Family Doctor (in German) sells for $27,446- Dec. 2005

[bwhhisc]

QUOTE FROM DN JOURNAL- December 2005-
"It looks like the crews at Sedo.com and SnapNames.com were especially good little boys and girls this year, as each company found nine Big Board entries under their tree"

Sedo's haul included the #1 domain, a very nice 3-letter .com, ASB.com at $50,000. Sedo also placed two German .de's and a double hyphenated .com in the first ten. #4 Hausarzt.de ("family doctor" in German) went for €23,200 ($27,446) and #8 AutoAuto.de delivered €11,600 ($13,723).

The real shocker was #6 True-To-You.com at £10,000 ($17,272), an exceptionally high price for a domain with two hyphens (or even one for that matter). The WhoIs information is privacy protected, but the domain appears to have been purchased by a motivated buyer, the owners of a popular Morrissey ezine and fan site at True-To-You.net. The .com now redirects to that .net.

[Edwin]

Strong sale, but it's not an IDN...

[Rubber Duck]

Yes interesting, but a side show really.

I think ASCII domains will always be more valuable than IDN in Europe.

In Chinese IDN will be worth a fortune. You are talking the soon to be largest economy in the World ( I think realistically no more than 15 years and probably a lot sooner). The dollar measures of GDP, when used in conjunction with internal growth figures are meaningless, as what people fail to recognise is that currency realignments with bring Purchase Price Parity values of GDP much closer to those measured in $US.

Real Chinese growth is probably more like 25% per annum at the moment, which sounds quite unsustainable, but whilst there is a huge pool of both skilled and unskilled cheap labour, there is no risk of hyperinflation. Wages will rise much faster than ours, as they need to close a yawning gap, but currently levels of about 10% per annum are actually quite sustainable.

Also, investment and advertising budgets tend to migrate to the fastest areas of growth. A rapidly growing economy will attract more of both than a much larger but relatively static one. Even in a good year, we appear to be standing still.

The other major factor in value is the nature of language itself. Chinese domains have a uniqueness that other languages do not. This is one of the reasons the name supply is drying up so rapidly. There are no cases, no tenses, no singular or plurals. If you get the name that matters there are no work arounds.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[bwhhisc]

My error...but hope it sparks some good information anyway. Happy New Year.