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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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