Why the early speculators may be screwed

[scotty]

This is something I'm sure a lot of you have already thought about but I find it strange no one has ever raised a discussion on this topic yet.

In a nutshell, the political and PR implications of it becoming widely known that the prime IDN.com's, .net's etc are already taken by a bunch of non-native carpet-baggers who have no "real" use for the domains except to make money from them - that's the reason ICANN do not publicise that IDN.com's etc already exist, why they don't engage with this forum more and why they'll try to make sure that the IDN.IDN roll-out is well publicized in advance of the domains becoming available (so real businesses etc can get a chance at the domains).

Domains are Internet street addresses for the wider public/business use - that's what ICANN want to happen with IDNs. They're not creating IDNs to make a small group of speculators very rich. They'll do whatever they can do thwart that happening.

Just a though (by one of those speculators!)

[Rubber Duck]

Not very original and not very right either.

Big Business made dot com, and they completely overlooked Generics anyway. They still really are only just perhaps in the process of waking up to the potential of Generics.

So basically your argument if it holds, would hold for ASCII dot com and it just doesn't.

Big Business will make IDNs and they seem to be going the dot Com Root. Most of them already have their domains registered since way back, they just haven't brought them into theatre of war yet. Why? Because they won't until they feel the environment is ready, and basically that means at least browser support in depth. After that it is just a question of whether the advertising spend will make a return. Shouldn't take them too long to figure that.

Originally Posted by scotty

This is something I'm sure a lot of you have already thought about but I find it strange no one has ever raised a discussion on this topic yet.

In a nutshell, the political and PR implications of it becoming widely known that the prime IDN.com's, .net's etc are already taken by a bunch of non-native carpet-baggers who have no "real" use for the domains except to make money from them - that's the reason ICANN do not publicise that IDN.com's etc already exist, why they don't engage with this forum more and why they'll try to make sure that the IDN.IDN roll-out is well publicized in advance of the domains becoming available (so real businesses etc can get a chance at the domains).

Domains are Internet street addresses for the wider public/business use - that's what ICANN want to happen with IDNs. They're not creating IDNs to make a small group of speculators very rich. They'll do whatever they can do thwart that happening.

Just a though (by one of those speculators!)

[phio]

Good Question. If you take a look at the history of ASCII domains, you can find a lot of answers. A friend of mine worked for network solutions in the early early days. His co-worker got business.com when it dropped and sold it a while later for xx,xxx not much really considering how much it sold for 20 or so years later-- I'm not sure of the exact amount but lets say lots of millions of dollars.

If you take a look at business.com You will see that it is basically a strew of parked pages. And every time someone clicks on it the owner(s) make money. In fact, this is REAL Business. Look at Yahoo and Google, most of their money is made by clicks. Newspaper and magazine advertising dollars are down, internet ad dollars are up.

Back to the early days. Those people who registered generic words, like business, music, sex, love...etc in the english language knew they could make money off the domains by selling or developing. And more than likely they did. We all know this.

IDN's are no different. In fact, by limiting the internet domains to english up until 1999 and the browser support until recently in many countries has been in a way unfair. This technology has been available for quite a long time now, and finally it is catching on. Has it hurt these other countries? Only time will tell. The saturation of ascii domains in other countries has shown how much usage there will be in the future for IDNs.

ICANN is holding off because they have a new product. Just like when VW announces to the world they have a new hybrid diesel, they wait until their engineering has completed the design (hopefully) and they have worked out all the kinks. They won't go back and advertise that the 1990 version of the Golf diesel got 55 mpg, the product just isn't new anymore. They sold out of them. Have the good IDN.coms and .nets been sold. Most of them. Is this keeping a big business from contacting the owner and purchasing the IDN. No. But many business' still don't understand the value of a good domain name. They will pay 1 million dollars for 10 employees for a year, but not 1 million dollars for a domain that will bring them 1 million visitors. Not yet at least


Also, like the nature of most things in the computer world, changes come in phases. Phase 1 for ICANN will probably be getting one or two countries on IDN.IDN It's not going to happen over night

Now we know that recently China passed the US in Internet Usage, and in the next few years China's internet usage will probably double. I envy those early idnrs who got top ranking keywords in Chinese. Is there a legitimate business in China that should have that name...hmmmm which one? How does one decide.

In the future a chinese company will want it, or the savy IDN.com owner will just semi-develop it and wait for the clicks.

[Rubber Duck]

What I really want to know, is if IDN is such a bust, why so many people seem to have a vested interest in trying to put it down? Why would they bother? Fuck knows what the motivation is, but you walk over broken projects you don't spend your life trying to shoot them down!

[scotty]

All valid points.

The difference between ascii and idn though is that with IDN many bets are already invested on horses that may never even run! The ascii domain speculators already knew .com was the only serious contender. And ICANN have a strong hand in influencing what horses will run in the IDN race. And at the moment, it seems the IDN.com etc are not doing a very good job at getting ICANN to advertise the fact that their horse is already available to run in the race.

Why would that be? Maybe they think the owners of the idn.com horse are not good poster-childs for their overall IDN brand. Or maybe someone with serious lobbying power is influencing them to keep the lid on idn.com while promoting idn.idn - since that someone has a chance of grabbing some of the idn.idn action?

[Rubber Duck]

Well time to address the other major flaw in your argument.

ICANN does all its press releases in English out of California. There is zip coming out from ICANN in most of the local news environment. If they actually gave a fuck about making sure locals had a fair crack of the whip, then they would have done much much more to publicise it. From their limited attempt to make people in these markets aware, it is pretty clear they are indifferent.

Also you a doing a great job of casting a false stereotype on this forum. My guess is we probably have a many Chinese here as Americans.

As for backing the wrong horse, well from where I am sitting with few exceptions there is only one horse at present.

[scotty]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

What I really want to know, is if IDN is such a bust, why so many people seem to have a vested interest in trying to put it down? Why would they bother? Fuck knows what the motivation is, but you walk over broken projects you don't spend your life trying to shoot them down!

Raising valid questions is not really tantamount to wanting to put things down. Its simply pursuing truths/answers.

And deluding ones self into thinking there are no real risks/threats in relation to a project is hardly a constructive course of action either.

[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by scotty

Raising valid questions is not really tantamount to wanting to put things down. Its simply pursuing truths/answers.

And deluding ones self into thinking there are no real risks/threats in relation to a project is hardly a constructive course of action either.

Buy, don't buy. What the hell do I care? If I am deluded that is my problem.

In a nutshell, I envisaged that selling a few domains to the old ASCII crowd would massage the cash flow until things took off. That clearly isn't going to happen. For whatever reason, they are just not interested. I have accepted that. That is my problem or theirs depending on which ever way you look at this.

Consequently, we just have to dig deep and sit this thing out. That is what we are doing. If somebody wants to make me a decent offer for a domain, then I will consider it. If not we just have to keep things tight and dig deep to sweat this thing out.

We are just about renewed up until the end of the year. Traffic income should cope with the rest. My strategy is to just keep on working, keep things tight and wait. What is your strategy?

[scotty]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

Buy, don't buy. What the hell do I care? If I am deluded that is my problem.

Churchill, Gladstone?

[Rubber Duck]

Originally Posted by scotty

Churchill, Gladstone?

Nah, Rubber Duck.

Churchill wouldn't have got it anyway. He would have made them all speak English!

[scotty]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

We are just about renewed up until the end of the year. Traffic income should cope with the rest. My strategy is to just keep on working, keep things tight and wait. What is your strategy?

I'm convinced some version of IDN is going to take off. So for want of a better option, I'll just keep renewing the 2nd rung .com and .nets that I own pending a clear winner emerging and jump on to that band wagon if I'm not already on it and there's any space on it.

[zfreud]

Few points here:

1: "The ascii domain speculators already knew .com was the only serious contender."

As do the IDN speculators.


2: A little something called the UDRP protects the major brands in the IDN space. They did not enjoy this luxury for the first few years of .com mania.

3: Since when was/is it ICANN's job to promote IDN.com? That's verisign's job.

4: IE 7 adoption is rising and with it the instances of marketing using IDN domains. This was predicted by everyone on this board 2.5 years ago. We all were to optimistic that microhoo would roll out IE 7 more quickly...but tipping point is nigh:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

[Rubber Duck]

Well, if you only have second rung, you have two choices, if you want to make the big time. You either go after decent IDN.com in the secondary market or the ccTLDs that are established or you keep your powder dry and try to pick up IDN in the sunrise of ccTLDs. You pays you money and you takes your chance. Being late has left you short of options. Waiting will leave you shorter still. Good Luck!

Originally Posted by scotty

I'm convinced some version of IDN is going to take off. So for want of a better option, I'll just keep renewing the 2nd rung .com and .nets that I own pending a clear winner emerging and jump on to that band wagon if I'm not already on it and there's any space on it.

[Giant]

Don't listen to losers!

[Fka200]

i agree, except .net with good key word are still worth it.

Originally Posted by zfreud

Few points here:

1: "The ascii domain speculators already knew .com was the only serious contender."

As do the IDN speculators.


2: A little something called the UDRP protects the major brands in the IDN space. They did not enjoy this luxury for the first few years of .com mania.

3: Since when was/is it ICANN's job to promote IDN.com? That's verisign's job.

4: IE 7 adoption is rising and with it the instances of marketing using IDN domains. This was predicted by everyone on this board 2.5 years ago. We all were to optimistic that microhoo would roll out IE 7 more quickly...but tipping point is nigh:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

[scotty]

Originally Posted by Rubber Duck

Well, if you only have second rung, you have two choices, if you want to make the big time. You either go after decent IDN.com in the secondary market or the ccTLDs that are established or you keep your powder dry and try to pick up IDN in the sunrise of ccTLDs. You pays you money and you takes your chance. Being late has left you short of options. Waiting will leave you shorter still. Good Luck!

That's not the way I see it.

If IDN.com/net are ever going to be big enough to make the prime terms genuinely highly valuable (ie in the same way asciis are now), then my budget of around $6K per year permits me to renew my 400 or so 2nd rungs easily. Were I to switch that budget over to one or two prime domains (even if prime's were available at that price) each year for the next few years and end up with 6 prime domains - would they really be more valuable than my 400 2nd rungs? they'd need to be individually 65 times more valuable.

Will the primes I could get now ever be 65 times more valuable than my 2nd rung chinese idns (for that's all I'm invested in) like whiskey.net, goldrings.com, redwine.com, freerecipes.com etc?

If IDN.com take off, then 2nd rungs take off just in the same way as primes do. Primes won't take off and 2nd rungs stay flat.

As for keeping my resources for idn.idn sunrise as an alternative to renewing what i've got, its too early for that!

[bwhhisc]

Originally Posted by scotty

, then my budget of around $6K per year permits me to renew my 400 or so 2nd rungs easily.

Where you registering at?
At $6.99 a year for .com (domainsite), and $ 5.75 per year for .net (dynadot), your 400 domains
should be costing you less than $ 2800 per year. That leaves you $ 3,000 which would buy some
nice IDNs on todays secondary market.

[touchring]

Originally Posted by scotty

This is something I'm sure a lot of you have already thought about but I find it strange no one has ever raised a discussion on this topic yet.

In a nutshell, the political and PR implications of it becoming widely known that the prime IDN.com's, .net's etc are already taken by a bunch of non-native carpet-baggers who have no "real" use for the domains except to make money from them - that's the reason ICANN do not publicise that IDN.com's etc already exist, why they don't engage with this forum more and why they'll try to make sure that the IDN.IDN roll-out is well publicized in advance of the domains becoming available (so real businesses etc can get a chance at the domains).

Domains are Internet street addresses for the wider public/business use - that's what ICANN want to happen with IDNs. They're not creating IDNs to make a small group of speculators very rich. They'll do whatever they can do thwart that happening.

Just a though (by one of those speculators!)

All valid arguments, but what the hell is this IDN.IDN?

Have you thought about it?

Admittedly, i've not done an indepth study on IDN.IDN, but a few points i picked out from my scratchy understanding:

1. IDN.IDN is not suppose to be confusingly similar to IDN.com or IDN.net or IDN.org or IDN.biz....

2. IDN.IDN already exists in China. .gongsi. .zhongguo. So what? LOL.

Originally Posted by bwhhisc

At $6.99 a year for .com (domainsite), and $ 5.75 per year for .net (dynadot), your 400 domains

oh! how did you get this rate? i'm pissed off when moniker raised their rates. I'm moving.

[Rubber Duck]

Scotty, even now if you are thinking that you are going to pick up Prime terms at $1000 bucks a time you are dreaming. They are already going to cost you around a 100x that amount in the more popular languages. The bad news is that it will only get worse!

[Ryu]

Originally Posted by bwhhisc

Where you registering at?
At $6.99 a year for .com (domainsite), and $ 5.75 per year for .net (dynadot), your 400 domains
should be costing you less than $ 2800 per year. That leaves you $ 3,000 which would buy some
nice IDNs on todays secondary market.

I just went to dynadot and tried to reg one IDN.net, but the price given was $8.99... How can I reg .net at $5.75? Could someone please tell me?