Is it just me

[rhys]

Is it just me or do other .jp IDNers feel like there is a lot more registration activity going on in the last 3 months by Japanese individuals? This morning for fun I was checking out keywords that I had left unregged (nice pickup on 選手.jp chinastar) and was surprised to see so many of them recently registered by people I have never seen before on the .jp whois.

It could just be that I had one of those mornings and this is entirely a misperception or wishful thinking but I can say with more confidence that the volume of blogging about Japanese domain names is certainly on the rise since the start of the year. Many of them are catching on to the SEO value based on results they have seen on Yahoo. Welcome to the party.

[Rubber Duck]

The only problem I have with stories about how popular these domains actually are the official registry statistics.

Today they are showing that 127,666 have been registered:

http://jprs.co.jp/en/stat/

Last November the figure was 122,718:

http://jprs.co.jp/en/topics/061102.html

Essentially the growth has been a lot lower than 1000 names a month. I have followed these stats, and unlike the Chinese stats there has never been much evidence of a surge.

[rhys]

In general I agree with you, this is not a massive groundswell. In fact, ASCII .jp is still being regged at a faster rate so the percentage share of IDN to ASCII has gone down slightly. But according to the data above it does confirm positive momentum for IDNs in that month over month registration growth in the first quarter of this year has been double that of the last quarter of 2006.

[Rubber Duck]

Frankly, I hope your right.

I have never really ever subscribed to the idea that there is only room for IDN.com or IDN.ccTLD.

From my perspective dot Com seemed the more attractive investment from the start, due to its lower price and more certain legal perspective. I have no doubt, however, that IDN.jp and IDN.cn will be widely used.

The odd thing I have noticed is that in some locations, it is the foreign companies that feel most obliged to adopt a ccTLD branding. The domestic companies often feel more inclined often to follow a global branding.

[blastfromthepast]

The odd thing I have noticed is that in some locations, it is the foreign companies that feel most obliged to adopt a ccTLD branding. The domestic companies often feel more inclined often to follow a global branding.

Foreign companies have two reasons for this, one is to seem less foreign, the other is that having 'foreign language' sections on your USA-focused .com main site is just not seen as cool.

[Olney]

I just blogged about this Rhys last week. Since December it seems many more Japanese individuals are registering, as before those who registered a lot of jps kept running across the same names.

One of the things I noticed is with the new registrations a lot of them point somewhere.

But there also will be developers & SEOs who are noticing IDNs in the search results.

Yesterday I went to a wii Party & one of the guys there works at one of the biggest registries here. They've actually had domain request in the mid XX,XXX range recently. Unfortunately he didn't know if it was IDN or Romaji.

He states that they know about the US sales (he even quoted a few of them), & even the amounts for the big buys, but Japanese companies don't know the value of domains yet.