Exclusive Q&A with Lee Hodgson: The Man Who Shaped Dropcatching

Lee Hodgson, one of the shapers of the domain industry, also known by his handle DomainGuru, sits down with IDNBlog to discuss his trajectory and the future of IDNs. Lee recently developed the Thai name เกมส์.com (http://xn--12c8d1a4fxc.com/) “games”.com, which is one of the top sites in Thailand according to Alexa. Besides holding a valuable IDN portfolio which he is in the process of developing, Lee also acts as a consultant on IDN website development projects at IDNGuru.com where he has released case studies such as this one (link).

Q: When and how did you enter the domain industry?

Lee Hodgson: I had written computer games for close on 10 years since leaving college, and had really “burnt out”. You can only write so many lines of assembly language before tiring of it! It was 1999 and I was traveling in Asia, looking for something I could do online. I saw an article about business.com selling for big bucks, and thought “let’s try that for a few months”. 10 years later, and I’m still trying.

Q: When you revealed the 6:30 am drop time here (http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/name-goldrush-1-rules-play) and basically laid out the business plan for Snapnames in public posts, many saw you as championing equal access for regging expiring names, while others saw you as making the drop market too competitive for the initial participants. How do you see your role in the history of the domain industry?

LH: I was, and still am, immensely proud of that series of articles. As part one hinted, the registry was already buckling under the strain of more and more domainers running “aggressive” scripts trying to grab the best expired domains. The drop-time information was effectively “out of the bag” at that time, it was spreading virally amongst domainers, so the whole expired domain landscape had to change anyway, it wasn’t sustainable in its (then) current form. If the article did anything, it was to wake people up to the situation that was developing.

Q: Why have you turned to focus on investing in IDNs? What potential do you see in IDNs?

LH: My focus switched to IDNs almost as quickly as I entered the domain game. In 2000 I was busy learning the Thai language, and began to wonder how such an amazingly different language could ever be “squeezed” into the ASCII character set used for domain names. Thais were able to have their web pages in their own language, but were being forced to use English-language for their domain names. It just didn’t make sense.

The Thai language just can’t be represented properly using A-Z, there are many differences, too many to list, but including: Thai words have 5 tones, long and short versions of vowels, consonant sounds we don’t have in English, vowel “diphthongs” not present in English, plus various special marker symbols.

Thailand is famous for having the English version of their words spelled in numerous different ways on road-signs etc. There is no widely used transliteration scheme to represent Thai words in the English language. That speaks volumes.

So what all that means is that what should be the cornerstone of any community’s web, domain names, the labels that are supposed to be meaningful and memorable to their users, just don’t exist in Thailand. This really hampers the development of the local web. Who is going to spend money advertising a website name on a drive-by billboard if 99% people can’t remember the name after passing the sign? And on the radio, even worse, Thais have to spell out their domains for the audience to even have a chance of working out what they are supposed to type in. Its terrible.

ASCII domain names are not fit for [a] purpose in Thailand, period.

So once I figured that out, I went out looking for a solution. There [were] various “plug-in solutions” being touted, but my experience in the ASCII world had already taught me to ignore those, so I eventually found out that VeriSign was planning a “multi-lingual domain test-bed”, which was to start accepting registrations for Japanese in 2000, and other languages (including Thai) in 2001. I was too late for the Japanese launch but managed to make the Thai launch on 19th April 2001.

Q: What are the obstacles and rewards unique to developing IDNs?

LH: Alexa stats are meaningless in Thailand, as the number of people with the Alexa toolbar installed is tiny. The results are statistically insignificant. I would hazard to guess much the same story for the rest of Asia. A much better measure in Thailand can be found at truehits.net, which collects website stats exclusively for Thai sites, where the [เกมส์.com (http://xn--12c8d1a4fxc.com/) "games".com] site normally ranks between 200 and 300.

I mention that because it helps to answer the 2nd part of your question. When you develop IDN sites, you have to relearn a lot of stuff. For instance, in Thailand, IE6 penetration is still quite high, at 40% or so, and as any IDNer knows, IE6 is not IDN-aware. This means people clicking through to our site from Google won’t see เกมส์.com in their address bar, but rather http://xn--12c8d1a4fxc.com, and IE6 users cannot type-in the Thai domain in their address bar, IE6 just doesn’t “understand” what you are trying to do….

And because the address bar has historically been a place for (ASCII) domain names, Thais have pretty much ignored it to date. They would much rather type stuff (in English or Thai) into google.co.th. That way they have a much better chance of getting to where they want to end up. Google has various ways of helping out users, the address bar is much a much harsher environment. If you don’t type a domain 100% right, you don’t get to your destination, which is a scary thought when typing in a non-native language. So whilst typing domain names
into search engines rather than the address might be counter-intuitive for westerners, the opposite is true for Thais. It saves time [and does] not waste[] it.

There are other differences as well. For SEO, it is good to have your keywords in the URLs, but putting Thai characters into site directory names is a challenge. Once you get it working, you breathe a sigh of relief only to realize that when people start trying to send site URLs to each, remembering that the URLs contain both IDN domain names and unicode directory names, email clients fall over themselves to ….fall over. Even great mail clients like gmail seem completely unable to reliably “work out” such URLs. So that becomes a big issue, how do you allow your URLs to be spread virally when email clients routinely corrupt your URLs? We have had to employ a number of techniques, including having an ASCII domain we use in emails (ThaiGamez.com), plus bit.ly shortened URLs as well.

And other software still fails to work with IDNs properly. Google Analytics, which is a great piece of software, still says our site gets 99% of IE visitors from IE6, and 0.06% from IE8. This bug has been present for a couple of years at least but even after reporting it repeatedly to Google, its still not fixed.

So the challenges are unfortunately, still many. But the rewards are worth it. We can now develop websites that have a meaningful native-language name associated with them. And not just meaningful to the target audience, but also meaningful to search engines. For the first time ever, Thais can develop websites using names that are “exact keyword matches”. In ASCII-land, this ability has been around since day one. If you were serious about being ranked top #10 for a search term, “truck rental” say, you went out and bought that name (if you could afford it). Now people around the world can do the same.

Through consistently good search placement for the last 3 years at google, our เกมส์.com site has generated approximately 60 million pageviews from 7 million unique IP addresses. That beats “domain parking” any day

Q: What advice would you give to a beginning IDN investor? Would you recommend any languages to invest in over others?

LH: IDNing is not a game for the short-term investor. I’ve been at in nearly 10 years now and we are still waiting for IDN.IDN to happen, though all the indicators are the time is very near now.

But even when IDN.IDN happens, software and people will still need time to adjust. IE6 will not just suddenly die out, email clients will not suddenly correct themselves, Thais will not suddenly start using the address bar rather than the search box, and the value of keyword-rich domains will only become apparent over time to locals. Never forget how alienating ASCII domain names have been to many around the world for the last decade. IDN.IDN will start to change that, but it will be a gradual process.

So the news for anyone looking to get into IDNs is good. It is still very early days, the opportunity is still there. Whereas with ASCII which only had one “games.com” to acquire and develop, there is now “games.com” available in dozens of languages. So if you can’t get the Thai one, try the Japanese one, or the Arabic one, or the Farsi one, or the Russian one ……

So the supply side looks great for the new investor. And because IDNing is much harder “to get” than traditional ASCII domaining, the demand side is still amazingly soft in my opinion. This will change over the next year, as IDN.IDN gets rolled out and the publicity that will go with it. So if you are an ASCII domainer and looking for the next big domain thing, you can still get amazing prices on many AAA IDN keyword domains.

And the same goes (if not more so) for the niche site developer. Get your keyword now in as many languages as possible, and develop, develop, develop.

As for individual languages, I don’t really have any recommendations there except for the pretty obvious one that if you happen to know a particular language, have a go at that first. Its certainly not a requirement to know a language, but boy does it help, especially now you can’t get free refunds on “bad” domain registrations!