One of the .Asia auctions has recently ended with a big result. The auction for export.asia ended at $18011. Obviously this was always going to be a popular auction considering the opportunity in using it to target export opportunities either to or from the Asian region. With what was a fairly busy auction with 94 bids in all and with the time for auction bids being extended many times according to the auction rules.

This shows the value of the .asia extension both worldwide and in the Asian region. According to the site www.keywo.com the top ten sales so far are sex.asia US$83,334, sexshop.asia US$53,607, business.asia US$29,000, promotion.asia US$26,000, resorts.asia US$22,501, sushi.asia US$22,500, cooking.asia US$21500, ace.asia US$20501, pos.asia US$20500, water.asia US$19388.

Obviously sex.asia is not a surprise, it was always going to be a popular domain name. but there are some surprises that are at the top over some of the names that went for a low value. This may be explained by the number of people involved in an auction, as only the people who registered their interest in the domain in the sunrise or landrush period of this domain release were allowed to bid in these auctions. So there may be some auctions with only two or three parties involved and there may be others with many more involved. There may also have been auctions where other parties involved didn’t have tens of thousands of dollars to spend at these auctions so competition may have been very low in some and very high in others. I do think that the results in so far do show the interest in the .asia extention and the very real value to be found in this regionally targeted extension. As the recognition of the .asia name gains pace I think many people will see the value and we will continue to see some interesting sales happening in the near future.