A NNNNN.com case study: 95539.com and Google

Over the past few days, a buzz has been going around about NNNNN.com's, dotcom domain names consisting of five numbers. (A website, listed in our NuDom Roll, which we just created on the (right) sidebar, has even been launched to devote discussion just to the topic of the 'countdown' to the day when there are no NNNNN.com's left.) There are all sorts of reasons why domainers are registering NNNNN.com's, however the most common reason has been for zip codes. Internet companies, such as Marchex, Inc., have been, for years, buying up NNNNN.tld's that correspond with U.S. zip codes and incorporating them into online directory networks. On the product listing page of Marchex's website, it states that the company 'owns and operates a network of more than 200,000 local and vertical Web sites....Example Web sites include...tens of thousands of ZIP Code Web sites, such as www.90210.com covering 96% of all ZIP Code areas nationwide.'

Adding our 2 cents to this buzz, we remember when, in 2006, Google, Inc., owned the five-digit pure numeric domain 95539.com, which redirected to Google.com. The mystery of why did Google own that domain hasn't been solved - at least to our knowledge. We did research - way back 'then' - and figured out that it had something to do with the Chinese marketplace. 95539.com fell within a range of popular (registered) domains beginning with 955**.com that were being developed in China. Those dotcom five-digit numeric domains corresponded with the five-digit telephone 'shortcodes' for many service hotlines of Chinese banks, insurance companies and so on. Those Chinese companies were registering and developing (or redirecting) numeric domains that corresponded with their hotline/shortcode. Chinese companies were building on a trend that U.S. internet companies had begun early on but hasn't caught on. One example in the U.S. is 47669.com (47669, or 4SONY, is the shortcode owned by SONY).

We could never figure out if Google was going to set up a hotline number at 95539 for Google China. In 2007, 95539.com redirected to cs-air.com, a website for China Southern Airlines whose HotLine number in China is (8620) 95539. (Cs-air.com now redirects to Csair.com, the main website for Chinese visitors to China Southern Airlines.) In 2008, 95539.com appears to be owned by a domainer in China who is building a website portal for airlines.