What is a domain name? What is the value and prospect of a domain name?

Domain Name, also known as network domain, is born to allow people to remember the originally complex IP address with a simple and easy-to-remember string of characters. Therefore, the domain name is more like: the "house number" of the Internet world.

1. What is a domain name?

With the registration of the first domain name nordu.net in 1985, the domain name has been born for 37 years. However, even in the Internet era where domain names are widely used today, in terms of domain name transactions, use, promotion, and legal disputes caused by domain names, the public is still looking for the most common and easy-to-understand interpretation of domain names in order to establish a more intuitive domain name impression.

To use an analogy, the domain name on the Internet is equivalent to the house number in our real life. For example, when we visit a friend, we will search for the community where the other person lives on the map. And this community name is like a domain name. It uses a series of "x Province x City x District x Road x No." in an intuitive way that is easy to remember as "xx community" to help us remember and locate the place we want to go.

The domain name is also like this, simplifying the complex and difficult to remember IP address such as: 124.232.137.172 into a simple domain name such as Yuming.com, to guide people to visit the website it represents. For example, the domain name of Taobao's official website is taobao.com, which is more vivid and easier to remember than the IP address.

Using the same analogy, the domain name is equivalent to the name of each phone number in our address book. Simple and easy-to-remember names are of course much easier to remember than complex and lengthy numbers. And because the domain name is unique, it can accurately guide us to the site we want to visit in the vast world of the Internet.

Of course, if the website referred to by the domain name changes, the domain name will also point to the new IP address and website content, and the original IP address and domain name will be disassociated.

2. What is the value of a domain name?

If domain names were simply used as a string of characters to refer to websites in the early days, then in the following decades of development, the commercial value of domain names is far greater than their technical value. It not only represents the unique position of the enterprise on the Internet, but also a comprehensive reflection of the enterprise's products, service scope, image, and goodwill. Regardless of the size of the enterprise, basically all companies have their own brand domain names, such as Apple's apple.com, Google's google.com, Tencent's qq.com, JD's jd.com, etc.

It is precisely because of the advent of the rapidly developing Internet era that domain names have been tied to corporate brands and have become an indispensable intangible asset. As a limited resource, high-quality domain names with short characters and rich meanings have gradually increased in value as more companies and investors register and acquire them. Looking around the world, there are many eye-popping cases of sky-high domain name transactions.

3. What is the prospect of the domain name industry?

According to the "Internet Domain Name Industry Quarterly Report (Q3 2020)" recently released by the China Academy of Communications Technology, the number of active domain names accessed by Chinese users has reached 42.733 million, concentrated in the ".COM", ".CN" and ".NET" top-level domains, and the global domain name registration market has grown steadily.

The "Domain Name Industry Brief for the Third Quarter of 2020" released by VeriSign also shows that as of the third quarter of 2020, the total number of registered top-level domain names in the world was 370.7 million, with a steady increase.

Domain names are key basic resources of the Internet, important network portals and human-computer interaction identifiers in the digital age, and have multiple attributes such as commercial, strategic, and public. In recent years, frequent domain name transactions, rising market prices, and the popularity of short-character domain names have also demonstrated the value of domain names. In other words, as long as the Internet exists, the value of domain names will continue to play out.

It is certain that high-quality domain names, as hard currency in virtual assets, can be used to make profits through projects through domain names, and can be collected for investment appreciation. The more refined pinyin, mainstream numeric or alphabetic domain names still have huge appreciation potential and broad application prospects!