I recently stumbled on a Facebook Group post which led me to a list of the top 500 websites in Vietnam. I can't confirm the datasources for the list but from my time living in Vietnam, reading articles from Vietnamese sources, and also visiting most of the 500 websites myself for this research I believe it to be a fairly accurate list.
I went down this rabbit hole because I find marketing & branding in Vietnam to be very fascinating and I also have a mild obsession with domain names. My goal for this was to understand which TLDs are used most for top websites in Vietnam.
Some relevant domain name terminology:
TLD = top level domain (This is the end of a domain name - For example, in the domain name www.example.com, the top-level domain is .com.)
ccTLD = country-code top-level domains: Two-letter domains established for countries or territories. (For example the ccTLD for the domain name of this blog is .io - the ccTLD for the British Indian Ocean Territory & .vn is the ccTLD for Vietnam)
I took the effort to put the list of the 500 domains into a Google Sheet & then proceeded to tweak the data to get the TLD of all the domain names. Here are the results:
One can see by an overwhelming amount that the .vn domain name is the most used TLD by top Vietnam sites at 46% of the TLDs. Next is .com with 25% of TLDs used, it is still the preferred TLD in the world & most appropriate for any company that aspires to reach an audience beyond the Vietnam market.
As Vietnam gears up to be a more digital society by 2030, I hope this quick TLD analysis helps budding entrepreneurs when thinking about their branding and company names. My advice on domains for Vietnamese startups is to pick a domain name with a .com ending if you have ambitions beyond the Vietnam market but also have the matching .vn domain name if a large number of your early customers/users are in Vietnam.
One last thought, if most of your users aren't finding you through a website but instead a mobile app you can also explore other TLDs such as .io, .me, & .co - these domains have grown in popularity around the world & are commonly used by startup companies. Even Zalo, made by one of the top tech companies in Vietnam - VNG, uses the .me TLD for their main messaging application & most recently they again chose to use the .me TLD for their new video conferencing application, Zavi.
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Thanks for reading!