The best name in the new .рф Russian IDN extension is debatably секс.рф (“sex.rf”). In checking the whois, I confirmed that CETIS is the owner of the name. Sluh.biz, a Russian news site reported (translated version below): “CETIS is a subsidiary of REG.RU, which first received permission to register domains in the zone .рф. Moreover, CEO Alexei [...]
Why park your best domain? You can earn 10x by dropshipping. Dropshipping is when you don’t make, store or ship the product. Instead, your website works for you automatically while you sleep or are on vacation. Your site collects leads, takes orders, gives them to the dropshipper who in turn ships the product, collects payment [...]
Here are the top 5 reasons why domain investors stay away from IDNs, and the rebuttals to each: 1. A native would never type an IDN in foreign characters and then .com in Roman characters. IDN.com will be worthless as you don’t have foreign characters on both sides of the dot. Not true. Dot com is [...]
According to a breaking New York Observer report (link here), Time Inc. gathered the magazine industry’s biggest names to form a new company that will allow print media to transition to the digital economy. The Observer reported that “Time Inc., Condé Nast and Hearst [are] all expected to join, houses that together publish more than [...]
The Arabic language has caught the tech bug. Within the last week, Egypt, Tunisia and others applied for Arabic IDN ccTLDs. Just yesterday, Skype announced that it is offering its website in an Arabic version to attract hundreds of millions of Arabic speakers as customers. Skype’s decision to aggressively market to Arabic Internet users in [...]
If you are like me, now is domain renewal season. Tonight means spreadsheets, domain management, traffic stat counting and paying renewal fees before 2010. I need a time out. And handing over a grip of money in the video above, is kind of what I wish my domain renewal season was about. Enjoy.
Sex.com is not so popular in Saudi Arabia. In 2008, Businessweek reported that Saudi Arabia had perhaps the strictest internet censorship in the world. Sexual sites were strictly taboo. Recently, in preparing a shortlist of names for a future volume of IDNNewsletter, we received a great adult generic in Arabic that was modestly priced. I [...]
The best domain valuation theory I ever read, was to imagine if the name you were buying would appeal to the type of brand that is a Super Bowl advertiser. The logic goes that if a company can spend over $1 million on a 3 minute ad, it can spend a million on its industry’s [...]
Variant characters are two or more representations of the same character, which may look visually similar. ICANN.org states the variant TLD dilemma as follows, “[a]llowing variant TLDs may result in user confusion, while excluding them may ‘disenfranchise’ cultures that use the characters in the excluded TLD strings.” ICANN further explains that a team will determine [...]
The Internet Governance Forum (IGF) concluded this week and its implications sent shockwaves rippling through the domain industry. As background, the IGF met in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt from November 15th-18th. There were more than 1800 participants from 112 countries. The major discussion topics included: promoting local content, protecting against cybercrime, managing root server system, IP [...]
