xxx topped the list of non-.com domain name transactions with a closing price of US$3 million. In this list, in addition to the common .cn, personalized domain names such as ".de", ".it" and ".id" also appeared.

Last year, four domestic e-commerce companies changed their domain names one after another: JD.com changed its original 360buy.com to jd.com; Yixun changed from 51buy.com to yixun.com; No.1 Store updated yihaodian.com to yhd.com; and Vipshop changed its domain name from vipshop.com to vip.com, some of which were huge acquisitions.

E-commerce websites' obsession with domain names is obvious to all. In this fiercely competitive industry, domain names have become a battleground for them.

Zhuo Saijun, an analyst at Analysys International, told the reporter of Business Value that although the traffic of e-commerce on the PC side is declining and the mobile side is constantly developing, at present, the activity of the PC side is still higher than that of the mobile side. In the next one or two years, the mobile side will surpass the PC side.

Unlike other industries, e-commerce has an extremely urgent need for traffic. It can be said that every visit is obtained at a loss. Chen Benfeng told the reporter of Business Value, "Domain name is a means to transfer offline traffic to online. A short domain name is easy to remember and everyone can type it easily. From the perspective of advertising input-output ratio, for example, if 200 million is invested offline, but people can't remember the domain name, then the advertising will be discounted."

Obviously, premium domain names are particularly important for major e-commerce companies that are caught in price wars.

Xu Jun, the founder of Jinming.com and Yite Advertising Alliance, snatched game.com from many competitors. Due to the signing of a confidentiality agreement, the transaction price was not announced, but Xu Jun himself said on Weibo that "it has created a new height in the history of Chinese domain names"; Shanghai Sanqiwan Network Technology Co., Ltd. spent 12 million yuan to acquire the 37.com domain name. As a major money-making company, game companies have been gaining momentum in recent years. It may only be a matter of time before they go abroad and go global. Whether game.com or 37.com is a step that cannot be ignored in the internationalization strategy of domestic game companies.

The burden that corporate brands cannot bear

Recently, China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) released the 34th "Statistical Report on the Development of Internet in China", showing that as of June 2014, the number of Internet users in China reached 632 million, of which 527 million were mobile phone users; among Internet users' Internet access devices, mobile phone usage rate reached 83.4%, surpassing the overall usage rate of traditional PCs (personal computers) of 80.9% for the first time.

In addition to wealthy e-commerce and gaming companies, there are also cases where entrepreneurial teams have purchased domain names at high prices. As a young force in the P2P industry, Panda Fireworks' Internet financial platform Yinhu.com was launched in July. Yinhu.com's earliest domain name was banklake.com, but considering the acceptance of domestic users, it still acquired yinhu.com from overseas.

According to an insider, the acquisition price is not comparable to that of t.tt, but it is a considerable expense for the entrepreneurial team. Li Junchao, vice president of Yinhu.com, told reporters, "Although mobile Internet is an inevitable trend, the PC side is more important than the mobile side in the field of Internet finance. The Chinese double-pinyin domain name is obviously easier for investors to remember us."

In the mobile era, domain names are no longer just a line of characters, but are part of the brand and appear in advertisements and logos together with the company name. In fact, domain names are trademarks and brands. In a sense, domain names are more important than trademarks because they are the way for users to directly reach the company. When you regard domain names as part of the company brand, the transaction price of millions or tens of millions of domain names is reasonable.

According to a recent survey by a famous IDC company in the United States, among nearly 500 listed companies, as many as 86.6% of multinational listed companies have experienced brand domain name preemptive registration. Even large national companies such as Google have found it difficult to escape unscathed. Google's redemption of the google.com.cn and google.cn domain names for millions of dollars caused a sensation.

The domain name google.cn will naturally remind people of Google. If the domain name falls into the hands of others, the loss to Google's brand will be more than a million dollars. The significance of google.cn is not only to consolidate Google's brand advantage, but more importantly to protect corporate brand security.

In China, domain names are even more important for brand protection. When a brand is copied, domain names can often distinguish the real from the fake. The "real and fake Kaixin.com" incident six years ago was quite typical. Although Oak Pacific, the owner of kaixin.com, was eventually found guilty of unfair competition, it still could not make up for the loss of Kaixin.com users. In this battle between genuine and copycat, the domain name, which should have been the key, was more of a hindrance than a help. In March 2008, Kaixin.com (kaixin001.com) was officially launched, and Oak Pacific copied Kaixin.com and used the kaixin.com domain name. When two Kaixin.coms are placed in front of them, new users often think that kaixin001.com is a copycat version.

But generally speaking, many small and medium-sized enterprises still lack awareness of domain name protection. Chen Benfeng said, "Some companies give all official website business to agency companies, including buying domain names and building websites. Building a website doesn't matter, it can be changed at any time, but the domain name has already invested a certain amount of advertising costs. If the contract with the agency company is terminated in the future, the agency company may not give the domain name to the company, and the domain name may even fall into the hands of competitors."

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.