Chinese Traffic at Sedo

[Rubber Duck]

In the last 24hrs we have noted a big surge in Traffic at Sedo from China.

Some conventional dot CN are implicated, but the really big event has been with IDN dot com! We are talking 100-200 uniques per day with good conversion!

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[bramiozo]

on how many names ?

[Rubber Duck]

on how many names ?


The 100-200 uniques is on a single name!!! But there are others in hot pursuit.

[sarcle]

Congrats..

I have yet to see any signifigant hits on my idns, one thing I can think of is if it got mentioned in the news somehow or is the victim of proxy hits as I have had a few of them at sedo.

Let us know which one so that we can do a little more investigating.

But it sounds like great news.

Sarcle.

[gammascalper]

Dave is right. I got 52 pageviews for the chinese term for 'pick up basketball' yesterday. Previously I had about 1 a day.

Perhaps the Great Firewall broke down? IE7 beta started to be circulated?

I hope this isn't some Sedo glitch!

[Rubber Duck]

Congrats..

I have yet to see any signifigant hits on my idns, one thing I can think of is if it got mentioned in the news somehow or is the victim of proxy hits as I have had a few of them at sedo.

Let us know which one so that we can do a little more investigating.

But it sounds like great news.

Sarcle.


It is not just one domain. The best results are on those with potential issues, but at least 30 domains have shown a very definite lift off. The greatest impact is with Chinese dot coms but some of the Japanese names seem to have got in on the act. The problem is there is such an overlap between Chinese and Japanese characters it would be difficult to say, how much of the extra traffic if any is from Japan.

There is no doubt that traffic is far the far east due to when it is landing, i.e. largely when I am in bed. There is no doubt that this is Consumer type-in and not automated or speculator driven, due to the volumes, the timing and the conversion.

The important thing is not really whether we are going to make a lot on traffic in the short-term. I probably only made about €3 Euros in 24hrs, which is certainly not a fortune. However, when it comes down to winning the argument over whether the Chinese are likely to type local characters into the address bar, there is no contest. It has been proven beyond any doubt that they will. They must have been typing them in, in significant numbers from sometime.

The fact they are recently been credited to my Sedo account is immaterial. Perhaps Sedo has come off some Chinese blacklist, perhaps some deal has been done, perhaps it is a glitch in the system, I don't know. However, the traffic is there, the traffic is growing and it will continue to grow, especially if they find something of interest to revist and tell their friends about. With China it is difficult as there are few Chinese Keywords that the system will accept and this is due to low penetration by Google Adwords. At the moment I am concentrating on things in English that will attract a youthful audience.

Ok, there may be something of a content issue at the moment, but the content will follow the traffic to a greater extent than the traffic following the content. If you want to make a success of internet marketing in the Far East, IDN will have to be central to your strategy. If not the competition will eventually wipe the floor with you.

Anyway keep us updated and I will try and post a few screen shots over the next few days.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[Olney]

I'm glad to hear that your Chinese traffic is growing but unless we get a member in China or that can fluently read Chinese we won't know exactly what happened.

All I know is the Japan traffic is steady like before no change really.

[gammascalper]

Traffic for chinese domains seem to have ground to a halt.

Perhaps it was all from employees in the engineering dept of search engines looking for free money! I like my conspiracy theory since they took away the extremely useful overture cn.

[Rubber Duck]

Traffic for chinese domains seem to have ground to a halt.

Perhaps it was all from employees in the engineering dept of search engines looking for free money! I like my conspiracy theory since they took away the extremely useful overture cn.


It would seem that all the Sedo sites suffered some kind of technical failure over the weekend. My traffic dried up and now appears to have restarted albeit at a reduced rate.

I rang Germany this morning and had a chat with Jakob Knightly who has at least some involvement with the dot CN site.

It came as quite a shock to them that there was so much traffic coming out of China!

I asked him to look into what was going on. He seemed to suggest that it might be something to do with Great Firewall being relaxed. He seemed to confirm that Sedo was not directly affected but that some of their partners had been. He would not say Google, but it was difficult to interpret the remarks anyway else, especially when I pressed him on the point.

He made the point that we should not expect too much in the way of revenue per click at this stage as Adword subscriptions are fairly thin on the ground at the moment, but did reaffirm Sedo's commitment to these markets. I asked him if he could get the guy doing the Arabic Site to get his finger out!

I told him about the forum and indicated that Sedo were not exactly getting good press at the moment. He said that was recognised and Sedo wanted to improve its image. It was agreed that he would do some research and report back and we undertook to keep each other abreast of developments.

Keep you posted.

Dave Wrixon

[gammascalper]

I asked him to look into what was going on. He seemed to suggest that it might be something to do with Great Firewall being relaxed. He seemed to confirm that Sedo was not directly affected but that some of their partners had been. He would not say Google, but it was difficult to interpret the remarks anyway else, especially when I pressed him on the point.

What do you mean when you said Sedo 'was not directly affected but that some of their partners had been'? Affected by an outage or by relaxation of the great firewall?

Thanks again for the report - you're on top of things as usual!

[Rubber Duck]

I have just received this response from Sedo. I think this is in reply to an Online support request that I input on Sunday:


Hello,

I have noticed the traffic fluctuation regarding your domain names that began at the end of October. I can see that the overwhelming majority of your traffic is coming from Asia, specifically China. China is a unique case as the government blocks many foreign IP addresses, especially American ones.

My only guess is that, for whatever reason, we might no longer be blocked. For sure, our system is not doing anything differently, as far as the technical aspect is concerned. Of course, that is only a hypothesis.


http://www.sedo.com/faq/index.php?tracked=&partnerid=18648&language=us

http://www.sedo.com/main.php3?language=us&partnerid=18648

Timothy Niziak
Key Account Manager
__________________

[gammascalper]

This is great news. It confirms that these domains are getting significant type-in traffic.

[dnnames]

Nice to hear. I am sitting around 20 Chinese keyword names.

[Rubber Duck]

Actually, I am beginning to think that there is another slant on this Chinese Traffic situation! The Chinese have been tinkering with their own internal DNS system to get IDN to resolve. I think it is possilbe that IDN dot coms accessed from within China are actually resolving to .com.cn instead of .com. Perhaps, it was some temporary readjustment of this system that let to the traffic surge earier this month.

In any event, medium term, China will comply with ICANN requirements on DNS, but probably not until after launch of IE 7.0.

This could actually be quite good news as it may mean that the Great Firewall, which is likely to be more enduring, is not actually interfering with our traffic.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[gammascalper]

This would explain the sudden traffic on the .nets as well over those days. I assume they would correspond to .net.cn.

Very plausible explanation.

[Rubber Duck]

This would explain the sudden traffic on the .nets as well over those days. I assume they would correspond to .net.cn.

Very plausible explanation.


Unfortunately, there is another even more sinister possiblity, and that is security software at either Sedo or Google has jumped in to prevent "click fraud" by blocking IP address, where there are multiple clicks within a given period. Because many surfers in the Far East use Internet Cafes, it is quite likely that legitimate useage is being branded as fraud.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[gammascalper]

I'm not too worried about that possibility, as Google uses a range of variables to determine click fraud, including bookmarks (which are frequently unique), cookies, screen resolution and alot of other secret-squirrel stuff.

It's frustrating to have had a taste of the traffic and have the rug suddenly pulled-out, that's for sure.