American cybersquatters enter foreign markets

    The largest US cybersquatters are starting to buy up hundreds of thousands of domains in other countries. Currently .mx (Mexico), .pl (Poland), as well as dozens of other national domains are in demand.

    CNNMoney magazine compares cybersquatters with real estate investors. Like their colleagues from the offline world, they invest in real estate, but only virtual, and profit from the general increase in market prices. And the prices on the domain market are constantly growing as the growth of online advertising. What is characteristic, this growth is now strongly felt not only in the USA, but also in many other countries. Due to online advertising, the entire virtual economy is growing and domain prices are rising, and there is also the opportunity to profit from “parked” domains, which has now become common practice.

    Recently, noticeable activity of American cybersquatters has been observed in the domain zones .eu (European Union), .es (Spain), .cn (China) and .br (Brazil), as well as in some others.

    After the recent opening of a new .eu domain, hundreds of thousands of domain names were registered in the very first days (the .eu zone immediately reached eighth place on the Internet in terms of the number of domains). Some of them were immediately put up for auction. In July, the Hotels.eu domain was sold for $ 330,000, and Shopping.eu for $ 200,000.

    Experts explain the reason for the entry of American cybersquatters into foreign markets. They behave like investors and seek to diversify their portfolio. In many countries, the potential of their own domain zones is far from exhausted. According to the director of the domain auction Sedo, currently the most relevant markets are .mx (Mexico) and .pl (Poland) zones. However, the market is starting to overheat in some other countries.

    For example, Russian cybersquatters complain that recently it has become almost impossible to work, because Denis Gledenov buys at auction about half of all free domains on the Russian Internet. According to estimates, his property already has more than 4,000 domains in the .ru zone. Denis Gledenov has long been working in the Russian market and claims to be the most famous cybersquatter in Russia.

    However, even he is far from sharks of Western imperialism, who can freely afford to buy up 400,000 domain names, as iReit has done over the past year and a half .. According to information from unofficial sources, this company recently spent several million dollars on the purchase of a collection of domains in the zones .de (Germany), .nl (Netherlands) and .fr (France). Now the company is trying to enter the markets of India and China. It is possible that soon the American capitalists will get to the Russian market.

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