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/

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.

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/

Now I’m just wondering which Domain Parking service will bid for my domain ドメインパーキング.com, net, & jp “Domain Parking”. Don’t take it personal guys it’s business…

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…

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

Picked up this week on DNJournal 8 of the 47 Japanese Prefectures were bought as a package deal by IDN Forums member Alphamale for $15,000. These domains are sought after because the dot jp equivalents are reserved by the Japanese Registry.

The sale of 東京.net started this uproar of domainers seeking country. city, & State domains in native languages with it’s sale of $10,000 by IDNForums member Rubber Duck (formally known as DWrixon).

There are still 36 Prefectures left in the dot com extensions. I believe IDNForums members actually own a large percentage of them. I myself own the IDN Domain for Kyoto Prefecture.

Let’s see where these sales end up in a years time.

(Article corrected originally 11 of 47 Prefectures was written but it was actually

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

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.

You can find “Rubber Duck” on IDN Forums & his portfolio of over 3,200 IDN Domains in various languages.

Congratulations to a great start for all of us IDNers…