Doing a deeper dive into the domain name market in South Korea

Now that I’ve been in South Korea for about a week I can tell you that .kr and .co.kr are everywhere, seriously, just about every ad, billboard, receipt, etc. has a .kr or .co.kr domain on it. Earlier this week I wrote an article about the sales history of .kr and .co.kr domains in 2019 and well, there isn’t much of it.

While it could be that not many sales are reported, given that South Korea does have a population of 51M which is larger than Canada, and there’s lots of publicly reported .CA data, I think the reality is there’s probably a lot more domain sales volume here than we’d think.

I know a number of domain investors in Canada that have done quite well with .CA, so I imagine there are domain investors here in Korea that are doing well with .kr and .co.kr, but who are they and where are they buying and selling their names?

I’ve decided to start to ask around to see if some of the domain investors that I know in Asia know a bit more about the domain market here. While Sedo came up as the main venue for sales based on the NameBio data I looked at, I’m guessing there’s a go-to domain marketplaces here that none of us know about that’s probably facilitating a lot of these deals.

If any of my readers know more about the market I’d love to hear more. Either way, I’m curious enough to investigate since it’s been pretty eye-opening to see just how prevalent the .kr and .co.kr extensions are in a country with a very meaningful population and that’s also famous for their proclivity for technology and innovation.

South Korea was named the most innovative economy on earth (source) and the US barley made the top ten clocking in at #8…so if the US has such a thriving domain market, I’ll bet South Korea does too, we just don’t know about it.

So stay-tuned, as I continue to learn more about the domain market here I’ll be sharing it with all of you. Know something about the .kr or .co.kr domain market? I’d love to hear from you, comment below and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton