Vans.mx sells for $1,200 and Sales..mx is now available en Espanol!

The domain name Vans.mx recently changed hands to claim the #7 spot on the Top 25 .mx Domain Sales Leaderboard.

The domain was sold by MXDomainsForSale.com for $1,200 in a private transaction.  Sales.mx was notified of the sale  last week via email and transfer of the domain to the buyer was confirmed by whois earlier this week.

If you have sold a .mx domain and would like credit for the sale and have it listed on the Top 25 Leaderboard please contact us at any time.

In other news, you may notice that there is now a translation link at the top of each page and post of the website.  To read the contents of this site en Espanol simply click on the [Translate] link at top.  The translations are automated (by Google Translate) so they are not perfect, but will do for now.

Since the majority of visitors to this site are Spanish and English speakers, we’ve only allowed Spanish language translation for now, but if you would like to request that we add any other language please contact us and we’ll be happy to do so.

Oscar Robles, CEO of  Mexico’s domain name registry NIC Mexico, stops to share some thoughts on the future of .mx

July 31st 2010 will soon mark the official one-year anniversary of the closing of the .mx sunrise registration period.  Since that time we’ve had almost a full year to see the .mx domain market begin to mature, including  many new .mx developed websites coming online as well as some notable aftermarket domain sales.

Sales.mx is now pleased to present to you an exclusive interview on the current and future state of the .mx domain market with CEO of NIC Mexico, Oscar Robles.

Sales.mx: Mr. Robles, first of all thank you very much for giving us this opportunity. How has Mexico as a whole responded to the new .mx top-level domain?

OR: I think the numbers are ok, we are at the early stages of adoption, and that one is the most complicated part. We are confident to maintain a bigger growth in .MX compared with .com.mx in the next months.

Sales.mx: As of early March 2010, there were over 80,000 newly registered .mx domains. Are we nearing the 100,000 mark, or has that number already been surpassed?

OR: Yes, we are very close to the 100,000 mark (by 15th of July we’ll be reaching it).

Sales.mx: Some people have said they expect .com.mx to remain the preferred extension for the near future. According to my own research, I’ve noticed quite a number of websites already forwarding the .com.mx domain over to .mx. What are your thoughts on this?

OR: And that’s going to be more usual in the coming months. The .com.mx still benefits from 20 years of brand positioning. We just started a branding effort for .MX last month (June) and we expect to continue this effort through the rest of the year, which will provide a good positioning about the .MX, and together with the cases you mentioned (and the ones we are starting to see in Mexican media : Honda.MX, Terra.mx, Chevrolet.MX, EXP.MX, telediario.MX, CNN.MX, etc) will foster the .MX growth.

Sales.mx: Most would agree that the success of a domain extension is largely based on it’s level of adoption by end-users – those who build a website or business around it. From your own experience, what can you tell us about the level of adoption of .mx among businesses in Mexico so far?

OR: I share your idea. Having registered 1/3 of domains .MX for every .com.mx in only ten months make us believe it has had a good level of adoption, even more when we talk about prices among .MX versus the second level domain’s prices you realize the latter.

Sales.mx: Are you noticing any increase in the number of television, print or radio advertisements using .mx domains over the past year?

OR: Yes, although we don’t have a full monitoring system in place, we’ve seen that in Mexican media (as I was telling you in my previous answers). Of course, it is not easy for the big companies to make this switch when they have worked for several months on the marketing campaigns with the former URLs, so we don’t expect to have a full switch to .MX in this year but it will happen sooner or later. At the same time we are not pushing for the banishment of .com.mx, but rather a good coexistence of both choices.

Sales.mx: Your company recently launched a new website at SeamosMas.mx. Can you tell us a bit more about that?

OR: “Let’s Be More .MX” is a communication effort that promotes .MX domain name registrations inspiring users to Be More and Grow their projects, ideas, services, business, and so on, by having Internet presence.

With this campaign we want all those who have a passion, business, idea or project to take advantage of the Internet; and use it as a tool to introduce it to the whole world and label it with .MX. This way we’ll be more .MX to Place the Name of Mexico on the Internet

Through www.seamosmas.mx it is expected that .MX users share their experiences, so they can be part of this growing trend to Be More .MX. The philosophy of this campaign is to grow and think bigger about any idea or project, and take it further no matter how small it seems.

We want to create a movement to add more projects on the Internet and Being More .MX.

Sales.mx: There have already been a number of publicly reported aftermarket sales of .mx domains, including the highest of which occurred just last month (see 888.mx). Can you comment as to whether you believe we are likely to see an increasing aftermarket demand for .mx domains in the near future?

OR: No doubt, definitely, we are going to see more Aftermarket transactions about .MX. Many good and generic names are still free, others are already taken, but registrants are waiting for the best moment to put them on sale. We’ll see an increase in those transactions in the future.

Sales.mx: In your opinion, are there many businesses with a local presence in Mexico willing to spend the money to acquire high-quality generic .mx domains at a price that is above normal registration and renewal fees?

OR: Yes. Some of our customers may recall the Landrush process we used last year. It was quite unique (reverse auctions, or dutch auction) and provided us with good level of understanding precisely in what you are asking. Certainly, our intentions were to keep running the systems during the “goldrush” period maintaining a low level of transactions (a few thousands) using the price as a control mechanism, but at the same time we learned that business do take care of their Intellectual Property regardless of the price (but of course there are limits for every body).

Secondly, many companies were asking for those premium names before we could make that reopening. Current growth of .MX confirm what I’m saying: .MX (only direct .MX registrations) has grown almost 45% against .COM.MX growth of almost 9% since Nov 1st 2009. .MX grows 67% faster in absolute number than .COM.MX registrations in the same period (even though .COM.MX is three times bigger).

Sales.mx: Do you see the exchange rate between the Mexican Pesos and US Dollars playing any influence either way?

OR: I think it plays both ways and considering the exchange market fluctuations in the last two years I think this is a wise way to provide certainty to the organization, thus to the services we provide to our clients. By the way, NIC.CL started to do the same this month http://www.nic.cl/fees-usd.html

Sales.mx: Does NIC Mexico have any plans to enter the domain aftermarket space, as for example with expired domain auctions?

OR: First, we want to understand perfectly the aftermarket and its implications. Unfortunately, aftermarket has not been comprehended correctly in our region (not only Mexico but Latin-America as a whole), that situation does not help any plan we may have in the future. But to give you two examples of thing we are currently carrying out in this regard, 1) we started to discuss the aftermarket in our Advisory Council early this year, so this is a two way information, the pros the cons, what we could do, what we don’t want to do, what we must do, etc; 2) we’ve been attending aftermarket meetings and trying to have good level of understanding about this interesting activity.

Sales.mx: Mr Robles, on behalf of my readers we sincerely appreciate your taking the time to share with us and discuss the future of the .mx domain market. Thank you.

One Year From Launch, .MX Domains Gaining A Foothold On .COM.MX

A recent informal study conducted by Sales.mx has revealed some surprising results.  A survey of developed .mx top-level domains indicates the new extension is already in use by a wide variety of businesses, clubs, schools, organizations and individuals.

Major findings of the study include that a) a significant number of end-users have chosen to forward their .com.mx domains to their .mx developed websites., b) When not using redirects (a.k.a. URL forwarding), others are still branding their .com.mx mirror sites with .mx logos, and c) in many cases the corresponding .com.mx domain name of a developed .mx domain was found to be unregistered, suggesting a clear preference for the latter.

Methodology

A search was performed on Google.com.mx using the search filter site:.mx.

Use of this filter returned results from only .mx domains, excluding all other tlds such as .com, .net, etc.

The search was further narrowed to display only pages from Mexico (Páginas de México).

Working within the first 100 results, a survey was conducted to measure the relationship between developed .mx domains, and their corresponding .com.mx domain counterparts.

For example, if the domain Widgets.mx was included in the sample, then the domain Widgets.com.mx was also evaluated to obtain one of several possible relationships, of which were:

1. .com.mx counterpart  is unregistered
2. .com.mx is registered, but under a different owner
3. .com.mx is registered under the same owner, and forwards to the .mx
4. .com.mx is registered under the same owner, and does not forward, but resolves to its own site.

Results

Of the 100 .mx domains surveyed, the results are as follows:

• 20% of developed .mx domains did not have a registered .com.mx counterpart
• 39% of developed .mx domains were registered under a different owner than their .com.mx counterpart
• 41% of developed .mx domains surveyed were registered under the same owner as their .com.mx counterpart
• Of the 41% of .mx and .com.mx pairs registered under the same owner, 39%  resolved to separate websites (Mostly mirror sites of each other)
• 25% of all developed .mx domains surveyed (and 61% of those registered under the same owner as their .com.mx counterpart) forwarded the .com.mx to the developed .mx website

The charts below show a visual representation of the data.

Figure 1 (below)

Figure 2 (below)

Discussion

Possibly the most interesting finding here is the significant percentage of .com.mx domains that are being redirected to their corresponding .mx developed websites.  In cases where the .mx and .com.mx counterparts were both registered to the same owner, forwarding the .com.mx to the .mx domain was largely preferred over having both domains resolve to separate mirror sites. (See Figure 2).

It is also of interest that of the cases where the .mx and .com.mx domains are registered under the same owner but resolved to separate mirror sites, 25% (4 of 16) used the .mx in their logo. (See Figures 3 and 4 below) In no case was any site using the .com.mx in their logo.   Thus there seems to be evidence for a branding preference among Mexico end-users towards the .mx top-level domain.

The study shows that 39 of 100 .mx to .com.mx counterparts were registered under different owners. It is unclear whether those who registered these .mx domains did so because the .com.mx was already taken, or whether they would have preferred to register the .mx regardless.

However, the results do show that in a significant number of cases (20 of 100 surveyed) the .com.mx was still available to register, indicating that in these cases end-users demonstrated a preference towards choosing the .mx version. *

The study did find one very high profile domain in the sample – CNN.mx – owned by Turner Broadcasting Systems (TBS).  This case turned out to be quite interesting when evaluated against its .com.mx counterpart. The result was that the domain CNN.com.mx forwards to Mexico.CNN.com, whereas the first-level domain CNN.mx resolves to its own domain.  This suggests that com.mx is being tied to the global .com brand, whereas the .mx is being branded at the local/national level.

Domains for a number of Mexican political candidates were also found in the sample.  Of these, 4 of 6 currently redirect their .com.mx to the .mx. (Cf. MarioZamora.mx, DavidMonreal.mx) It would be interesting to know whether this has anything to do with wanting to appear progressive. Regardless, in all of these cases, their constituency are likely to be increasingly exposed to the .mx first-level tld through their PR campaigns at the local and national level.

Several online journals and periodicals which forwarded their .com.mx to their .mx developed sites were also found among the sample. (Cf. Filosofia.mx, PeriodicoVictoria.mx) The implication here is that subscribers to these publications are also experiencing repeated exposure to the .mx top-level domain through their websites.

Other noteworthy cases of sites forwarding .com.mx to .mx were:

• Mercado.mx – top generic keyword domain (meaning market in English)
• Manana.mx – another top generic name (meaning tomorrow) and site of the self-proclaimed largest, most popular gay nightclub in Puerto Vallarta
• ToursPorChiapas.mx – Local tourism site
• Ipade.mx – IPADE Business School, a PanAmerican Graduate University
• Raia.mx – an interactive web-design firm
• Entec.mx – an international building technology solutions provider

Discussion Appendix A – .MX Branding

Two sites from the sample branding .mx logos on a .com.mx mirror site.

Figure 3 (below)

Figure 4 (below)

* Caveats

1. Note that the study conducted is biased not to find results for .mx domains which forward to their .com.mx counterparts. This is presumed to be due to the fact that all results returned using the site:.mx filter are for developed domains, whereas only undeveloped .mx domains are likely to be forwarding to the .com.mx.

For a full comparison, a study under the search filter site:.com.mx would also need to be conducted, and the results contrasted. Sales.mx may carry out such a study in the near future.

2. The method by which Google calculates the order of results on a search query using the filter site:.mx is not known at this time, and there is no guarantee that the results represent a random sampling of all developed .mx domains.  It was noted that the number of sites for certain categories of end-users such as politicians, schools, and radio stations, appeared to be somewhat higher than one would have expected from a completely random distribution.

3. In the 20% of cases where the .com.mx counterpart to a developed .mx domain was found to be unregistered, the methodology of the study does not factor for cases (if they exist) where a .com.mx domain was previously registered to a different owner at the time the .mx domain was first acquired, and later dropped to show as available during the period the study was conducted.  However the author of the study takes the probability for this discrepancy to be extremely low.

Conclusion

One of the greatest challenges faced by a new domain extension, if not the greatest, is achieving a significant level of end-user adoption.  Such adoption is key to establishing traction in the marketplace.

A key question among early investors of .mx since its initial launch little over a year ago, has been the anticipated time-frame for wide-scale public public end-user adoption, (and therefore potential return on investment)  given the already existing and ingrained .com.mx second-level domain.

Here, an analogy is often drawn in public forums between .com.mx/.mx and .co.in/.in (cctld’s for India), wherein the general argument is raised that Mexico’s adoption of the later top-level domain is likely to mirror the similarly slow strides by which India’s .in has advanced on .co.in.

Although the author knows of no such study that was ever conducted within the first year of launch of India’s top-level domain to measure adoption, based on the results of the current study the anecdotal evidence for this analogy when compared to the current data seems to be weak.

The data herein appears to show that Mexico is already embracing .mx and that the new extension could experience an accelerated rate of local end-user adoption, at least more so than has been related concerning  other new top-level country code domains launched in previous years.

A couple of domain blogs including DomainNameWire and DomainNameNews have recently reported on the sale of 888.mx for $10,000 on Sedo.com domain marketplace last week.

If completed this marks the highest publicly reported sale for a .mx domain since launch of the first-level cctld last year.

We will wait until the the sale has been confirmed by DNJournal before posting it to our top 25 .mx sales chart.

In other news the domain Vancouver.mx has reportedly sold for $400 at the T.R.A.F.F.I.C Vancouver domain conference live auction.

NIC Mexico has launched a new website to help promote .mx domains.

SeamosMas.mx

The site appears to be a new promotional tool to help educate and promote .mx domains.  However because the site is built almost entirely with Flash, it cannot be translated using Google Translate.

On the homepage you will find a .mx history machine which is a clever interactive game that walks you through the story of .mx.

There is also a rubix cube that displays the important benefits of .mx domains.

NIC Mexico is also offering a special promotion at this time to register .mx domains for as low as $20 through June 30th, 2010.

If you want to register any new .mx domain names take advantage of this great pricing while you can.  If you would like to make a serious investment in premium keyword generic .mx domains please see our .mx domains for sale.

We are pleased to announce the launch of a news feed dedicated to aggregating online coverage of .mx domains, NIC Mexico, and Mexico internet usage  news from around the web.  The feed will be updated on a weekly basis when new news is available and can be accessed from the News tab in the top menu or simply by following this link:

.mx domain news

Sales.mx is committed to being your #1 resource for up to date information on the top-level .mx domain name market and is happy to provide this service to our visitors.

Latona’s Brokerage has just announced the inventory for today/tomorrow’s Daily Domain Auction. They are running a special .mx theme auction for 200 keyword .mx and .com.mx domains.

The auction will run for 24 hours and end at 8:00 pm EST or 5:00 pm PST on Monday evening (of April 19th, 2010).

The starting bid and reserve on each name is $60 USD.

Here is the full list of .mx domains being auctioned:

Absoluto.mx
Acabar.mx
Acaso.mx
Aceptar.mx
Acercar.mx
Actividad.mx
Acto.mx
Adelaida.mx
Ademas.mx
Advertir.mx
Afectar.mx
Agujero.mx
Airfare.mx
Alabama.mx
Alguno.mx
Alonzo.mx
Alquileres.mx
Amenudo.mx
Anaheim.mx
Anchorage.mx
Annuity.mx
Ano.mx
Anos.mx
Antes.mx
Antioch.mx
Aparecen.mx
Aparecer.mx
Apenas.mx
Apie.mx
Aplicar.mx
Apoyar.mx
Appartments.mx
Apropiado.mx
Aprovechar.mx
Aquel.mx
Aquello.mx
Arkansas.mx
Asegurare.mx
Asunto.mx
AtkinsDiet.mx
Aun.mx
Aunque.mx
Austin.mx
Autoridad.mx
Avanzar.mx
Ayer.mx
Ayudantes.mx
Bagdad.mx
Bald.mx
Baltimore.mx
Banador.mx
Bancarrota.mx
Bargain.mx
Bastante.mx
Bastar.mx
Beatles.mx
Beber.mx
Belgrado.mx
Belladonna.mx
Berne.mx
Bilene.mx
Billete.mx
Blondes.mx
Bola.mx
Bolso.mx
Boobs.mx
Borde.mx
Bordo.mx
Bragas.mx
Brazo.mx
Buen.mx
Buque.mx
Burbank.mx

To see the entire list including .com.mx domains, or to register to bid in this auction visit Latona’s .mx domain auction here.

Digging into a market report on .mx investing from the domain name aftermarket company Sedo which first appeared on their website in January of last year reveals some notable internet trends for Mexico. From the report:

Internet usage in Mexico has been rapidly increasing in the last few years; in 2000 the penetration rate was 2.7% and in May 2007, it was estimated in 21.6% which is approximately 23,700,000 people, and this number is expected to keep growing …

According to the most recent data from InternetWorldStats that number is now grown by nearly another 4 million to a total of 27,600,000 of Mexico’s population.  Also from the report …

a study conducted by IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) shows that investment in online advertisement in Mexico in 2006 was around 50 million dollars, which represents an enormous growth of 62% compared to 2005. In 2007 this figure went up to 96%, reaching the billion dollar mark, and this growing pace is not projected to decrease for the subsequent 5 years.

The report goes on to discuss the pending launch of second-level domain registration under .mx which as we know took place in September of last year.  For further reading the report is available in its entirety here.

With more and more eyeballs and ad dollars projected to come online in Mexico over the coming years now is the time to consider whether or not to invest in .mx domains while it is still relatively early.

In the near future this page will be serving up news and announcements relevant to the Mexico ccTLD space with a focus on .mx top-level-domains, so stay tuned. In the meantime please browse the rest of the site to see the top 25 .mx domain sales to date, as well as a number of premium .mx domain names for sale.

If you are not familiar with what .mx domain names are visit the About Us page to learn more.

There are a number of other exciting features planned to roll-out as the site develops. For now thank you for visiting and please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments.

~ Sales.mx

P.S. The site is also currently undergoing a redesign so if you see some changes over the next weeks don’t be surprised.