Asia SEO GuruBlogging SEO in Bangkok Thailand

I was in a small town on the Gulf of Thailand called Hua Hin when I saw it.

My first .Asia in the wild. I’d previously seen them spring up in PPC campaigns. I’d seen them in newspapers. I’d even seen them on television screens. But this, the first one on the streets.

Hua Hin is a small beach town with a population of 50,000 people, so if you take the rest of Asia in to account with dozens of sprawling cities, proliferation is going to be rapid.

I’m almost certain that right about now a bunch of people in the domain industry are asking themselves…

Why were we so wrong?

Prior to the launch of .Asia domain industry leaders and most commentators in domain forums wrote .Asia off as useless and unlikely to go anywhere (a little bit like .mobi :)).

My guess is most domain forum commentators were American domain kiddies who’s knowledge of Asia extended as far as noodles and Bruce Lee.

As for the larger players in the Domain Industry, as they have spent the best part of a decade watching their dot com investments turn into a valuable assets it is easy to see how they may have been skeptical about rapid acceptance and adoption of a new niche name space.

The best explanation I can see for the change in time frames comes from Eric Schmidt’s recent presentation at Bloomberg.

At 12:15

“These changes are happening faster than ever before. The statistics are quite interesting.  50 million users in North America took 37 years to adopt radio, 15 years for television, 6 years for cable, and 3 years for the internet.”………..”But clearly time is compressing”

So however long Rick Schwartz had to wait to see Time Square covered in .com, take that figure and divide it. New name spaces Aren’t going to take decades to take off.

My prediction is that in just over the next 2 years, Asian cities from Tokyo to Tashkent will be dripping in .Asia