Dave Wrixon owns one of the strongest IDN portfolios period. And he managed to accumulate his portfolio long before many even heard of the term “IDN”. More impressive, is that he has been a vocal leader in the domain industry. He is known for tirelessly advocating IDNs everywhere and at any time of day or night.



Q: Pitch me. Pretend I am a .com investor with limited time and no knowledge of IDNs. What am I missing?

A: Domaining ROI is all about exploiting opportunity in a timely manner. IDN are not only timely they are about ten years late. Of course, because the domains have been available to register even though the infrastructure to support them has not been in place, much of what is ever going to be available is already spoken for. However, as Rick Schwartz quite rightly pointed out, IDNers are not yet in a position to deliver, and that in itself provides a huge opportunity for anyone to willing to take a chance in the secondary market. Of course there is risk and most of that is down to the ebb and flow of policy formulation, however that is largely now complete although one or two important points have yet to crystallize. Once that clarity is there, this going take off like a Saturn 5 rocket. The ROI achievable from making the right calls at the right time are enormous. Can you still believe Rick bought Porno for $42K? Well, you may have had a good excuse for not make a killing the first time around, but you have no excuse this time around. This is the second wave. There will not be a third.


Q: Please let all of our readers know, what is your history with IDNs? Is there a story as to how you first got involved, and where has it taken you?

A: It started in early 2004. Yes, I saw a Turkish IDN on Sedo and asked Domainguru what it meant. He explained what an IDN was. I then realized that there were online dictionaries that enable you get the Unicode. It was then simply a matter of using a Punycode converter to register at an IDN supporting registry of which at that time there were very few. The bottom line was that at that time nearly everyone was dropping and nobody was registering, so we sort of scooped the pot, to the degree that we were able with non-existent local language skills.

Q: What languages have you invested in?

A: We maintain significant holdings in Chinese (Simplied and Traditional), Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Thai, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Punjabi, Gujarati, and Azeri.

Q: What are your current favorite languages to invest in and why?

A: We are not currently in acquisition mode. We feel that further acquisitions at this time would do little to ensure the success of the venture. You have to understand that we picked most of our domains for $7 bucks, so we are reluctant to pay 4 and 5 figures a domain to acquire more of the same. The quality of new-registrations bears no resemblance to the quality that was available five years ago.

Q: How would you describe the risk profile of each: Chinese, Japanese and Russian IDNs?

A: Japanese is most favored among domaining circles, but even in 2005 it was tough getting good terms, and we struggled to understand the language or find easy sources of translation. Remember there was no Google Translation service back then. Only a few languages had even been indexed. You could not see how many web pages would turn up in Arabic back then. Even Chinese websites were rarely Unicode, many were in Pinyin (Latin Character) and the rest were in unsearchable bit-maps. Chinese is also pretty much played out, but China is going to be the world’s biggest market, so even with the perception of political risk it should be on everyone’s agenda. Russia seems to be most clear cut. Current PPC values are low but the traffic is there and growing and click through rates are respectable. No market has yet shown itself to be firing on all cylinders yet but Russian is the closest.


Q: What are your thoughts on Rick Schwartz’s interview the other day?

A: Not quite sure what he’s doing to be honest. He has just hosted one of the main domaining seminars, but to my knowledge has given the subject no airing at all, despite the fact the most momentous changes to the Internet in forty years were being implemented concurrently half way around the globe. Frankly, these guys have their heads in the sand, but that is their entitlement, although it does a disservice to newbies not to inform them of the wider picture, especially when they are under the impression that they are paid to be appraised of the domain market. But I must say it baffles me why anyone would come on here to make a point of displaying their lack of knowledge?


Q: To ask some similar questions as I asked of Rick, how do you go about deciding whether to acquire a domain? What metrics do you use, and how often do you rely on your “gut” instinct?

A: I believe in metrics but to be ahead of the curve you have to go where the brave dare not tread. Prospectuses are for investors not speculators. Sure I used my gut a lot and figured if I got it right once in three attempts, then I was way ahead of the game. As it turned out we got it right most of the time.

Q: What were your best and worst IDN purchases?

A: I have probably dropped nearly a 1000 domains in total but nothing I paid $200K for. The best is impossible to say, but a lot of cities, countries and provinces and single characters spring to mind, but the top commercial generics have to be the best, even though the prices of those are not as high at present.

Q: Will we see you investing more in English .com’s as opposed to IDNs in the future, and why or why not?

A: I don’t think I will ever invest in English dot com. As Rick says, “follow the money”, and the big ROI is to be had in IDN. I sold Tokyo.net in Japanese for $10K just six months after acquiring it 7 Bucks. Work that out as a ROI!

Q: For those who missed it, can you fill us in on the progress made in Seoul regarding IDNs?

A: Well ICANN belatedly made some progress and that will no doubt raise the profile at lot. What it will ultimately do more than anything is raise awareness of what is already out there. ICANN is still disappointing a lot of people and have a lot of work to do. Most of what they have taken credit for has been the hard work of others.

Q: So now that the fast track ccTLD process officially begins on November 16th, 2009, when do you expect to first see .IDNs?

A: About 2000. No seriously, the only significant new registration coming out in the foreseeable future is Dot RF, and good luck getting those. What you are going to see is a lot more support for the domains that have been around forever. China already bundled its IDN.IDN with IDN.cn so the best of those have been registered like forever. Dot RF will come on stream as a new registry next June sometime for the lucky winners of a rather expensive Dutch Auction. In the meantime there is going to be considerable uptake of the IDN.com that are already out there. A lot of businesses already brand on these without actually registering them.

Q: With the release of IDNs in the extension, what do you expect will happen to the value and popularity of IDN.com domains?

A: Dot com will continue to be king regardless of language or script, but with the addition of aliasing for which there is no viable charging mechanism, it will mean that there will be a substantial hike in the fees of all dot com registration. That should be popular!

Q: A lot of noise has been made about aliasing IDN.com to IDN.IDN. Will this aliasing happen? If so when would you approximate that aliasing will happen? Should we expect it to happen in all languages?

A: It will happen and in all languages. My guess is that it will start to come on stream late 2010. But from a investor’s point of view what is needed is a clearly defined road map. Yes, ICANN that means you.

Q: To take a step back, what does aliasing mean?

A: Aliasing means that strings are equated, and all equivalent strings will be directed on mass back to the dot com registry or whichever TLD they have been equated to. This will only happen at the Top Level, so no, the owners of Bullion.com will not be entitled to strings with similar meanings in all languages.

Q: Do you have a sense of roughly how many IDN.com’s have been registered in each of Russia, China and Japan?

A:It is very difficult to get statistics apart from IDN.jp which has fallen to around 130K. Dot Com had dipped below a million registrations but my guess is that we are now well north of that. Verisign doesn’t seem to like to talk about this for some reason.

Q: Overall, which do you expect to be more popular, IDN.com or IDN.IDN?

A:It will depend on country and language. Dot RF will probably do well in Russia. Elsewhere I would expect dot com to remain the most commercially significant. Of course there is Germany, but I have little interest in Latin IDN.

Q: How does aliasing work for .CN names? And related, do you prefer .CN or .COM?

A: Well, at the moment the Chinese have implemented an ISP hack so an address used inside China goes somewhere else from those outside China. As far as I can tell they simply have a few lines of code that say if it contains XN– then append .CN to the end. Of course that means that IDN.com currently go nowhere useful. However, the whole point of having IDN TLDs put into the ICANN Root is to remove such hacks, so this problem should not endure much longer.

Q: Do you see IDN names ever overtaking standard English .com names in popularity? In any particular market? Overall?

A: Everywhere that Latin is not the standard script for the language, IDN will dominate almost totally apart from the retention of Latin for one or two well established brands. Elsewhere, there really is not too much need for them, but the Germans are embracing them anyway. They seem not to be concerned about the technical distinction between IDN and what people rather annoyingly call English.com.

Q: Are you familiar with our services at IDNTools and IDNNewsletter? If so, what can we do to increase IDN awareness?

A: Yes, but probably very little apart from trying to keep people on message. There has been more crap spoken about IDN than just about any other subject in the history of mankind.


Q: What can domain investors do to further the progress of the IDN industry?

A: Frankly, I don’t really see it as separate industry, although to date it is not well integrated into the existing industry. About all you can really do is to ridicule those that behave as though the entire world speaks English. That seems to include most of the existing domaining establishment.

Q: Do you have any predictions about what the IDN industry will look like in 5 years?

A: Well in five years time, the size of the Chinese economy will be almost on par with that of the US, although it is likely the US will come down almost as much as China comes up. Much of the world’s economy will be derived from populations that are not going to be using English on the Internet. Other than that things will be much as they are now except the Internet addresses will look very different. Most people will not know what IDNs are. They will simply use them.

Q: Thank you Dave for your time, your tireless advocacy of IDNs and for being a founding father of the IDN industry.