I’ve written a number of articles over the past year on the looming problem of the Chinese debt situation. It’s currently just shy of 300% of GDP and this doesn’t bode well for domain investors reliant on cheap Chinese capital to purchase their domains at hugely inflated prices. So should we really panic?

I saw the following charts in a recent Bloomberg article that puts the Chinese debt problem into perspective. What’s interesting about this chart is that China’s flatter line shows that it’s not getting as big a GDP bang for its debt buck compared to some other nations. Also notice that Germany is retiring debt even while sharply increasing its GDP per capita.

The USA is continuing to increase debt while getting a lot of GDP per capita from it.....but the debt still continues to increase. At some stage the piper has to be paid and if the current trends continue it will be more when not if.

I’m a self-confessed data junky. I love my numbers and if they can be plotted on a graph so I can see a trend then so much the better! Domain investors live and die by their numbers. If you ignore looking at the stats then you can miss out on some significant opportunities and take bullets rather than dodging them.

Beyond the numbers and charts is understanding how to interpret them and how they may impact your business decisions. From a very high level there are a number of charts that I like to pay attention to and in this article, I’ll step you through them.

World-wide Growth in Internet Users

Ultimately underpinning every e-commerce transaction is a person wanting to buy, watch, click or doing anything. If the number of Internet users suddenly began decreasing then I can guarantee that it’s going to have a big impact on your business.

I’ve just arrived home after traveling for 38 hours in multiple flying tin cans. An Air Berlin plane delay combined with their baggage handlers walking off the job played havoc with the itinerary and caused us to miss our connecting flights in both Dusseldorf and Dubai. Got to love air travel.

I pointed out to the Air Berlin ticketing agent that the measly 10 euros of compensation could not even buy us a sandwich and a bottle of water at the airport. At which point the person next to me in another line completely agreed. As you can imagine, Air Berlin is now at the top of my list of “never fly again” airlines. Enough of the complaining.....!

My first stop on this European business trip was Madrid. It’s a fascinating city with a great old quarter and some of the most modern artistic architecture I’ve ever witnessed. It was also the host of the ICANN GDD summit. Unlike many ICANN policy centered, sleep inducing, events the GDD was a hive of activity.

I’ve just spent the last couple of hours reading reports and listening to updates on publicly listed company, Rightside, post their sale of Enom. Trawling through all the data has been confusing to say the least with numbers from different sources not seeming to correlate with each other. After all of this what are my conclusions?

With the sale of Enom, Rightside is putting more of its eggs in the new gTLD basket. Is this a brilliant move or more of a train wreck in slow motion? Obviously, a lot will depend upon the growth in the ngTLD market.

nTLDstats.com is suggesting Rightside grew their number of registered ngTLDs by 29,537 last quarter which means they are growing at about 13%. From a revenue perspective, they managed to increase by 23% in Q1 2017 compared to Q1 2016. All these are good healthy numbers.

Eric Lyon is one of the moderators at domain industry forum NamePros. In this video he shares some advice for old time domain investors as well as newbies to the industry. He also talks about Scorpion agency, his design and brand management company that works with clients all over the world.

I hope you enjoy hearing from one of the very special people in our industry as he shares from the heart his thoughts on domaining.