Unlocking the Power of Domains in Brazil: It’s the Language Stupid

Portuguese is the third most widely used Latin-based language by native speakers according to most estimates.

This statistic has particular personal relevance for me. When I realized that the ASCII/English domain gold was already mined, I next turned to Spanish which was still mostly tapped but I still walked away with some solid names such as Gabinetes.com (“cabinets”). Then I started buying Portuguese domains such as Roupa.com (“clothing”), Capacetes.com (“helmets”) etc., which at the time were seen as speculative junk. However, given the roughly 178,000,000 native speakers, I thought that this was a risk well worth taking.

As such, I was thrilled to see Imoveis.com.br (“real estate” in Portuguese) sitting high up on the DNJournal sales chart for $231,500. Note that it is not an English word with a foreign ccTLD, but at the core of the name’s value is in the foreign word “Imoveis”.

The .com.br ccTLD has been trouncing .com in terms of usage when it comes to Brazilian businesses. And though it is is somewhat entrenched, I forsee a bright future for both the .com and .com.br extensions when it comes to Portuguese.

As some Portuguese words are IDNs, as they contain non-Latin characters or accents, this clearly bodes well for Portuguese IDNs as well.

However, the green shoots of growth in the Portuguese market embolden me to think bigger –that the entire path of investing in foreign language language domains is a ripening area that is just beginning to reap rewards. Moreover, it is time for you too to get over your squeamishness and go beyond the Latin-based languages to invest in Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Thai, Arabic and others.