Japanese Language Domains

It’s no coincidence Japanese domains are one of the favourites amongst domainers, with Japan having the second largest economy by nominal GDP.

Country

GDP: $34,200
Online advertising spend forecast for 2011: ~755bn Yen ($7.7bn)
Population: 127m
Internet Penetration 2008: 91m users

“82.55 million Internet users from PC, compared to 75.06 million Internet users from mobile.
More than 90% of people in the age group of 13-49 are Internet users”

Language
English Speaking: 11.75%

Social, Domestic & Political

Nothing notable
No evil government firewall like China has

At face value, Japan is ripe for IDN’s with it’s low English speaking population, it’s high internet penetration and equally high on-line spend – and what with Japan being the epi-centre for technology, this can only spill over to it’s residents and feed the love for all things new and techy.

Need the need

For IDN to have any value to an end-user or investor there has to be a real need.

For those of you paying attention, you’ll have noticed I haven’t once mentioned Latin language IDN’s (French, German, Spanish etc). After-all, these work right out-of-the-box, and although there are some isolated examples where the meaning of the word completely changes by using the grammatically correct accented letter (and without the accent, the word cannot be expressed by only using English language letters A-Z)… in the vast majority of cases, for these Latin languages, IDN isn’t needed*.

* That’s not to say that there isn’t any value in these domains; we’ve all seen German IDN.de sell for 5/6 figures – the point here is about tapping into where the real need is.

It’s no co-incidence that 70% of my total IDN portfolio is made up of Japanese language domains.

If ever there was a case for IDN, I believe it exists in Asian domains, and none more so than Japan.

I could bore you to tears with endless statistics, charts and graphs, and throw logic at you to try to prove my point – but sometimes some of the very best examples can be seen by looking at how a country like Japan has historically been living without IDN.

Let’s face it, the internet has been around a long time, and there are gazillions of websites in Japan – and as an online community it has flourished; so it wouldn’t be an unreasonable question to ask why after all this time without IDN, is it needed?

To begin to assess the need, we need to take a quick look at the various scripts used in Japanese language today.

Japanese Language scripts

• Kanji
• Hiragana
• Katakana
• Romaji

The first 3 are all symbol based scripts, example: 漢字, ひらがな, カタカナ

The 4th “script” is actually using the English language alphabet to Romanise (transliterate) the Japanese language.
It’s target audience are those who cannot easily read Japanese, and is common place in literature aimed at foreigners. For a native Japanese person, it is the least easiest to read and is only used as a last resort; for example where the input or display of symbol characters is technically not possible.

In the early days of the internet, and with English language at such a small % of literacy; Japanese advertising mediums promoted Romaji URL’s; but found that just like trying to promote English language URL’s, memorability and recall was terribly low.

Then along came IDN’s, launched by Verisign in 2000, and by JPRS (.jp) in 2001 and with it the solution to all their problems. As mentioned in my Chapter 3 post, 1 million of these Japanese/Chinese/Korean domains were registered in the first 30 days – but it would be a further 5 years before Microsoft would release a compatible browser, and a painful 9 years and counting for the extension to be idn’d.

So if English and Romaji is no good, and IDN at the time not working, how on earth do you promote a URL in Japan?

The answer quite simply is, you don’t.

Search Box Ad

All throughout Japan’s media advertising from TV to billboards to metro train ads, there are examples of the search box ad.

This has become the standard way of directing your visitors to find you online.

You simply show a phrase or your company name in a search box and depict a mouse pointer hovering over the search button.
…and of course make sure you’ve purchased the right Adwords.

Advertisers aren’t stupid.
They know that to secure the recall, you have to use Japanese symbols.

When I first saw this, it struck me as gilt-edged proof that there is a need for something better. Why else use such a risky strategy of assuming you will be #1 in the SERP each time or that your competitors don’t outbid you on selected Adwords.

For brand names and company names, I imagine it’s a fairly safe bet – but still it must be open to abuse by competitors and the occasional Googlebombing.

The example above is of a company called Docomo, and it’s their company name that is being suggested to search for.
Notice how the only url being shown is numeric: 457098.jp (numbers being the only true universal language) If you follow this URL you will arrive at their homepage Docomo-Staff.com

Sometimes it’s not what is said that is important; and in this case it’s the decision

• not to simply advertise a Docomo-Staff.com URL
• not to advertise a Romaji URL
• not to promote searching for “Docomo”
• not to promote searching for a Romaji keyword
• not to use anything other than a numeric URL

While URL’s are used occasionally to advertise, we can see yet more evidence of Japan’s need for something other than promoting an English URL in…

QR-codes

While reserved in the West as a somewhat of a novelty concept, throughout Japan it is everywhere, with most cell-phones having the required gadgetry.

The process involves pointing your phone at the 2d barcode and taking a photo – you then get whisked away by your phones browser to the relevant URL.

If you happen to have that functionality on your phone, give the one on the left a whirl

Japanese Domain Market

Bearing all this in mind, it goes someway to explain the lack of (or at best minimal) domaining community and aftermarket in Japan.
The value of a generic ascii or romaji domains cannot fully be exploited, and with the terrible track record of IDN’s in the early 2000′s – it’s no wonder that domains in Japan haven’t taken off.

But all this happened almost a decade ago, and while some may say it was the death-knell for domains in Japan; maybe it was at the time, but sh*t happens and people move on, another generation of surfers arrive and with it the absence of stigma and history.

Japanese Language

I’m being particularly careful in my posts not to give the impression that I am actually fluent in any of these languages I am discussing – I am open and honest each time and say I cannot read, write or speak Japanese. I supplement this handicap by working closely and sometimes partnering with native speakers; but I have to say that over the years you do start to recognise some of the key symbols and keywords, and while I wouldn’t have a clue how to pronounce what I am seeing, I certainly can pick out quite an extensive range of common phrases now.

At the top of this post I said that Japanese domains make up the overwhelming majority of my portfolio. A big part of this is of course backed up by my belief in their need and hence value proposition – but another part of it, is the language itself.

Of all the languages I have dabbled with since starting to register IDN’s; I have to say that the Japanese language is by far the easiest to work with and translate, due in part to the wealth of online tools available, but also because there are few complicated grammar rules associated with nouns.

Buy-one-get-one-free

There are also no plurals or singular in the Japanese language, so 手紙 as an example, means “letter” or “letters” (as in something you’d write to someone)

Whether it refers to “one” or “many” is dictated by the context it is used in.

Buy-one-get-three-free

Because the Kanji script is also used in the Chinese language, it’s often the case that the term means the same or similar in Chinese too.

Buy-one-get-five-free

and because sometimes the Simplified Chinese term also doubles up as the Traditional Chinese, you often find the term extends your reach to also include Hong Kong too.

I never could fully understand the “rules” of when an English domain would be better used as single vs plural; but with Asian domains like this, it’s no issue.

Almost poetic

Continuing with my example of “letter/letters”, the language itself can often be fascinating.

The term 手紙 means letters
if you split the term down into two symbols, they can stand alone:

手 is a noun and means “hand”
紙 is a noun and means “paper”

put them together and they form a new word, not “hand paper”, but “letter”.

(In Chinese by the way this “hand” and “paper” seems to make “toilet paper”!)

I’ve spent a lot of time and money IDNing, but even if it all sank tomorrow, hand-on-heart the eye opening experiences of new cultures and languages would have been worth it.

ccTLD vs com

Unlike many ccTLD’s, dot com has an overwhelming lead over the ccTLD (.jp) – a big part of this I am reliably told is that .com is trendy, and maybe some of that can be put down to a loose association of it being somewhat linked to the West (U.S)

Even the .net makes a strong outing here, shrugging off it’s poor mans dot com persona

Link

Dot com

One thing you cannot help but notice, is how Japanese websites often brand themselves.

If you Google for “.com” and set your results to show Japanese only pages, you will see thousands of these examples:

but look at the URL’s. They are all English domain names.

It’s weirder than that, in almost 100% of cases, these website owners do not own or use the IDN, they are simply branding on it.

If we click on the first result kakaku.com, you can see the reference to an IDN is not just some random piece of text, it is in their banner.

The 価格.com means “price.com”, incidentally the English language domain they are using: kakaku.com is Romaji for price.com

and you can bet that in any offline advertising of their website they will be using the search box ad + 価格 or maybe even search box ad + 価格.com

I would also bet that the webmasters of all these sites branding themselves on a non-existent IDN they don’t own, are totally clueless on the topic of IDN’s and are in for a real shock one day soon.

It’s hard not to find all this pretty amusing. But on a serious note, when you piece it all together – to me, Japan is screaming out for IDN’s in .com, even if they don’t know it yet.

IDNing the dot com extension

There has been a lot of talk about how IDN’s are useless until the extension has been IDN’d. And as we heard earlier there are plans for a Japanese version of .com to be introduced in the near future; but as you dig deeper, all is not as it first appears.

For dot com IDN’s, the process of toggling mid-typing from Japanese to English is achieved with a couple of keystrokes – almost second nature; just like you or I would shift a character to capitalise it. Second nature because it’s been this way forever.

What about the ccTLD?

Japan’s ccTLD (.jp) has allowed IDN registration since 2001; registration price is comparable to .com, and the requirement to have a permanent Japanese postal address can be satisfied by using a local registrar such as Jp-Domains.
The ccTLD does have a reserved list of terms, so all Geographic locations and what appears to be random keywords such as “Telegram”, “Teacher”, “Post Office”, “Fireman” etc are unavailable for registration.

IDN’s in .JP do have a number of benefits over IDN’s in .com

What may be the biggest edge, but least known, is that to actually type IDN dot jp it isn’t necessary to toggle language from Japanese to English.
The 。ｊｐ can be typed straight after Japanese text.

How come? It’s to do with the absence of vowels in “jp”; unfortunately trying the same with dot com triggers a language toggle as soon as the “o” in com is typed.

I do however think this may be a red-herring; the Japanese keyboard has two periods, an English “.” and a Japanese “。” – both are used in the same way, i.e. to signal the end of a sentence; and both can happily be used in a URL, and either will work.
But in all likelihood, your average Japanese surfer is unlikely to know this; they will assume that to type dot jp, they must type an English period, and that requires a language toggle.

Another benefit is that idn dot jp is immune from the ridiculous way that Firefox treats IDN’s.
Unlike all other browsers, Firefox have a white-listing policy, and most gTLD’s have not been white-listed.

This means that a IDN.com will display in the address bar as:

and IDN.jp correctly as:

According to the latest browser stats, Firefox has a 20% market share in Japan; so this has to be an important factor, especially with all the over-hyped fears of phishing.

IDNing the dot jp extension

If IDNing the extension is really that important, then .jp are on the right path.
The registry that runs .jp (JPRS) have applied during the fast-track process to create an IDN version of dot jp, in the form of .nippon (.日本) – the symbols that mean “Japan”.

They have also publicly stated that to avoid confusion, the current owner of an IDN .jp domain should be the owner of the new IDN.日本 domain.

It is undecided as to whether idn .jp and idn .日本 will be separate identities or whether there will be some sort of aliasing to automatically point them to the same location.
From an IDN .jp owners perspective, I guess it doesn’t matter too much, the key point is that ownership rights will be grandfathered.

Sounds good right? maybe.
The opinion on the ground is that .日本 sucks

Why?
Well not only does it take more keystrokes to type .日本 than .jp
but .Britain or .America would suck too; so I can see why .Japan might not be everyone’s favourite.

Also if you look at the number of idn dot jps registered, its on somewhat of a slide recently – this trend will be interesting to track once the launch of .日本 starts being publicised to the masses.

Statistics are funny things, interesting – Yes, but never ultimately really seem to answer that much

• Yes the number of IDN .jp is trending down
• and yes ~130k IDN .jp registrations doesn’t sound like a lot
• but it is 20% of the total number of .jp (ascii + IDN) – and to me that does sound a lot (it’s certainly higher than the percentage of IDN .com vs the total number of .com)

Make of all this what you want. The only thing I can be sure of is that with only 130k IDN .jp domains registered, there’s still scope here for scooping up some generics.

Traffic

Traffic levels for Japanese Domains are not yet on a par with the likes of Russian; but there are very promising signs.

Looking over my Japanese portfolio and from speaking to others, a parked page delivering 1-2 hundred uniques a month is not uncommon for ordinary domains. From my own experience the traffic is clean, i.e. it originates from Japan and is targeted. (Namedrive displays the search phrase that led the surfer to your page, and is more often than not peppered with Japanese phrases related to your term)
I also have a few seasonal terms that produce the predicted spikes in traffic as you would expect.

CPC

CPC as you would expect is strongly related to the GDP of the country, so for Japan, $1+ clicks are a common sight, and real life examples of keywords paying $4+ dollars have been observed. I remember a while back I did a crude comparison using Googles keyword tool and found equivalent keywords in Japan were often paying higher than in the U.S/UK.

Like a lot of IDN’s, there are few examples of developed sites, and even fewer people who are willing to share stats; but thanks to a certain anonymous individual, I am able to share this one with you.

The domain itself is a multi-page static “mini-site” using embedded Google Maps with a dose of Adsense.
It has constantly ranked on Yahoo at around #4 for at least a couple of years.

I can’t share the domain name itself with you due to Google T&C’s, but I can tease you by telling you it is xxxxxx地図.com (the Japanese symbols mean “map”)

Traffic levels average out over the year at approx 900 impressions a day. Click-thru and CPC are low due to the nature of the domain; had it been in any way commercial, the numbers obviously would look very different.

Screenshots (1, 2)

Conclusion

There’s an awful lot of information in this post; so in an attempt to try and draw a conclusion.

• I am a firm believer that there is a direct relationship between “need” and “value”
• Japan’s internet marketers surely need something better than the Search-Box type ad or QR-Code; it is just too open to abuse and clunky; and can only work for niche terms such as non-generic brands and company names
• There is a lack of any serious domain market in Japan, and as such the generic keyword domain advertising doesn’t really exist today, but in my eyes this is just a massive opportunity waiting to be tapped
• I think Japan’s webmasters unwittingly have shown us what they want in their branding of non existent IDN’s in their banners
• Traffic to Japanese domains pays well and with yet another example showing the potential of developed IDN’s, I’m beginning to think my time might be better spent developing rather than blogging

.com or .jp ? The com has the brand power and the trendy mindset, and is by far the favourite.
The .jp today has the technical advantage with Firefox and is on the fasttrack path for full idn, and like ccTLD’s often tend to, draws on the national pride.

People do what works and makes sense.
If the advertising giants and the corporations they work for, believe they can get strong memorability and recall from using IDN’s instead of relying on: SEO + the mercy of a search engine + fair playing by competitors; then I believe we might see a new chapter written in Japan’s internet history. Maybe the chapter that describes how the search-box ad was just a clumsy make-do, waiting for something better to arrive.

The need is there, therefore so is the value. This is one of those cases where to back both gTLD and ccTLD would be the smart thing to do.

Next up:

A specific topic? Another language deep-dive?
You decide.