Dynadot - new IDN filter

[Drewbert]

Part of my attempt to make it easier to bulk-register priority IDN's, Dynadot has added an "IDN Filter" to the domain management interface, allowing you to display IDN's of particular character classes.

It's my hope that soon, if you (say) select Arabic, all your Arabic .coms will appear, and there will be an additional column showing the price of the corresponding .كوم and a checkbox alongside, allowing you to check the .كوم's you want to register and bulk register the lot at once.

If you like this idea, it might be worthwhile dropping a note to a support@ letting them know that you would use the feature.

[dynadot]

Hi Drewbert - We're glad you like our new IDN Filter feature. We have passed your idea on to our team to see if it's something that makes sense for us to add. We can't guarantee it'll be added, but we wanted to let you know that we have seen your post.

Happy Friday to you!

[Drewbert]

Thanks for adding the extra character classes to the IDN filter.

Fingers crossed the other request gets approved! :^)

Have you heard anything from Verisign regarding what language IDN.IDN they'll release next?

[dynadot]

You're welcome! We're glad to hear it's a hit. :)

We haven't heard any announcements from Verisign about their other language domain extensions yet, but we know they have more coming up. We will be attending an event put on by them early next month and hopefully will have more info after that. We'll check back in here once we know more!

[clipper]

You're welcome! We're glad to hear it's a hit. :)

We haven't heard any announcements from Verisign about their other language domain extensions yet, but we know they have more coming up. We will be attending an event put on by them early next month and hopefully will have more info after that. We'll check back in here once we know more!

Hey Dynadot,

We're seeing highly competitive pricing from your foreign competitors in the IDN nGTLDs from Verisign. In Japan, Onamae is giving them away at about $0.30 apiece (which basically covers ICANN fees); in Korea, we're seeing pricing at around $4.50 for the pair (dotcom and dotnet at 5000 KRW) at hosting.kr.

Can you folks inquire with Verisign if they're offering promotional pricing to certain registrars? Can they make similar arrangements with you?

It's possible that the registrars are taking a bath on these, but I find it unlikely that they aren't being given some sort of push from above.

From a registrant standpoint, there's no reason to keep my domains with you, since your foreign competitors offer such favorable pricing.

As the second-largest registrar for .コム (largely due to us), you're going to have some pull with them, as well as market insight, to open up and maybe make a similar offer for upcoming launches.

I am certain that if their launches thus far had worldwide promotional pricing similar to what we're seeing in Korea and Japan that registrations would be deep into the tens of thousands for both Korean and Japanese in the few short months they have been available, and momentum would only be building for their upcoming launches.

Thanks for your time.

[dynadot]

Thanks for letting us know, clipper. We definitely want to offer competitive pricing to our customers and will discuss with Verisign to see if there is anything we can do for our IDN TLDs.

[dynadot]

Good news! We are lowering our 1 year registration prices for Japanese .COM to $6.99 and lowering our prices for Korean .COM & .NET to $7.99 starting 9/15 EDT. This special pricing will go until the end of the month for Japanese .COM and the end of the year for the Korean TLDs.

[Drewbert]

Thanks for that. There's only one problem.

99% of our (idnforum board members) registrations are done during the "Priority Access Period". For .コム and .닷컴 and .닷넷, many of us have done all the registering we're going to do. The premium pricing that Verisign charged it's #1 fan base really knocked the stuffing out of us - I for one did NOT register many of the domains I had priority access to because of the ridiculous registration prices.

Perhaps you could negotiate the above prices with verisign for the NEXT launch, and also try to convince them to leave the premium pricing rort out of the system until AFTER the priority access period has ended? We have, after all, been registering the .com/net versions for nearly 10 years, waiting for these launched to finally take place. (You are welcome to look up my dynadot account to see how much I have spent in IDN's waiting for the launch only to be slapped in the face by Verisign with Premium Pricing).

Let's hear a "+1" from all who agree...

(Also, please read http://www.idnforums.com/forums/35355-닷컴-and-닷넷-coming-down-the-pike.html for background if you haven't already.)

[Rubber Duck]

+1

By far the biggest barrier to litigation over the Premium Domains is Versign's failure to prove they are even worth Reg Fee.

Thanks for that. There's only one problem.

99% of our (idnforum board members) registrations are done during the "Priority Access Period". For .コム and .닷컴 and .닷넷, many of us have done all the registering we're going to do. The premium pricing that Verisign charged it's #1 fan base really knocked the stuffing out of us - I for one did NOT register many of the domains I had priority access to because of the ridiculous registration prices.

Perhaps you could negotiate the above prices with verisign for the NEXT launch, and also try to convince them to leave the premium pricing rort out of the system until AFTER the priority access period has ended? We have, after all, been registering the .com/net versions for nearly 10 years, waiting for these launched to finally take place. (You are welcome to look up my dynadot account to see how much I have spent in IDN's waiting for the launch only to be slapped in the face by Verisign with Premium Pricing).

Let's hear a "+1" from all who agree...

(Also, please read http://www.idnforums.com/forums/35355-닷컴-and-닷넷-coming-down-the-pike.html for background if you haven't already.)

[IdnHost]

+1

[sbe18]

+1

with an Icelandic football Viking clap cheer.. ;)

[Steve Clarke]

+1

[clipper]

+1

[AWS]

+1

[dynadot]

Thanks for the info, Drewbert et al. We did receive similar feedback from other IDN customers after the launches and we did pass this on to Verisign. Unfortunately, I don't think there's much we can do about their premium prices, but I will definitely bring this up with them again at the event in October.

[tee1]

+1

[Drewbert]

Thanks!

[dynadot]

You're welcome! We also wanted to let everyone know that we just removed the language drop down from our IDN search. Our system will now automatically detect the language for you.

[Drewbert]

Thanks for that. Here's a suggestion to improve things even further.

Currently, if I go to IDN search and search a Korean string, the order things come back in are:

com, net, org, gdn, live, online, website, co, global, xyz

because those are the default search TLDs even for IDN's.

Please scrap those defaults - gdn is a joke "global domain name" a stretch of the imagination. .global doesn't even offer IDN. ,xyz, well what can I say?

All those ASCII's are allowing IDN registrations in the 2nd level purely for profit reasons, not to offer the Internet user anything in the way of security and/or stability.

How about, when you detect the language, for Korean, offer .닷컴 and .닷넷 FIRST along with any other Korean newGTLD's (are there any)?

With Japanese, offer .コム first.

For Cyrillic, .орг .сайт should be first on the list, until Verisign launch the .com equivalent.

etc etc.

Offering ASCII TLD's in front of IDN TLD's just makes a joke of the whole reason for having IDN's in the first place.

[IdnHost]

Thanks for that. Here's a suggestion to improve things even further.

Currently, if I go to IDN search and search a Korean string, the order things come back in are:

com, net, org, gdn, live, online, website, co, global, xyz

because those are the default search TLDs even for IDN's.

Please scrap those defaults - gdn is a joke "global domain name" a stretch of the imagination. .global doesn't even offer IDN. ,xyz, well what can I say?

All those ASCII's are allowing IDN registrations in the 2nd level purely for profit reasons, not to offer the Internet user anything in the way of security and/or stability.

How about, when you detect the language, for Korean, offer .닷컴 and .닷넷 FIRST along with any other Korean newGTLD's (are there any)?

With Japanese, offer .コム first.

For Cyrillic, .орг .сайт should be first on the list, until Verisign launch the .com equivalent.

etc etc.

Offering ASCII TLD's in front of IDN TLD's just makes a joke of the whole reason for having IDN's in the first place.


Couldn't have said it better myself! +1

[dynadot]

Thanks for the great ideas! I will definitely pass this on to the team. We are actually working on some upcoming search changes. For now though, I did want to mention that you can set your Dynadot searches to show certain TLDs that you prefer. The settings will apply to all of our searches, but it will help you put the TLDs you're most interested in at the top when you do a search while you're signed into your account. Here are some instructions on how to set that up: https://www.dynadot.com/community/help/question/save-search-settings

[dynadot]

Happy Friday, everyone!

[clipper]

Happy Friday, everyone!

Hey Dynadot, you said you were meeting with Verisign at the end of October.

Here's some data you might want to bring to the table regarding Japanese IDNs, "premium" IDNs and sales thus far. Perhaps you already have it or are aware of it in real time.

This is from about a week ago.

My only reference is your retail price and Japanese .コム, so that's how I've divided these, and the revenue total is registrar gross, since we don't know the wholesale price of these names.

Note that the largest premium tier is the sixth, which comprises over 26,000 names and is roughly 70% ASCII. I have no idea how many have been registered, since you'll only allow me to search 1,000 at a time. :-p

I think that this quick breakdown will give you a decent idea of where the breaking point is for valuing these things going forward. When less than 2% are being sold at a premium price, then the price is too high.


Tier 1 ($30,000):
Total: 656 (All ASCII)
Registered: 13
Revenue: 390,000

Tier 2 ($14,400)
Total: 246 (74 ASCII / 171 Japanese)
Registered: 12 (5 ASCII / 7 Japanese)

Tier 3 ($1,440)
Total: 528 (All Japanese)
Registered: 22

Tier 4 ($720)
Total: 1,123 (All Japanese)
Registered: 52

Tier 5 ($360)
Total: 10,616 (7,632 ASCII, 2984 Japanese)
Registered: 198 (25 ASCII, 173 Japanese)

Gross Revenue: $703,200
ASCII Revenue: $471,000
IDN Revenue: $232,200

ASCII revenue far outpaces native language, but Verisign can't conceivably build its brand on mixed-script names like sex.コム ($1,440). And native-speakers and investors simply aren't willing to pay at these prices.

$360 was the price of some very desirable Japanese premiums that I decided to drop at a loss. (I, in fact, purchased NO names in either Japanese or Korean at premium prices, except for one that was later pulled from me and refunded).

Verisign is right to price ASCII and numbers investors into the stars, but all signs point to us IDN investors (even in a developed market such as Japan) cutting our losses if premium pricing is this high going forward.

It is important to note that Japanese .コム was a great success, largely because it has the most developed economy of all of the countries being represented by Verisign's IDNs. It would be silly to expect the same sort of investment in languages where per capita GDP is 1/3 that of Japan (China - 1/3, India - 1/6, Thai - 1/3). Further, noting that only 1/3 of premium revenue came from IDNs might dissuade them from the tactic in the future.

I have a strong hunch that Korean native language premium numbers are far worse, but I have no list to check.

[idn]

.コム was a great success

?

[clipper]

.コム was a great success

?

What did it cost? $250k plus personnel/time? For $700k+ in revenue over six months? Yes. In the short term it is a success.

[Drewbert]

Very informative post. Thanks!

[squirrel]

What did it cost? $250k plus personnel/time? For $700k+ in revenue over six months? Yes. In the short term it is a success.

Not material to a billion dollars company however :(

[dynadot]

Thanks. I've passed these ideas onto the team and we will see if this is something that we can implement in the future.

[Drewbert]

Just as an aside, when I get domain offers sent to me via your messaging system, if the offerer has used a currency symbol, it isn't encoded correctly.

Can you have your guys look at your messaging system please, to make sure it's all UTF-8 and not doing any weird encoding?

[dynadot]

I'll ask the team about that, but it may be your browser. What is the browser you're using, Drewbert?

Also, thanks for the info about the Japanese TLD, clipper. I did meet with Verisign and did talk to them about IDN premiums and relayed your feedback. They took it well, but I don't know if they'll make any changes. They also didn't have any dates for any upcoming launches yet. Hopefully they'll announce the dates soon and when they do I will definitely post the info here.

[Drewbert]

I doubt it's my browser. It looks like the classic double-encoded Unicode to me.

http://www.yunker.io/2013/05/18/double-encoded-data-in-mysql/

Have your tech guys check out message ID 82193.

[Drewbert]

IDN search page still brings up ASCII TLD's as default. What's with THAT?

[dynadot]

Thanks, I'll let our engineering team know to look at that message specifically.

As for the ASCII TLDs coming up first, that is based on how we set up our search, but you can actually adjust your settings to see the TLDs that you prefer instead. Here are the instructions on how to do that: https://www.dynadot.com/community/help/question/save-search-settings

[Drewbert]

You don't see the irony in having a special IDN search page, but presenting it with defaults of ASCII TLDS (some which don't even offer IDN) instead of listing all the IDN TLD's for the default?

That's great that you allow account holders to specify their defaults, but I have ASCII and IDN portfolios. When I search for ASCII, its invariably in .com. When I search for IDN, it's in whatever language .com I'm after.