Hello all,
I had the delightfully serendipitous experience of finding this blog and website not long ago. I suspect my bookmarks on it will get worn out!

A little about myself....
I'm a dual-citizen American and have lived and worked in several different countries. I attended graduate school in Northern Europe (Sweden) and did research on international real estate opportunities in Scandinavia (great opportunities by the way so check it out, especially in the self-storage market - feel free to contact me to know more about it or google the Federation of European Self Storage Associations).

Before that, I worked for a start-up in Fairfield, CT (yes the hedge-fund capital of teh world ) which was one of the earlier pioneers of streaming video.

I enjoy studying personal development and traveling. My husband-to-be is also Scandinavian.


In particular, I would like to share some of the research I have uncovered on ccTLD opportunities in Northern Europe so feel free to ask me any questions about that. I am new to domaining but would like to develop a speciality with regard to ccTLDs in Scandinavia and the Baltics (where some of the highest connectivity rates in the world are). I've actually done a fair amount of research on this.

Thanks for setting this up and I look forward to learning and contributing here as best I can.

Welcome aboard!
It's great to have a person who is willing to share their ccTLD experience with others. If there is anything that I can do to help faciliate this then please don't hesitate to ask.

Michael (Whizzbang)

Thanks for your reply. This weekend for instance, I took the liberty of using Excel to analyze some of the ccTLD data from your Domainfest Powerpoint presentation. One idea would be to compare total internet users to countries where the country code extension outranks the .com (a recent example is Spain).

Just like .nets bleed into .coms (i.e. a lot of owners of .netss lose traffic to the .com) I've noticed a trend where insular domestic companies own the ccTLD but not the .com! This of course has provided instant, built in traffic for the .co owners.

With regard to ccTLD as I think you and others have mentioned, regulation is an important factor. If one is dealing with a valuable asset, in some cases, there is serious concern as to weather your domain name could be taken right from out of you if you are a foreign business concern.


With regard to facilitating the sharing of knowledge when it comes to ccTLDs (or any other maket opportunity for that matter), I think it just takes people willing to open up in order to work together.

I think an interesting place to start would be to have a list of drop catchers in some of the top countries of profiled in your PP presentation. I found a Chinese drop catcher if anyone is interested (going to get an American friend who speaks chinese to assist me with that project).

I'm happy that you found the presentation useful for searching for domains.

I couldn't agree more with you about the bleed of ccTLDs into the .com domains.

Your point on drop catchers in an interesting one. I think that there are a LOT of really smart people in this industry doing some pretty innovative things in this area.