Japanese IDNers - time to add comments to this post

[Asiaplay]

Hi Blue,

Thanks for stopping by... as I told people what is good is that you are taking the time to learn about IDNs - and to be honest this is the only forum I know which has any up to date information (and perhaps dnlocal.com as well).
As you know I am also your good friends, good friend and the person who started this post.

IDNs are quite a new area and many do not understand them, as language & cultural skills really help when looking at what is a good IDN.

Also not a lot of testing which has been done has been made public - partly as people are earning from this (and also at the stage of building their portfolios and therefore do not want to give out too much help to would be competitors)... this is true of any newish market.

Please understand that people here have explained things a thousand times - and therefore sometimes are lazy to do this again.
To see this - look at the number of posts some people here have made (and you will see that many posting in this particular thread have posted 1000s of comments which people can learn from).

There are also a few hot-heads in here - so bear with their comments (basically people only really share once they see the newbie doing the same).

True - there are also counter arguments and points that need to be thought about (not all that is said in these forums and elsewhere is true - what we are seeing is a big kickback from the ascii domain community, which personally I see as lack of understanding that not everyone can understand English and as they have a lot of potential losses coming when people realise that IDN version of a word actually has higher search ratings and type-ins than the English version does for given countries).
Namely - why would you buy salmon.com when the Japanese version has much higher monthly search hits & recall?

Firstly, I must admit that I am not the best to reply - and this is partly why I started this post... hoping that some people who are even more informed than myself would do so. Some have in part, but often they are missing out the details you need.

I will however try to answer some of your questions and make some comments:-

a) Your Exampe of Nihongho.com
It is of course best to own as many options of a domain (ascii) and IDN as one can for a particular topic area - for this you are correct.

However what you will find is that if you search these terms you will get quiet different hit rates (and there possible earnings ratio returns).
There are a few tools which assist in knowing what the search rates are, one is a Overture Stats tool and for simplification lets use that for now - see http://inventory.overture.com/d/sear...estion/?mkt=jp

The results come out as follows:-
Keyword Term / Searches per Month
"日本語" / 21655
"nihongo" / 840
"にほんご / 0 (is used with other characters - but never used by itself)
"ニホンゴ" / 33
"にっぽんご" / 27
Unfortunately there is no direct English word for this Japanese term - closest I think would be "Japanese Language" I guess (as "Japanese" is not a fair translation, as this is like adding "日本" to every term ever searched and would be biased in this example) - 314 is the search results for "Japanese Language".

So what we can clearly see here is that you would lose very little if you only owned "日本語" - as 96% of all searches in Japan are for the "日本語" term.

b) Examples of IDN Sales
Please note that the majority of these at the moment are done behind closed doors and figures are not disclosed - therefore although some here know they will not disclose this information publicly (normally at the buyers request).
I am sure you are aware of what ascii domains sell for (e.g. highest I know of so far is US$345 Million for business.com).
Basically what this shows is a domain or IDN is very much like properties & other equities - they are worth whatever anyone is prepared to pay for them.
There is however one list I know of which lists sales of IDNs which have become public - please see http://www.idntools.net/idnsales.php

I can not comment on the price for the 3 domains you listed on stipley too much - as I did not set the price. But I speculate that the logic is as follows:-
i) They represent a very expensive estate, where rentals per month can be even higher than the asking price of the IDNs.
ii) There are people living in this housing estate who have more money than they can spend in a lifetime (and who have money to spend on something they like - be it a porshce or an e-mail address, homepage which represents them.
iii) In this case the person owns what is considered by many to be the only good extensions for domains - the .net, .com and the .jp
iv) This term is slang and can not be trademarked (the official version of the estate name can be - and therefore can not ever be owned by one single resident).

c) What are IDNs used for?
This is important so you can understand why people are not jumping forward with examples to back up their comments. I have seen some of the results and know they are true.
Basically they are used for the following two things:-

i) General Websites
The same as any website is used - for online sales, company or product introductions and so-on.

ii) Advert Websites
The idea of these is that people earn from the adverts that are listed on the pages.
Browse around in the forums and you will see many of these.
The basic idea is someone either goes via a search engine or direct type-in of the IDN name to get to the website.
Once there if they click on one of the adds people earn between a few cents and a few dollars.
Why are they earning - as others are paying for adverts which lead to clicks to their websites.
The companies behind this have rules to stop people from cheating the system and sitting behind their pc mouse and clicking dollars into their bank accounts.
Namely they ban sites where it appears this has happened - and often also totally ban the person or company that has the account (this can lead to tens of thousands of dollars of lost revenue overnight - as account gets closed).
For this reason people are very reluctant to list their websites in public forums where it could lead to them being banned.
I am sure you can understand this - and this is also why Jacksonm will have to explain his jump in hits and advert clicks on those domains (luckily in this case he can).

d) Why would people want their domain to be a keyword?
This is the same as for English - basically it is for two reasons, as I understand it:-

i) Direct Type-ins
This is where someone types the IDN or domain name directly into the URL Navigation box and goes to the website.
What is known with ascii domains is that this is very common (looking for diamonds, then type in diamonds.com - not a difficult thing to understand people do.
More recently with Firefox, Opera, Safari etc. being taken up within Asia, what the guys are now seeing is people doing exactly this - typing the website name in directly.
Obviously this is also the point of advertising that is not net click based - namely someone remembers your IDN or domain name and types it in to get to your website.

ii) Increase in Search Engine Page Position
This suggests that their is a link between the name of a website and how well it is ranked by a Search Engine.
Obviously the Search Engines do not publish their formulas (or people would just follow that and be at the top - which defeats the idea of creating a good search engine).
However tests for both domains and IDNs have shown clearly that there is a distinct advantage in the formulas if your website name matches what is being searched for. Which once again makes sense - why wouldn't a website named "日本語" be about the Japanese Language?
There is also one other important interesting point here - namely there are other factors which effect page position / ranking (and endless posts on the internet about this) - as you know this is called SEO (and among other things includes "relevant content", "size of titles" etc..
However - all these other things someone else can do to ensure they gain a high position with the search engines... the differentiating factor that only a few can have is the advantage of having the website name matching the search term / keyword.

e) Problems which still exist for IDNs
The sole biggest problem for IDNs at the moment is that a large percentage of people use Internet Explorer as a browser.
The problem here is that only IE7 can resolve the punnycode ascii version of a doman into the characters it really represents - earlier versions merely show the punnycode ascii xn-xxxxxxx.com type look (which does not help much as people do not see the domain name clearly... and when you might click on or remember "日本語", would you click on or remember "xn--wgv71a119e" (I think it is fair to say unlikely anyone would remember it and less would click on it).

There is also one other issue, which I am not 100% clear on myself - and that is an e-mail issue (namely that at present if you use and e-mail address abc@xn--wgv71a119e.xx it will work, but only recent versions of Mail software can accept / resolve abc@日本語.xx (note xx obviously here means .jp, .com, .net .cc .ws etc. etc.).

f) Why is there a preference for .com, .net & .jp
The reasons behind this are as follows:-
i) .com is a well known brand & it is assumed that more than often people when typing in will choose to type the .com extension.
ii) Some browsers default to the top search engine result (and others to the .com when a person just types the keyword without an extension into the navigation bar).
iii) TLDs (Top Level Domains) should get a position in search results based on the fact that they are a certain language - namely it makes sense than .com or .net or .biz or .tv etc. get included in results for searches in Japan when the domain name is in Japanese (tests have shown that they do for Google - but less so for Yahoo... but do in both cases if you host the IDN in Japan & perhaps the registered owner has a Japanese contact address).
iv) ccTLD (Country Top Level Domain) should get a better position than 2nd level country domains (e.g. .ne.jp) - this is as I understand is as they are resolved higher up and also as nothing extra is included to weaken the term. It is also logical that .jp IDNs will be included in the search results for Japan (what people are finding is that they are, no matter where you are hosting).

It is also believed / assumed that .com, .net and .jp are easier extensions to remember (as people are used to these compared to things like .nu or .cc etc.).

Blue, I hope this is a good starter for you to understand a bit more on why people think IDNs in countries where English is not the native language will be more useful than a domain name in English.
Basically there are a lot of words / topics / interest areas which people search on the internet which are based on words the average person based in a country like China or Japan would not even know, let alone search on.
You have a point that people could be using romanized Japanese (and some do) - but for the example you gave above you can see the differences - and people here dealing in IDNs keep seeing the same thing again and again.
Namely that there is logical sense that people can remember a website name in the language they are fluent in (no matter what the topic is) and that the term people are using the majority of the time is the Japanese term (and not the English one).

ok - in counter argument there will be some exceptions for easy words... like coffee perhaps or sushi (but not sure as I have not checked these).
-----------------------------

Blue, I hope this is a good intro from someone who is a relative newbie to IDNs unlike others here who own 10,000 IDNs and have run tests on what works best to achieve earnings on their domain base.

Cheers - Asiaplay

PS: it is for the reasons above and what many now see as obvious that they do not want to spend 1/2 an hour writing what I just did (god I am long winded - lol - ask whatever questions you have - ok).

[jacksonm]

Originally Posted by Asiaplay

I can not comment on the price for the 3 domains you listed on stipley too much - as I did not set the price. But I speculate that the logic is as follows:-
i) They represent a very expensive estate, where rentals per month can be even higher than the asking price of the IDNs.
ii) There are people living in this housing estate who have more money than they can spend in a lifetime (and who have money to spend on something they like - be it a porshce or an e-mail address, homepage which represents them.
iii) In this case the person owns what is considered by many to be the only good extensions for domains - the .net, .com and the .jp

You hit the nail right on the head with all three points. However, one small correction: Hills-Tribe refers to the people who live in Roppongi Hills, not the place itself. To be "Hills-Tribe" is to be on the top rung of Japanese high society. The place was previously primarily occupied by gaijin executives as even the rich Japanese people couldn't afford to live there, but the situation is changing nowadays. The ones who can afford to live there are damned proud of it, too.

.

[Edwin]

It's worth noting that many Japanese companies are resorting - on TV and offline ads in newspapers, magazines, posters etc. - to printing a "suggested search" in Japanese precisely because their audience can't remember the ASCII URL. It's a trend that's more and more prevalent.

In your example, I'd bet that close to 100% of native Japanese speakers who saw the URL "日本語.com" would remember it. They might not actually be able to access it (browser/os dependent at the moment) but they would REMEMBER it. There is no ASCII domain (except perhaps something like sex.com) that a similarly large % of native Japanese speakers could be counted upon to remember accurately, and certainly not if you test that recall a day or a week later, rather than moments after they say it.

[thegenius1]

Originally Posted by Edwin

It's worth noting that many Japanese companies are resorting - on TV and offline ads in newspapers, magazines, posters etc. - to printing a "suggested search" in Japanese precisely because their audience can't remember the ASCII URL. It's a trend that's more and more prevalent.

Why am i even trying to help this guy become a IDNer beats me , maybe for the fun of winning a debate.

This is a TKO Blow like Mike Tyson in his Prime http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVuFOjF0d5I

[gammascalper]

Another thing worth noting is that Japanese words with long vowels and hard consonants can be spelled in different ways in ASCII.

What is a Japanese surfer going to remember:

東京, toukyou, tookyoo, tokyo?

大阪 or oosaka or osaka?

BTW, check out toukyou.com, tookyoo,com, oosaka.com. They all lead to sites! I think I'd rather have the IDN :-)

[Edwin]

Originally Posted by gammascalper

Another thing worth noting is that Japanese words with long vowels and hard consonants can be spelled in different ways in ASCII.

What is a Japanese surfer going to remember:

東京, toukyou, tookyoo, tokyo?

大阪 or oosaka or osaka?

BTW, check out toukyou.com, tookyoo,com, oosaka.com. They all lead to sites! I think I'd rather have the IDN :-)

Bad examples - 99.999% of people will spell them Tokyo and Osaka - but valid point

[gammascalper]

Originally Posted by Edwin

Bad examples - 99.999% of people will spell them Tokyo and Osaka - but valid point

Hehehe, yeah -- too ubiquitous. Maybe somebody can provide some better examples to drive the point home.

[thegenius1]

BETTER YET IDN oombiaya !

[gammascalper]

Totally OT: this guy sakuraba is amazing... should check out some of his matches on youtube.

Originally Posted by thegenius1

BETTER YET IDN oombiaya !

Is that Liston?

Because your quote is from Rumble in the Jungle (I think)...

[blue]

Thanks for the examples guys, now we are getting more specific, and that is great. I am here to have a meaningful discussion, not a debate. Actually, I really wanted people to tell me why I am wrong, this is not a I win you loose sort of game, it is an opportunity for me to learn, and for you to "educate" as you say. (It's not an opportunity to "knock out" people, that's rather childish and just shows us that you are a red-neck with only one unshakable point of view)

To thegenius1
>> Why am i even trying to help this guy become a IDNer beats me

Ill tell you exactly why. Because when you are trying to sell something, you need to convince people. What you people need to effectively do is market your product better. I work in Japan at a large company, and the subject of IDNs often comes up over lunch with Japanese and gaijin colleagues alike. The fact is that none of the people I talk with use IDNs now. You still have a long way to go in convincing, and a "why am i even trying to help this guy become a IDNer" attitude will not help your cause.

To everyone else, thanks for the input, especially the domain name examples. As you know, I am more interested in the Japanese ones, as this is the market that I know, but the others are interesting too.

[IDNCowboy]

Originally Posted by blue

Thanks for the examples guys, now we are getting more specific, and that is great. I am here to have a meaningful discussion, not a debate. Actually, I really wanted people to tell me why I am wrong, this is not a I win you loose sort of game, it is an opportunity for me to learn, and for you to "educate" as you say. (It's not an opportunity to "knock out" people, that's rather childish and just shows us that you are a red-neck with only one unshakable point of view)

To thegenius1
>> Why am i even trying to help this guy become a IDNer beats me

Ill tell you exactly why. Because when you are trying to sell something, you need to convince people. What you people need to effectively do is market your product better. I work in Japan at a large company, and the subject of IDNs often comes up over lunch with Japanese and gaijin colleagues alike. The fact is that none of the people I talk with use IDNs now. You still have a long way to go in convincing, and a "why am i even trying to help this guy become a IDNer" attitude will not help your cause.

To everyone else, thanks for the input, especially the domain name examples. As you know, I am more interested in the Japanese ones, as this is the market that I know, but the others are interesting too.

thats cause the japanese don't call them "IDNs"

They are native language urls. "Japanese domain names" in japanese....

It will take a few years to get the general population to realize it

[rhys]

Originally Posted by blue

Hi guys, Im the author of that article on stippy.com. I just did a search for stippy and IDN and found you guys talking, and thought I'd join in.

One (stupid?) question first. Don't you have to own 日本語.com and nihongo.com to make them really have affect? You could loose a lot of traffic to the other, if you only own half... Japanese people do remember nihongo.com just as easily as they remember 日本語.com, at least anyone under 40 does, and face it, they are 95% of internet users. Your statements in this area are not so accurate. For example, there is only one alternative of nihongo.com in a real domain name. Whereas, there is 日本語.com, にほんご.com, ニホンゴ.com (not to mention にっぽんご.com) in Japanese. Japanese people would have to recall which one it was that they saw when they go home to their computer, or your would have to own all of these be sure. Its like if NIHONGO.com and nihongo.com were two different things... how easily could you recall which one it was that you saw written on the side of a bus today..?

Stippy - I left you a fairly concise and lucid explanation of the IDN argument on your blog. What I say on it is fairly irrefutable so hopefully you will find it useful. I welcome your desire to learn more about IDNs or specifically in your case Japanese domain names. There is good information on this forum though sometimes you have to fish through the muck for it. I do wish you good luck and if I can help you I will be happy to.

As for your question above, I am left to conclude 1) you don't know Japanese very well OR 2) you do know Japanese perfectly well and are merely being disingenuous and ridiculously argumentative. I challenge you to produce one Japanese person to me who does not understand that the correct way to write 日本語　is 日本語. Certainly any Japanese educated beyond the 2rd grade knows that it is not にほんご or ニホンゴ. Beyond that, I have spent half my life living and working in Japan and I have yet to encounter a Japanese person that turned to English spelling "nihongo", "nippongo", "nipongo" or whathaveyou because of their utter befundlement in spelling words using their own language. That is utter garbage. This is, I am afraid, just the foreigner in you getting the best of you. Best check that, you know as well as I do that what I say is correct.

Interestingly, Olney actually does go after both Japanese and ASCII domain equivalents in his portfolio i.e. rome.jp and ローマ.jp . That's his thing but not mine. My position is this, I'll take 日本語.jp over nihongo.jp anyday of the week, the ascii equivalent has no value for seo purposes and it has no value in terms of direct navigation (type-in traffic). Therefore to my mind ascii transliterations of Japanese domains are garbage and have no further use in a world where Japanese are free to choose between the two. If for some reason you think that Japanese actually type in romaji urls in great frequency, you don't know very much about how japanese search and use the internet.

The other thing I will point out in case it isn't obvious (though I think it should be obvious) is that you apparently work in a company of both Japanese and foreigners. This is not a typical Japanese company and the Japanese in such companies make poor focus groups for the mass of the Japanese people. I remember my experience at places like goldman sachs and mckinsey, the Japanese were of extremely high caliber in the Tokyo office and most of them would have been as out of place in an "average" Japanese company as a giraffe on Park Avenue. If you want to focus group these ideas, you have to hit the street.

[Olney]

Thank You Blue for joining the forum.
I would like you to know that many of us are not in this just to sell something. Like you I'm also a long time resident here (more than 10 years). I left Japan for two years & came back when I started the forum 2 years ago. I work at an online marketing company initially doing SEO & now only doing PPC & online ad management for Japanese & global companies.

I like you too remember hearing about IDNs years ago & thought just like you they were fluff. It took about 6 to 10 hours for me to remember my web experience here in Japan & realize the potential. There were some things that stuck out in my head initially.

1. Japanese are horrible spellers of English (Non of us can deny this.)
2. There wasn't any browser compatibility. The only reason why it faded out here in Tokyo is because IE took 6 years to upgrade their browser. I was a Mac user it resolved for me but I thought about the average young person in Japan. With IE7 coming out JPRS started to promote IDNs again.
3. Domains for many Japanese companies just plain sucked. There was no plain right or wrong or many good generics for companies.
4. The internet in Japan started late. Japanese were late to even think about getting their own sites & domains. With English speaking domain investors Japanese don't have a chance to register good & easy to remember dot coms
5. Before owning IDNs I just like Edwin owned romaji versions of Japanese domains.
Let's take for example Geinokai.com half of Japanese might write it as geinoukai.com but all of Japan could write it as 芸能界.com & visually seeing the domain they all know what it is.
6. SEO value, I read on your blog someone said that Yahoo would eventually change the algorithm. This is not true. IDNs just the exact keyword like Car.com or CheapTickets.com would be in English. English domains have benefited from this since forever. My geinokai will never benefit from the domain name with searches for 芸能界.


I wasn't looking to see if punycode is compatible with Unix, or Linux. Or if IDNs are going to be sold to us Americans even. It's about something that can truly benefit the Japanese market & to understand why in Japan domains were not a big part of any company's online strategy.

After coming back to Japan I did development & research.
I asked over at least 100 Japanese that I work with or visited to let me see how they accessed a web site. (I'm not making this up about the number either, it's likely way higher). Over a years time I saw that they inputted every site name in katakana (or kanji) in the search box. I was shocked. Only a few English speakers actually ever typed in the domains. Only other way of accessing sites was bookmarks.
Everyone searched for the domain & wrote it in in Japanese.

I also did development testing & found out that just like in English keywords in the domain have a really strong value, Yahoo actually changed the algorithm recently giving it more strength for exact match.

Many of us will probably not sell all of our domains & will build them out & monetize them.

Domains that I own that I consider premium generic are

グラビアアイドル.com & jp
ローマ.jp
アニメ.com
セール.com
ダイヤモンド.jp
アダルトビデオ.jp
ニューヨークホテル.com
派遣.com
不動産担保ローン.com
キャバクラ.com
海外ホテル.com
& 400 more with better quality

We are not ignorant to think that everything will happen this year Blue.
It will be another 2 years before IDNs are normal domains here. AU is already IDN compatible & also many of the Softbank phones. IDNs will directly compete with iMode menu so it's not in NTTs best interest if people didn't use the iMode menu.

I do agree with you in the short term for development it is good in some cases to have both. You can not get a good generic dot com for registration fee in English though.
I have collected a few for personal development & to test which gets more traffic.

I really don't mind if you are not convinced to buy IDNs Blue. Domain investment is not for everyone. Certain markets they have to advertise online. There are markets where the CPC is average of 300 to 500 yen a click for the big keywords. They have to spend at least 500,000 to 1,000,000 a month for an effective campaign. There will be more competitors next year & prices will keep going up.

I'm looking at 2 to 3 years later. The option to buy your best converting or best keyword for your market will be an option only with IDN domains.

When I look at generics I try to only invest in common big keywords.
Get feedback only from Japanese that don't speak English Blue. Look at the 2 to 5 year picture technology always advances & more & more services are becoming IDN compatible. They wouldn't start adding IDN compatibility here locally if they didn't understand it's just natural. Japanese like English but they don't want to function in English. Just go to Mixi...

[Clotho]

Hello Blue. Welcome to the forum!

The success of Japanese domain names isn’t going to be decided by anyone on this board or even all of us together. It will be decided by the people of Japan as they work and use the Internet in the years to come.

In the past, Japanese names suffered a low adoption rate largely due to the fact that there was no browser support for them. In order to maintain the integrity of the DNS the names had to be resolved at the browser level. It wasn’t until last year that IE7 was released. At the current time all browsers support IDN’s. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari. Netscape. The current version of all of these support IDN’s. Still, not all users have the current versions. This places us at an interesting spot in time. It is pretty safe to say that everyone will eventually upgrade to the latest browser versions. It happens to all of us. We buy a new computer. We get a new browser. Or we upgrade for other reasons.

Email will take a little bit longer but it too is catching up. Vista supports Email with IDN’s and naturally Microsoft has the largest share of this market as well. Just like the browsers, eventually people will upgrade their Email program and they will have an IDN compliant one.

As you can see, while there may be some barriers to the use of Japanese names right now, they are rapidly disappearing.

Japanese Domain Names: Pros vs. Cons.

Cons :

Not supported by older versions of browsers. (It should be noted that IE6 navigates Japanese Domain Names just fine if you do it via a search engine. You just can’t type the name directly into the address bar.)

Not supported by older versions of Email clients.


Now lets look at the Pros:

Consider this. It is 2 years in the future and 99 percent of the Japanese population have updated their browser.

Scenario #1. You own a sushi restaurant called 毘沙門寿司. You have decided to create a website for your restaurant so that you can showcase your wares, tell people how to get to your location and also inform them of the hours of operation.
You have to choose a name for your website. Do you register 毘沙門寿司.com or bishumonsushi.com? Obviously the most memorable and instinctive name is 毘沙門寿司.com as it is the same as the actual name of the restaurant. Lets say you were clever and you registered both. Which one do you put on your business card? There is only room for one and you don’t want to confuse your customers by printing both. Which is the most memorable and easy to use? I think you will find that if you ask a native Japanese person this question they will choose 毘沙門寿司.com for the business card every time. Why? They choose it because it is memorable for them and easy to spell.

We know that the Japanese have some difficulty getting users to their ascii named websites because we see examples of ads including Japanese search terms and even pictures of search engine boxes with the Japanese search term typed in. Anyone in advertising will tell you that such a circuitous route is less than desirable. Obviously a concise and memorable domain in the native language solves this dilemma. It is interesting to note that the terms they show in the search box are always in Japanese characters and never in Ascii.

Scenario #2, You have a website that sells jewelry online called tanakajewelry.com. Your sales for the previous month have dropped considerably because you got bumped from the top 10 results in Yahoo.co.jp for the search term ジュエリー (jewelry). Your website is now on the second page of results and you are getting much less traffic. You ask your SEO expert what is wrong? Why is our site getting lower results? He answers that there is nothing wrong with the site. The problem is that the competition has started to use Japanese domain names that include ジュエリー in the name and thus they are starting to rank higher in turn pushing tanakajewelry.com lower. His solution? Register 田中ジュエリー.com and rebrand the website with the new name.

Japanese domain names have already been proven to provide a significant SEO advantage for their owners. When the term searched for is also found in the domain name itself both Google and Yahoo factor this in favorably. This isn't anything new. This is the same algorithm used in English for both of these search engines. Many people here have discovered that a few simple pages of relevant text with a proper Japanese name is able to rank higher than many more established and vastly more complex Japanese sites. It’s all in the name. It is a fact that the majority of searches done by the Japanese population are done in the Japanese language. They don’t search in Romaji or English 99.9 percent of the time. Therefore this advantage is not gained by Romaji or Ascii domains. In a competitive business environment where every advantage is important and where the majority of the population navigates via search engines, this SEO advantage is a critical factor for many website developers. Who doesn’t want more traffic?

Scenario #3, A young man meets a young lady during an event at Yoyogi park. They hit it off and exchange emails. He writes his down for her 高橋悠治@ピアニスト.com. Hers is kiyoko553@livedoor.com She is impressed as his email address tells both about his name and what he does and she can read it. Her own Email address feels a bit clunky. She asks where she can get a new email address like his?


These are just 3 different scenarios but the real point is that it isn’t us who are going to decide whether or not Japanese domain names become popular or not. It will be decided by the people of Japan as they work and use the Internet in the years to come. It will be decided by people building websites for fun or for business.

Lets look at the Pros vs Cons again.

Cons :

Not supported by older versions of browsers. (It should be noted that IE6 navigates Japanese Domain Names just fine if you do it via a search engine. You just can’t type the name directly into the address bar.)

Not supported by older versions of Email clients.

I will include another: In Japanese domain names the .com part is still in English.


Pros:

Japanese domain names are memorable (for the Japanese)

Japanese domain names are meaningful (for the Japanese)

Japanese domain names can directly match existing business names.

Japanese domain names provide an SEO advantage for their owners.


Remember earlier when I said “This places us at an interesting spot in time.”? Imagine 2 years in the future when the majority of the Japanese public have upgraded their browsers and Email clients. (btw the .com in English part will have been solved by that time as well, but that is another topic which has already been discussed in great depth.) 2 years in the future and all of these Cons will have been solved. Yet the Pros will remain.

With the negatives removed is it not common sense that the Japanese population will grow to use Japanese names for their Japanese websites? Especially if you consider the SEO advantage and other benefits of doing so?

[thegenius1]

Originally Posted by blue

Thanks for the examples guys, now we are getting more specific, and that is great. I am here to have a meaningful discussion, not a debate. Actually, I really wanted people to tell me why I am wrong, this is not a I win you loose sort of game, it is an opportunity for me to learn, and for you to "educate" as you say. (It's not an opportunity to "knock out" people, that's rather childish and just shows us that you are a red-neck with only one unshakable point of view)

To thegenius1
>> Why am i even trying to help this guy become a IDNer beats me

Ill tell you exactly why. Because when you are trying to sell something, you need to convince people. What you people need to effectively do is market your product better. I work in Japan at a large company, and the subject of IDNs often comes up over lunch with Japanese and gaijin colleagues alike. The fact is that none of the people I talk with use IDNs now. You still have a long way to go in convincing, and a "why am i even trying to help this guy become a IDNer" attitude will not help your cause.

To everyone else, thanks for the input, especially the domain name examples. As you know, I am more interested in the Japanese ones, as this is the market that I know, but the others are interesting too.

Dude i would prefer this forum to be shut down if you read the thread that i posted earlier. It has nothing to do with you , i just don't want too many other people joining the Get Rich Party. You came off with your little cocky attitude first about how you "know so much more about the Japanese then everyone" , so how do you want to get educated if you believe you know more then us ? I don't mind helping out a few people here and there but I'm definitely not up to try and convince a person that thinks they know it all already and aren't willing to be humble.

And since you want to come in cocky Swinging I'm going to get cocky right back with you. Accept the fact that your arguments got "Knocked Out ! " , and don't try to divert the situation and criticize how i delivered the BLOW just take it like a man.

[rhys]

Stippy,

I see here a variety of responses to your desire for information some nasty some extremely nice. I ask you don't judge us as a group, judge us as individuals. Some of us are just plain friendlier than others. And regardless, try to absorb the information offered here because none of us had to spend the time to spell it out for you, we could have just shut up about it and laughed later.