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Originally Posted by idnowner
Anyone have ideas on how good a Japanese .com IDN is (or will be), as compared with a .jp IDN. Think a .com would be 10% as valuable, 20%, or better?
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Nobody knows exactly what domains are worth, it is all down to the motivation of the buyer or seller.
Nobody really knows how much IDN are worth or indeed whether they are actually worth anything. Opinions vary from nothing to 7 figures. This situation will not change until IE 7.0 is adopted and the levels of traffic and the advantages in terms of SEO become apparent.
It is therefore fairly meaningless to try to differentiate between gTLD and ccTLD in terms of resale price in percentage terms.
What we do know is that ccTLD are generally very expensive to buy and renew, which makes them higher risk and means that your return on investment is likely to be lower. This in turn makes them less attractive, which in turn will lower the resale value.
ccTLDs are market specific so they are sought after for this very reason. The traditional perception is that to market to China you need dot cn and to Japan dot jp. This is probably why dot de goes for such a premium.
IDN to some extent will change all that, as they have the power to market locally even with a Global Extension. They do not, however, target countries but linguistic groups. With Japan and China things are fairly clear cut. Japanese is spoken in Japan and almost nowhere else and Simplified Chinese is used almost exclusively in PRC. However, things are not clear cut. We are not talking volumes of literature here and often text fragments in the same script will infer meaning in different language.
Elsewhere thing get more complicated. As yet there is no Pan Arabic ccTLD. Whilst some are lobbying hard for this Political control over such a domain is fraught with problems. Arabic is main language in about 25 states with minority useage elsewhere. The script is also shared with Farsi and Urdu, so single characters and other common text fragments with apply to all. No ccTLD gives you the power of an IDN dot in the Arabic Market, but here it would seem the differential in acceptance between dot com and dot net is less distinct.
Urdu is another complicated situation in its own right. It is the official language of Pakistan but only spoken by 8% of the population. It is in fact a dialect of Hindi written in Arabic script, and it has many more users in India than Pakistan. Use of ccTLD in this case could be a distinct disadvantage, wheras IDN very specifically targets a culturally homogenius grouping. Of course like many, you may assume that the language of India is English. You would be wrong, only 3% of the population are considered comfortable in English.
Best Regards
Dave Wrixon