After six years of planning, the essential new Chinese TLDs Dot Chinese Online (.在线) and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) are now in fully-open, worldwide availability!

Today at 13:00 UTC, the final milestone -- General Availability, or "GA" for short -- was reached and the top level domains went fully online.

within 50 minutes of General Availability, Dot Chinese Online rocketed to the global number 4 position for New gTLDs, and Dot Chinese Website shot to global number 9 for New gTLDs.  This ranking is calculated by the number of Domains Under Management (DUMs).

Much has been written about the journey to today's milestone. Howevert we want this post to focus on the present, rather than the past.

As of the last minute before GA, the total number of domains in Dot Chinese Online (.在线) totalled 9,803, and the total number of domains in Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) totalled 8,623. According to the global leaderboard, this ranks Dot Chinese Online (.在线) at number 19 globally, and Dot Chinese Website (.中文网) at number 21 globally.

Pre-GA, these positions were significant: no other non-ASCII TLD was in the global top-50. 

Pre-GA, the next ranked non-ASCII TLD (known in the domain industry as an "IDN", or Internationalized Domain Name) was Google's own Japanese TLD, "Dot Minna" (.みんな) -- it means "everyone", and was at the time of writing ranked at global number 52, with 3,455 domains under management. The first IDN TLD to go live, the Arabic "Dot Shabaka" (.شبكة ) was ranked at number 70, with 1,885 domains, and the next two IDN TLDs on the global rankings were .ОНЛАЙН (.online in Russian) with 1,246 domains, with and .САЙТ (.site in Russian) with 619 domains. The first Chinese IDN TLD after Dot Chinese Online and Dot Chinese Website was the recently-entered-Sunrise .移动 (.mobile in Chinese), with a total of 293 domains.

Our admittedly immodest analysis is that Dot Chinese Online and Dot Chinese Website were gratifyingly successful in their lead-up to GA.

The results one hour after Dot Chinese Online and Dot Chinese Website entered General Availability were much, much better:

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News about our launch from around the web was incorrectly reported in the first hour of GA. Due to a calculation error, registry-reserved domain names were included in the total domains under management. While some New gTLD registries have done this in the past, TLD Registry does not do so. The error in calculations was not the fault of the bloggers who reported the news -- fault lies entirely with an incorrect method of calculation done in the heat of the launch. We regret any inconvenience caused.