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February 28 2010Posted by: IDNBlog

Making Money with IDNs: Google Adwords Obstacles

Google Adwords is one of the cheapest ways to get targeted clicks to your sites. Buying an IDN is one of the most cost-effective ways to own a super-premium, category-killer, I-put-Jeff-Bezos-to-shame domain. Too bad the two don’t mesh.

In planning out the development for some of my better IDNs, I found that if you use Adwords to advertise an IDN, the url that you link to and that you display must be in punycode. Having a “xn--” domain referenced in the ad rather than the actual IDN makes the ad look like spam, which hurts your click through rate, and almost forces you to seek out other alternatives. See below:

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February 27 2010Posted by: IDNBlog

Verisign Heightens Expectations of “Unlocking” .Com



As reported by Domain Name Wire, Chuck Gomes, Vice President of Policy and Compliance for VeriSign Information Services, elaborated on Verisign’s plan to “unlock” IDN.com names so that owners of a IDN.com can own an IDN.IDN.

In December, Gomes first explained Verisign’s goal of unlocking IDN.com in an IDNBlog interview (here). Gomes initially said that the idea was “if you are the registrant of [insert IDN].com, no one else could register [insert IDN].com-in-IDN…”

Today, Gomes clarified that to unlock a “.com-in-IDN” there will likely be an additional fee.

Gomes cautioned that “[n]othing is . . . concrete yet,” but also expressed confidence that he thinks “it’s a pretty well agreed-to plan.”

Ultimately, the ball is in ICANN’s court as to whether such activation of .com-in-IDN can occur. From a policy perspective, this seems like it would be a way to allow other countries to catch-up in using their native language on the Internet in a well branded TLD. It also would enhance value for a large constituency of registrants who hold many IDN.com names.

An interesting question already raised on IDNForums (here), is what languages will be included in this plan to unlock/activate/alias .com? Gomes said that the “the business unit is considering applying for ’several’ IDN versions of .com in some of the scripts”, which implied that some scripts might be left out in the cold.

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February 24 2010Posted by: IDNBlog

Bangladesh Applies for an .IDN ccTLD: Will Bengali Names Hold Value?



Bangladesh has filed a formal application for an .IDN Bengali ccTLD. Bangladesh has a population of over 162,000,000 (here).

It may be populous, but it is also a poor country with low levels of Internet penetration (even if you may have come across the occasional Bangladeshi coder) — in fact most Bengali words have nearly non-existent monthly search volume stats.

As a very long-term play, you can still register almost any name in Bengali that you want, if you are inclined to stick it out until the large local population starts searching in its native language.

Personally, I couldn’t resist the temptation to grab a few Bengali .com’s (especially since the Bengali TLD could increase usage and value of Bengali domains) but am fully aware that it could be many years before any ROI on this type of investment. In the meantime, I’ll return to the traditional focus on Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian and Hebrew names.

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February 22 2010Posted by: IDNBlog

Are There No More Opportunities In IDNs?

Newcomers to the IDN industry often wonder if they arrived too late. Has the window of opportunity closed? My answer is definitely not. In the IDN sales chart below, maintained here , you can see that there are still opportunities for those willing to spend x,xxx. In particular, the Japanese names (Pregnancy).com and (Tickets).jp look like some of the nicer acquisitions from the past few weeks:

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February 19 2010Posted by: IDNBlog

What Poker.org and Sex.com Mean for the Average Domainer



Poker.org just sold for $1 million. Sex.com should definitely exceed $5 million in the forthcoming auction. This is electrifying news for domainers big and small. It should increase your confidence in the industry and in the money that can be made at the very top. When you have a one word irreplaceable “got-to-have-it” domain, time and time again we have seen values increase.

How will you react to this news? Many, unfortunately, will run out with fist-fulls of cash trying to buy some of the lower hanging .org names. This is not what you should do. This is not what companies want. They do not want a name like mykitchentable.org (unregistered at the time of the post) and I can’t imagine a future where people will be fighting over such a name.

Companies are not spending millions on IDNs right now either. But I do imagine a time where premium one word IDNs mirror the steep climb that .com’s and .org’s have experienced over the past decade.

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February 18 2010Posted by: IDNBlog

Breaking: Sedo to Support Chinese and Japanese IDNs



Finally. Sam Nunez, the VP of Product Management at Sedo just announced that “Sedo will add support for Chinese, Japanese and other ‘multi-byte’ characters [for] IDNs starting next week.”

This was just posted as a comment to our IDN series on Elliot’s Blog (link here). Thanks for all who made this happen — to Elliot for graciously hosting the IDN guest posts, the comments that showed Sedo the demand for IDN support, and of course kudos to Sam and the team at Sedo for moving forward with this.

Sedo’s embrace of IDNs should add liquidity and ultimately value to the IDN market.

*Update: Also IDNDemystified wrote a nice post on the topic here

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February 16 2010Posted by: IDNBlog

Domain Observations from Mexico



I just vacationed in Mexico. It was a great vacation, with plenty of beach and guacamole. I also learned a good amount about the non-U.S. use of domains. My eyes gravitated towards every billboard or T.V. ad that used a domain name. I was particularly curious as to whether I saw a preference for ccTLDs vs. dot com names. I was also interested in whether native Spanish language domains were used or whether English domains were more popular.

I found the “.com.mx” extension to be used frequently both with English and Spanish phrases. I surprisingly didn’t see one ad for “.mx”, though I expect it to be adopted more in the future. For hotels, restaurants and tourist shops, I saw .com being used exclusively. I saw slightly more English domains advertised in Mexico when it came to the dot com extension, and many more Spanish names advertised in Mexico under the .com.mx extension. Of course this was a small sample size and each market/country has its own preferences. But this was some food for thought, and definitely makes me think that there will be plenty of opportunity in the forthcoming IDN.IDN ccTLD market.

Also interesting was IP-based domain forwarding. Based on our Mexican IP address when I’d type in Google.com I would be redirected to Google.com.mx. With Picnik.com, my favorite online photo editor site, when I typed in the url, the site automatically came up in Spanish instead of the usual English but the domain used was the same. Many ccTLD advocates stress that people need a different domain to go local, but with IP based language detection as used by Picnik, this might not be the case.

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February 14 2010Posted by: IDNBlog

ICANN Terror Threat



Right before the weekend, ICANN posted an update to the terrorist threat that jeopardizes the upcoming ICANN Nairobi meeting.

Initially, on Thursday, ICANN posted that the U.S. State department released the following statement:

“As of early February 2010, individuals affiliated with al-Shabaab al-Islamiya were planning suicide bombing attacks on the US Embassy and Kenyan International Conference Center in Nairobi, Kenya . . . .”

On Friday, ICANN downplayed the threat, stating “general threats of this kind are common; what made this particular communication worthy of mention is that it has identified a specific venue that has not generally been the target of previous threats. . . . Staff is evaluating a full range of options for handling the meeting.”

I am confident that ICANN will take all measures possible to ensure the safety of conference participants as this is of utmost importance. I hope that regardless of where this meeting takes place that ICANN continues to make quick and decisive strides in advancing IDNs and introducing new IDN ccTLDs.

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February 12 2010Posted by: IDNBlog

IDNTools Ad in Las Vegas (picture)



With great pride, I can announce that we rented out a billboard rotation in the famous Fashion Show Mall in Las Vegas. The Fashion Show Mall is owned by General Growth Properties Inc. and boasts over 250 stores including Saks and Bloomingdales.

Yes, this is similar to our earlier Times Square billboard (here), which gave us a nice spike in traffic and IDNDroplist subscribers.

Ultimately, the more publicity for IDNTools, IDNs and domains in general the better for everyone in domaining.

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February 11 2010Posted by: IDNBlog

Russia Says Yes, Though the Official Answer is No

A number of press releases and registrar statements over the past week touted the ability to preregister Russia’s “forthcoming” .РФ IDN ccTLD extension.

The problem is that Russia hasn’t received ICANN approval to release the .РФ extension. Only recently has .РФ jumped the String Evaluation hurdle (link) but it has not passed the String Delegation threshold, which means that it is not ready to be released.

In fact, ICANN issued a strong statement to the contrary (here) noting that .РФ is not ready to be released or preregistered:

“[.РФ] must go through the final step in the Fast Track Process – String Delegation . . . [o]nly after String Delegation takes place will these TLDs be in the DNS root zone, and only then can resolutions requests against them be performed.” Moreover, ICANN emphasized that it “has not authorized pre-registration of domain names in any potential future TLDs” which includes .РФ.

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