Originally Posted by igor

".ru" is mostly used in Russia and highly prefered in comparison to ".com"

I would not call ".ru" an emerging trend.

It is pretty establsihed and populated by domainers.

There are plenty of local forums in Russian where domainers share and trade.
Hard to see this forum will be very popular (, but good luck anyway).

Prices are relatively high too.

russia.ru was sold several times with the end-user tag was around $200k.

Some domainers start looking into ".com" as alternative - though I do not see benefits here.
zoloto.com (gold in Russian) was recenly sold on Sedo for around $17k.

Everyone is waiting for a new ".***1088;***1092;" (Russian Federation) extention coming with Russian letters only.
This should solve the problem of writing Russian words in English - for some letters there are several ways possiple to write a Russian letter in English.
This may be a good investing opportunity.