IDN demystified

IDNs are worthless, they don’t get any traffic.

I know people who are making $xxx a month parking a single IDN. And it won’t surprise you to hear that the type of quality needed to bring in that kind of traffic is exceptional.

Whether you subscribe to the IDN business case or not, it is kind of irrelevant – because there seems to be this universal law (regardless of language, IDN or not) that the very best keyword domains will always bring home the bacon.

And when I say very best. I don’t mean “premium” or “double premium” that you hear touted around too much these days, I mean keywords that would sit proud in the top 50 keywords Hall of Fame.

Getting the owners of these types of domains to come forward and go on record about their traffic/revenue is not easy – believe me I tried. Anyway.. nothing new here.. but that is not the point of this post, the point of this post is what about the rest?

I mean what can you buy for ~$2,000 or even reg fee – and what does that traffic look like today?

Notice the emphasis on the word TODAY.. it’s important because where we are right now in the IDN rollout programme, you would expect traffic to amount to a big fat zero.

and here’s why:

• Today not all browsers support IDN, although compatible browsers are now dominant in most countries
• Today virtually no one knows you can use IDNs – to clarify, ICANN seem to be more than a little embarrassed over their marathon 9 year IDN rollout programme, as thus far it has delivered nothing since November 2000, and you can see this in their literature, it seems to be more convenient for them to talk as if IDN’s of any kind don’t exist yet, and instead to paint a picture of a project that has been running only a year or so and will be delivering the first IDN extension into the root in the next few months
• In some countries domain names to date have been completely irrelevant due to there being little chance of them being remembered, and thus a complete absence of type-in

So that’s where IDN’s are at.

What would you expect from a parked IDN?

well, with most parking sites not indexed and the revenue from parking in the toilet these days, you would expect a big fat zero.

So by my crude calculations this all equates to zero + zero.

It is all this above that forms one of the pillars of investing in IDN, the assumption that some or all of these barriers will erode as publicity increases and the IDN machine gathers pace.

I picked some examples from my personal portfolio as examples of current traffic. As usual, this is 100% transparent, and anyone wishing to challenge me on these numbers is more than welcome to contact me and get some solid screenshots proof by return.

パソコン dot com. This domain is an abbreviation for Personal Computer in Japanese. PC dot com, if you like. Last month it recorded 146 impressions parked and delivered $12.67. Ads displayed are of course all related to PC stuff in one way or another, and it delivers approx the same each month.
I paid just over $2k for this at Snapnames and was reported in DNJ a few months back.

и dot com. This domain is a single Russian alphabet letter. I paid $xxx for this from a private seller and last month it recorded 5,320 impressions parked and delivered $5.56. This is not too surprising, as traffic to Russian domains is on the up since awareness in Russia is also on the up due to them being one of the first planning to insert their IDN cctld into the root. Click through is terrible as you can see by the low revenue, but I guess that’s to be expected as the domain is so generic.

What about buying for reg fee?

two more Russian IDN’s: егэ dot com (this acronym stands for a state entry exam for universities), 724 impressions last month delivering $6.85.
гипноз dot com (this translates to Hypnosis in Russian) 316 impressions delivering $5.56 last month. Both bought for reg fee ~$8

I could list a pile of these sorts of domains, all making their renewal fees, but the traffic prize today goes to adult domains, and I wish I was brave enough to list them here.

I could also write about fresh regged .jp domains, but I’ll keep that to myself for now.

The moral of this tale? The numbers above alone are not exciting, and in fact very typical, but they are what they are, and while no one will be retiring on them today, the real question is, how big a multiplier can you apply to these numbers when the barriers I mentioned above start to erode?

IDN/International traffic worthless? Busted!

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