IDN Domain Blog - international domain name talk

Microsoft has announced it will finally release IE7 this month. The update of the new Internet Explorer browser will be via the automatic updates. This means we can expect that more Microsoft Window users will make the transition from IE6 to IE7 since it’s automatic. No word yet for the official release for international versions. Let’s just hope it’s soon.

IE7 Is Coming This Month…Are you Ready?

The final release of IE7 is fast approaching … and I mean really fast … and will be delivered to customers via Automatic Updates a few weeks after it’s available for download. We want to ensure that you are ready and the information below will help get you there.

After IE7 international version is released many of us who are IDN site developers, investors, content providers etc. expect the traffic to our existing sites to increase. The more people globally that see IDN Domains the more common they become gradually.

You can read the whole blog here at IDN Forums: IE7 set to release October 2006

Or via Microsoft’s Blog: IE7 Is Coming This Month…Are you Ready?

If you want to read more about IDN Domains you can do so at our forum: IDN Domain Forum : www.idnforums.com
or read our IDN Domain Blog : www.idnforums.com/blog/

It’s almost a year since IDN Forums was launched. A year ago many domain investors labeled IDN domains worthless because they felt they couldn’t generate any revenue from parking. Earlier this year NameDrive was the first parking service to let IDN investors park IDN domains showing the domains as unicode instead of punycode.

Then finally we were able to display targeted ads in native languages. This was geotargetted so a user in Japan would see Japanese ads & a user in the US would just see English ads. This was exactly what I & others had waited for. Even though final release of IE7 which will be IDN compatible wouldn’t come until the end of 2006 I was sure now that native ads are showing up, we can just get traffic from search engines & make a hefty profit.

Up until now my portfolio was getting an average of $.34 per click, in Japan most of my domains are bidded on at Overture for over $2 a click up to over $20 a click. With a 22% CTR on 600 IDN domains. I started thinking just by search traffic alone if each domain could get just 5 uniques a day
Even if I round off the numbers
600 domains X 5 unique users X 30 days X $.25 per click X 20% Click through rate
That’s a potential of $4,500 a month
(These stats are only the potential in the target region)

So as the months went on I started to wonder, why aren’t my IDNs getting traffic from the search engines at least? If the domains are indexed with relative content then they should at least get picked up for some related terms. They were displaying Japanese ads in Japan.

Then I went & checked on Yahoo! & realized something that would help our domains gain equal ground as ASCII domains. Yahoo! & Google are US based search engines. Yahoo! Japan & Google Japan do not control the search database in Japan. Google.co.jp & Yahoo.co.jp just use the data provided by the US office. The reason why this is important is because the data crawlers all have US IPs. Even though we can see Japanese ads on the pages in Japan, Google Japan, & Yahoo! Japan only have data supplied by the crawlers from the US. This data was just English content, which means we couldn’t rank for anything in search results.

This week NameDrive has upgraded their system to allow more international based ads to show up in all regions. This means the search engines will start to pick up relative content in the correct language the domain is in. Once this happens we have the potential of achieving my goal of 5 uniques a day even before IE7 is launched.

I know many will wonder why we would want ads to show up worldwide. When you think of it not as an English speaker, English is showed worldwide, why shouldn’t a Japanese domain always show Japanese ads? Why shouldn’t a Chinese domain always show Chinese ads? I personally want conversions, on my parked sites. Chinese are all over the globe & not just in Asia. A better conversion rate can be achieved by a Chinese person going to a Chinese domain with related ads in Chinese. This can be in Beijing, San Francisco, Boston, Paris, anywhere.

So since parked pages can finally show related targetted text finally we are moving in the right direction to monetize IDN Domains. Most members with optimized portfolios are already showing growth, with this new change I think by the end of November there will be more members with portfolios making X,XXX a month.

Just remember the guys who hooked you up…

You can join IDNForums.com if you are interested in IDN Domains. We will be one year old on September 11, 2006.

If you have IDN Domains you can Also park them at NameDrive.

Last month NamePros.com was added to the list of Domain Forums to create an IDN Domain section for users. I believe the section was created because of constant request by few but it’s finally there.
Since NamePros is a free online domaining community it has the ability of reaching out to a variety of domainers.

I commend RJ & Team for looking into the IDN Market, & letting his users discuss the progression of the IDN Market on NP. The IDN Market isn’t for every domainers but many domainers who are of various ethnicities can at least explore their interest on NamePros.

Good going guys…

You can go to NamePros IDN section here:

http://www.namepros.com/idn-discussion/

Today someone sent me a link to this Japanese Blog.
http://www.hyperposition.com/se3blog/yahoo/search/20060526093106.html
It’s an SEO Blog that has noticed that Yahoo! Japan has perhaps changed it’s algorithm. The changed seemed odd to him but it seemed like the evolution that I felt all of us were gearing up for.

He noticed for the first time that in Yahoo! Japan searches were pulling up IDN Domains.

These are the terms he searched for

備後
備中
伊予

Then on my own I noticed for even being a huge train station
You search for Shibuya Station
渋谷駅

& The IDN domain pops up as # 3 in the search…

I tried to tell people that the IDN Domains are going to have a strong value for SEO in languages…. Time to develop a few IDN Domains…

How long before iREIT starts to pick up IDN Portfolios?

Since IDN Forums members currently hold the vast majority of Premium IDNs in multiple languages I’m wondering when an entity like iREIT will start to target this market. Recently iREIT acquired a portion of Nester’s domain portfolio but it is not apparent yet if their IDN Portfolio was included in this deal.

Many of us know that Nester has a vast amount of IDN Domains from drops through the years in multiple languages. Also these are pretty high quality domains from my remembering running through their portal in searching for Japanese IDNs.

Will iREIT use Nester’s data to consider whether or not to purchase more portfolios? Will iREIT in the future come directly to IDNForums members? I can personally say that most members have a variety of real premium generics in expanding markets. According to the report on DNJournal that the Yellow Pages of Canada bought a Portfolio of .ca of just about 400 domains for 2.5 million dollars. This makes you realize that an IDN Portfolio holder doesn’t have to have a few thousand to hold prime internet real estate.

The other situation is that members are swiftly evolving techniques & buying patterns other investors are getting wind that IDNs is the area to get into. Will they wait till the market saturates & they can’t buy portfolios or single domains for cheap prices? I got a feeling that some are already adjusting their budgets to acquire some IDN Portfiolios but who is going to be first to do it?

Look for the lastest in IDN News at IDNForums.com
Also this info was taken from DN Journal’s Lowdown

IDN Domains at Domain Name Roundtable
IDN Domains will be presented for discussion at the Domain Roundtable this year. It’s really a 360 degree turn from last year when IDN Domains were totally ignored on domain sites, & now it’s regarded as the next domain goldrush.

But what will it bring for us who already hold large portfolios? The Domain Roundtable is not for the domain spectator it’s specifically for those in the field with the cash to put out for high end investments. Will those investors & business’ hire teams to wipe out the rest of the domains we (IDN Forum members) didn’t register yet? Will they just go straight to the source & buy out portfolios of those members who own 500 to 4000 premium Domains in various languages?

I posed this question on the forum & would extend the invitation for you to discuss potential outcomes.

You can read the prewriteup on the Domain Roundtable by Ron Jackson on DNJournal.com
Domain Roundtable Preview on DNJournal

You can Discuss this with us at IDN Forums
IDN Domains at Domain Roundtable

As I launched my first Japanese IDN site with a .jp extension I started to realize a bit of a difference between using an IDN with a dot com extension & a dot jp.

Japan Registry reminds me of Network Solutions of years back when I started to buy domains for my online projects. You bought the domain but it took about a day for the whois to update. I see many posting dot jps IDN Domains directly after they purchase them. Currently we don’t even know if the domain sites registering jp domains are in realtime because after the purchase if you check immediately afterwards on several domain sites the domain is sometime still shown as being available.

When adding a domain to your server you must still add the domain as punycode. When you change over the nameserver that also can take a day to transfer over.

The best part of using the dot jp was in firefox if you type in a dot com IDN Domain it will resolve to the punycode. With the IDN dot jps Firefox never resolves to the punycode. It stays as a native Japanese term in the browser.

The site I made is an online tutorial, currently I’m promoting it within a popular Japanese social network so I can see the direct feedback & comments. Mac users can use IDN Domains already so this is the best way to get feedback on what young Japanese think. So far what I’ve never heard from a single Japanese person here in Japan is “why do need IDN Domains” or “we can’t use those”. 100% of the people I’ve informed that they can use them thought that they are better than using English Domains for Japanese. This also isn’t media hype.. It’s a fact.

IDN Domain Market Expands

Recently after months of telling domainers about the potential of IDN Domains people are finally starting to pay attention. I’m personally glad I got in early though.

After we launched IDN Forums member Huron opened up IDNPros.com & joined together with IDNChat.com to create the second purely IDN Focused community.

Then we have IDNers at www.IDNers.com a site with information about IDN Domains in general. IDNers also has IDNBlog.com an IDN Blog.

IDNTools.net makes a great amount of tools available to the IDN world.

Then as a surprise to me DNForum added too IDN sections recently one for general questions & then one this week for IDN Sales.

DomainState.com also added an IDN section this week on their forum.

NamePros.com is about the only large domain site not to add an IDN section but I think if someone made a suggestion they’d probably add it soon.

The market expanded a lot quicker than most of us pioneers expected. We thought we’d have at least another year of non competitive space to get more inventory. Cover’s blown I guess I need to pull out the credit card & get the stuff I left unregistered.

Also members of IDN Forums can examine my entire premium Japanese Domain Portfolio, over 160 pure valuable Japanese IDN domains.

IDNForum’s Member Touchring posted a link to an excellent article that explains why we IDNers are investing in IDN domains.

The original ink is here:

http://www.igoldrush.com/feat2.htm

After you read it you’ll know it doesn’t mention a word about IDN Domains. Actually the interview is about Domaining in 1996. That’s 10 years ago & lots of have changed. The interview was done with Matthew Barzun VP, Software Services at CNET (at the time the interview was done). CNET at the time owned Search.com, Download.com, TV.com, & Gamecenter.com.

The interview is about his domain investing for the company. Things that he points out really applies to looking for solid investments in IDNs. He had 3 points that he could sum up in 2 points.

Our strategy for selecting domain names is simple: the name should:

* describe as simply as possible what the WWW site does
* be easy to remember (important for word-of-mouth marketing)
* be easy to spell
Which could be broken down into: keep it simple & straightforward.

Many domainers are really forgetting these points because in the regular domain world these simple domains were bought up years ago & only the elite & rich have the chance of acquiring these kinds of domains in English.

Thinking of IDN domains we have all applied these strategies to our IDN portfolios.

The Points:
* describe as simply as possible what the WWW site does
Not every person can apply English to their own language for the function of a site. Most simple terms in English are far gone & registered.

* be easy to remember (important for word-of-mouth marketing)
I get some people that tell me because of Japanese kanji a word that sounds like kami for example can have 2 different kanjis based on what the word means. I’ll explain a little bit better because usually people never reverse their own thinking & put the same logic into their own language. If you have shopping site, & you own buy.com & you tell people your site is buy.com, most likely they know what word you are talking about. When people tell me the kanji is confusing if you own a shopping site how many people will go to by.com??? Sounds the same doesn’t it? Does to me.
If you own kami.com & tell people you have an online shop about hair products. They will automatically go to 髪.com, if you have a site that has paper products they will go to 紙.com (paper). What’s easier than that?

* be easy to spell
I’ll put it this way. If you think Japanese, Chinese, or Russians like trying to write domain names in English or figuring out how to, then you probably can’t understand this point. Easy to spell means writing something in your own language that you don’t even have to think about to spell. This is the reason why type ins are so low from countries that doesn’t have a Roman/Latin based character set. People in these countries usually writes the term in their native language in the search engine to find the sites. Even if they’ve been there plenty of times before. Most people’s default page is a search engine.

To reduce it to two words: simple and straightforward…
This explains a great deal. Simple & straightforward in a foreign language to the end user just messes up this concept. Simple & straightforward. IDN domains to users in the language you target are just that simple, straightforward, easy to understand, a piece of cake to explain what their site is.

If you want to know more about IDN Domains please feel free to discuss the development of IDNs at IDNForums located at www.IDNForums.com.
The first & largest forum dedicated to IDN Domains.

Since it’s my business to buy, sell, & develop Japanese IDN Domains using the Japanese version of Overture tool (OVTjp) is essentially to base some value on Japanese terms. I realize though that not all IDNers are fluent in Japanese & type in terms by hand.

I noticed this before & forgot to comment on it because I forgot the example to use. In Japanese there are 3 writing systems used together. Katakana mainly for foreign words & hiragana which is like an alphabet system & kanji which are Chinese characters.

I looked up the term mail friend (not for personal reasons but.. for research)

メル友 gives me 89395 searches in December
メルトモ which is the same thing in katakana

The results in overture are the same which means that there possibly maybe two ways to write a phrase. If you search for a term in hiragana & or katakana & it produces the results in kanji (Chinese characters) it most likely means that it is written both ways frequently…