So what does this tell us?

Well, it tells us that Sedo have a huge reach – that we knew.
It also re-confirms that Sedo dominates not just the ccTLD space, but also the non-English space too.

You also might think that these sales we keep seeing tells us that the only interest in IDN, are German IDNs.. but you’d be wrong, this is very misleading.

You see, Sedo have a little problem, a problem that they have been telling people publicly will be fixed for over 5 years now.

Before we get into that, let’s take a look at Sedo’s mission statement.

…Sedo has experienced remarkable success establishing a global domain name marketplace… to continue extending the reach of our services regardless of language or location…Sedo’s top priorities have always focused on research and development…Sedo is positioned to continue its growth as a complete domain service provider with an internationally recognised brand…

Not sure what your take away from all that was, but I read:

• Global marketplace
• Regardless of language
• Top Priority is R&D

So why is it that if I try and list a Chinese language domain for sale, I get this message:

Maybe I would have more luck with Russian..

.. nope.

Ok, so Sedo can’t handle them… not quite the leading edge R&D powerhouse then.

Let’s get a little closer to home.

Last week on DNjournal along with the usual appearance of a few German IDNs sold through Sedo, I also noticed a few Czech language IDNs too (zájezdy.eu, práce.eu and dovolená.eu)

Hurrah! So Sedo can also handle the Czech language…

erm, no.

I tried to add this domain in earlier: tři, it means “three” in Czech, and guess what..

So in summary, Sedo’s globalness reaches as far as Germany plus half of the Czech Republic.

As I mentioned earlier, Sedo have been aware of this problem for years.
For over 5 years, various Sedo reps have turned up and shown their face at IDNforums, and each time given a promise that their “technical limitations” would be resolved, but alas, nothing.

In fact I jested earlier about Sedos mission statement referring to their top focus being research and development, and it has got me thinking, usually when a database or interface can’t handle IDN characters, it’s because it is not UTF-8 encoded, but somehow Sedo have achieved the impossible here, by UTF-8 encoding their systems so they can handle German special characters (and half of the Czech special characters), but none of the other characters that UTF-8 encoding allows. Quite incredible.

Summary

Yes this post has been somewhat of a bitch-slap for Sedo, but that’s what you get when you repeatedly make & break promises for 5 years, but I would like to wrap this up with two simple open questions for Sedo.

1. Are Sedo making so much money, that they and their shareholders don’t need the extra revenue from enabling the other half of the Czech language, plus the hundreds of other languages that IDN affords ?

2. Are you finally able to commit with any confidence when you will fix this “bug” ?

A link to this blog post has been emailed to Tim Schumacher CEO at Sedo; the IDN community is patiently awaiting your feedback.

Monetizing an IDN if you are not familiar with the language & culture can be an obstacle, but it doesn’t have to be.

If full scale development is your goal, then partnering with an existing business in that country makes a lot of sense.. you provide the name & traffic, they provide the platform.

And besides, development doesn’t have to be hard either, there’s a huge number of developers, graphic designers and content writers on sites such as Freelancer and Elance and the ironic thing is, from my experience, when I’ve put out jobs for regular English development projects, I’ve often received quotes from non-English contractors. i.e. Russians, Chinese..

If development doesn’t float your boat, then there are many parking and affiliate services out there that are IDN friendly.

Logging in to one of my accounts, I was greeted with this the other day, a below average Japanese IDN I picked up on a drop brought this recurring payment in via a single user, monetized through a Japanese affiliate site.

$42.50 thanks.

There are opportunities in IDN, because today it is still a niche area of domaining, and if you are prepared to also play in niche genres such as this, there are even more untapped opportunities.

Hard to monetize IDNs? Busted!

This is hopefully the first of a few articles in this series, where I attempt to un-mask some of the great unknown IDN domainers.

If like me, you have spent many hundreds of hours in the whois, you will have constantly run into the “Snow’s”. Their portfolio of IDNs is nothing short of legendary, and although I feel like I know them because I have bumped into them so many times, of course I don’t know them at all.

I make it my business to know most people in this business, but to-date for me, and I’m sure for most of us IDNers, the “Snow’s” have remained largely tight-lipped private people.

For the first time ever, Andrew Snow speaks candidly about his background, and the future of IDNs.

Q. GM: Anyone who has spent time in the whois will have seen the “Snow’s”, yet to many you are surrounded by mystery; what can you tell us about yourselves?
AS: No mystery really. The better half of the Snow’s is my college sweetheart and life companion for over three decades. Though we’re both from the U.S, we had met, travelled and have worked overseas and speak several languages. We have and enjoy a large family. My background includes law (attorney), business (MBA), and entrepreneurship (serial).

Q. GM: How and when did you first get involved with IDNs?
AS: In the mid nineties my wife and I were doing some charity work that entailed travel to orphanages in under-developed and emerging economies. At the same time the Internet was taking hold as a popular medium in the developed economies and the unprecedented impact of its digital revolution was coming into view.

I saw it as one of the most significant inventions in human history for it had the potential to change the equation that lies at the core of human progress itself. Innovation, the driver of progress, occurs when creative minds and knowledge cross-pollinate in a timely fashion.

Throughout human history the total pool of potential “pollinators” was a mere single-digit percentage of humanity. But now, the internet’s ability to deliver instant, dynamic, low-cost, and mass access to information and knowledge had the potential to dramatically change this equation’s numerator by multiplying the potential “pollinator” pool several fold in one or two generations – leading to a burst in innovative progress.

However, for many there was a road-block to the access ramps to the info-knowledge superhighway that was destined to eventually reach them, as these ramps – the domain name system- were designed and built for ASCII enabled travellers only. Since the jury had already delivered its verdict in the mid-nineties on the unprecedented potential and value of the digital real estate -domains- thru which this traffic was to flow, both the significant need and the opportunities in fixing these ramps were evident.

Q. GM: So what did you do?
AS: I began with some research into the DNS structure, Unicode, languages, Internet browsers, and other related issues. It became evident that any approach that mandated the insertion of anything but ASCII into the root was technically complicated and destined to be met with insurmountable resistance from those whose support would be needed for its implementation.

Another approach would be needed.
I then had the rather simple idea of utilizing, not changing, the existing DNS by way of piggybacking on the existing ASCII through adding an invisible layer that would function unseen to users and translate from non-ASCII to ASCII and reverse.

I devised an encoding scheme that was based on the location of a non-ASCII character in relation to a QWERTY keyboard, with workarounds for special character and language exceptions. (I took private lessons in several languages via a language school in order to deal with this).

I then wrote and filed a patent titled “Non-Roman Character Domain Names in the DNS”. In addition, utilizing an IE developer license, we built the first (I believe) IDN capable browser which we dubbed the I-Browser (Int’l Browser) The I-Browser was able to receive and display non-ASCII inputs, transparently translate them to a “gibberish” ASCII according to our integrated encoding scheme, and send an ASCII query to the DNS for site retrieval.

From the start, we envisioned a fully internationalized URL, and so the system and the I-Browser were designed to accommodate and demonstrate full IDN.IDN

We partitioned the operating system of a laptop to accommodate multiple language simulations, added character stickers to create a multi-lingual keyboard, loaded the I-Browser, and built (on their underlying ASCII gibberish domains) the first two IDN sites that were seamlessly and transparently retrieved to a computer via the DNS and with IDN.IDN displayed in its browser (one of our kids still uses this laptop).

The sites were of Russian and Hebrew IDNs in order to demonstrate both left to right and right to left system capabilities. IDN Trivia: those first two sites were игры.россия (games.russia) and פרחים.ישראל (flowers.israel). And yes, we thought IDN.IDN cctld’s should and would be first.

Q. GM: And then what happened?
AS: Several things. First, the market and Internet environment at the time were overwhelmingly Anglo-centric and thus not quite ripe. Second, I found that some of the most brilliant engineering minds can induce systemic inaction unless they envision perfected solutions to all aspects of a problem in advance. Third, and most important, as we followed developments I found that there were parallel efforts in several places around the globe that were working on solving this, including those that ultimately devised a superior encoding scheme (RACE) and those who were ultimately first granted a patent for an IDN system (Walid).

Since it became evident that only a system that went thru proper ICANN channels would survive, and as patents, encoding techniques, and browsers were never the planned profit centers for this project, when public IDN testbeds and launches were first announced – we were ready to participate and move forward.

Q. GM: Which languages have you invested in?
AS: We have a master list of keywords that we translated into three dozen languages and have invested in many.

Q. GM: What are some of your best IDNs?
AS: Well, they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder – but to me 美.com is truly “a thing of beauty” -as are the rest of our beauty.com domains in 30 languages.

Q. GM: Which languages do you favor most and why?
AS: Chinese for market scope, Cyrillics for inherent adaptability, and Hebrew for right to left issues.

Q. GM: A key part of the investment model for IDN dot com is the aliasing strategy. Can you share your thoughts on this, and how and when we might see it unfold, and your logic behind your thinking?
AS: First, I’d like to note that there are many Latin and Latin extended languages that include IDNs that are not dependent on this issue as they maintain there .com suffix. We have many of these in various languages that receive a significant amount of type in traffic in addition to their inherent and valuable SEO/development advantages, such as niños.com or crianças.com or even çocuklar.com (children.com in Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish).

As to your question, this is becoming increasingly moot. To me, this issue has always been near-moot for in my mind there was only one plausible outcome when all constituencies and realities were considered. The only unclear issue was exactly the amount of time it would take before this was to come to pass. I believed all along that we would see full IDN cctld first, and then some aliasing mechanism for gtlds together with some ICANN approved fee structure for its implementation. China helped a great deal by persistently pushing for IDN and then by being the first to officially alias IDN.ASCII to full IDN. Though it took a decade to complete, the whole event was to be played out as: Game (testbeds), Set (RACE to Punycode), Tie breaker (browser support) and MATCH (aliasing)

Q. GM: How would you explain the advantage of IDNs to someone who knows nothing about them?
AS: This week in Israel – where they mostly read, write and speak Hebrew – they’ll celebrate the “festival of lights”. So for quick holiday tips do they type in non-Hebrew: Hanukah.com, Hanukkah.com, or was that Chanukah.com – and who really knows? Would a business in the U.S. want to depend on the ability of its customers to remember its online brand or type its web address in, let’s say, Hebrew – to be able to be reached online?

Q. What do you think is the biggest risk facing IDN investing today?
AS: Just like the ASCII market: Investing later rather than sooner.

Q. GM: What advice would you give to domainers just starting out in IDN?
AS: Don’t fear other languages, and don’t forget that the “www.” stands for world-wide web. Otherwise, it’s 1998 all over again – and you know what to do.

Q. GM: What advice would you give to current IDNers?
AS: Remember that the true value of our “new” real estate is in its affinity, proximity, and attractivity to mindshare – the new location, location, location. And just as in the “old” real estate, the greatest value and purpose of location is – development, development, development.

GM: Thank you Andrew for taking the time to do this interview and Good Luck with all your online ventures.

Ever since I acquired IDNTools, there’s been a ton of things I wanted to do with it – relocate it to a fast server, give it a new skin, improve the toolset (particularly the IDN droplist), change the icons, new logo and so on.. I’m lucky, I have a great partner and a healthy budget, and it’s all coming soon.

But back to the free lunch..

I’ve been IDNing for years now, and I pretty much know what works well, what works kinda, and what sucks – and one thing that has frustrated me for a long time is the lack of an intuitive Punycode tool.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a bunch of them out there, but I haven’t found THE ONE.

Being able to convert native language domains to and from Punycode is the staple diet of any IDN domainer – lets face it, we find ourselves doing it many times a day.

For me the perfect Punycode tool needs to tick the following boxes:

• I want to be able to convert just 1 or many domains
• I want to be able to enter either a Unicode (native text) or a Punycode and have the tool just convert it the other way around
• I want to be able to enter terms with or without an extension
• I want to be able to easily copy the results (I don’t want to have to copy the original and converted just because it’s all in one table and then somehow work out how to separate the 2 columns
• I want to be able to quickly clear the selection and start over
• I want to be able to convert hundreds/thousands at a time
• I want it to be quick

..and I want it to be free


IDNTools is now running on a super fast server, and I think we now have the perfect Punycode tool. Built by IDNers for IDNers. Bookmark it.

IDNs? Nah not for me, I wouldn’t even know how to type one

Continuing the Mythbusting series from here..

I’ve lost count how many times I have heard folks say that they can’t get in to IDN because they don’t know the language; and the noobs that do, sometimes ask how do I change the language in my system so I can type them?





While I guess you could do it that way, but that sounds like way too much hard work to me – who wants to go to the trouble of trying to master a language just to type it in.

Enter stage left the IDN domainers 3 favorite keys on the keyboard.

Registering an IDN is a doddle

• Grab a reliable foreign language list of phrases
• Copy the term
• Paste the term into your favorite domain availability lookup tool

It’s sounds so simple doesn’t it, when you stop and think about it, but like I said you might be amazed how many domainers struggle to think outside the box on this one.





By the way, I’m on my 4th keyboard now, they all seem to meet the same fate



Need language skills to register IDNs? Busted!



]]> http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-language-skills.htm/feed 3 http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-cpc.htm http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-cpc.htm#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:05:01 +0000 GM http://www.idndemystified.com/?p=1100

IDNs are worthless, the traffic is worthless.


Continuing the Mythbusting series from here..

One of the most common myths I hear is that international traffic is worthless, or at least not worth chasing.

While it’s true that many factors come into play to determine value, it certainly isn’t true that ALL international traffic is worthless.

I could write a long post and batter you into submission with a ton of facts and case studies and logic of why that is.. but sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words.

The following chart represents some random keywords I ran through Googles Keyword tool




I picked 7 words/phrases in English and in Japanese and plotted the Average CPC according to Google.



This is a fascinating game to play, and when I have time I’ll run a similar exercise but comparing a group of languges side by side for the same keyword – but even with a small subset of data like this you can see how the story really unfolds.

Base data:




IDN/International traffic worthless? Busted!

]]> http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-cpc.htm/feed 2 http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-traffic.htm http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-traffic.htm#comments Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:36:16 +0000 GM http://www.idndemystified.com/?p=1057

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!

]]> http://www.idndemystified.com/the-truth-about-traffic.htm/feed 1 http://www.idndemystified.com/portfolio-management-and-security-101.htm http://www.idndemystified.com/portfolio-management-and-security-101.htm#comments Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:52:11 +0000 GM http://www.idndemystified.com/?p=917 Not a week goes by when there isn’t a story about a domain theft, it’s becoming an all too familiar sight, and just this week a colleague of mine lost many domains, some ascii, some IDN.

While it was this act that prompted me to write this blog post, I will refrain from going into detail about this specific case, as the criminal investigation is
ongoing – however, having a ring side seat as this story unfolded, I can at least draw some conclusions and weave it into some practical advice – so that you
can at least try to avoid being the next statistic.



Stealing a domain is not the same as stealing money from your bank account.

• The chances are that your bank account has much more security than your domain account
• The chances are that you would notice money missing from your bank account before you missed a domain
• The chances are that the authorities will not view a theft of digital assets such as domain names as seriously as they would theft of cash
• You might be surprised how unhelpful and unsympathetic your registrar is


If you genuinely own million dollar domains, then this article isn’t for you – you will probably have your own registrar.

This article is for everyone else, I am not a security expect and i’m not giving you blueprints to build your own Fort Knox – it’s about some simple, often free precautions you can take to make your domain assets just that little harder to take – not unlike the house in a street with a visible burglar alarm isn’t 100% safe because of that burglar alarm – it’s just the house next door is easier to ransack because it doesn’t have one.



My 6 Points

#1 – Keep a central list of what you own and at which registrar

There’s only one thing worse than being a victim, and that’s being a blind and clueless victim.

Believe it or not, a lot of people I know still rely on the registrar to tell them what they own.

They log in to their account and they see a list of domains, and they assume it is what it is.

But sometimes, that’s not how it is, firstly if someone steals a name, how will you know?
Secondly, most registrars UI that you are presented with has little or no relationship to the central registry. We’ve all seen Domainsite keep emailing you renewal reminders long after you transferred out to another registrar.
Heck, I have 2 domains that are with Moniker that I transferred there from Domainsite, and not only do I keep being reminded by Domainsite to renew them, they also still show in the Domainsite UI as being in my account there!

Another registrar I use for ccTLD’s, their UI is manually updated when you purchase a domain, on one occasion this was obvious as there was a typo in the domain they keyed into the UI that is presented to me, yet the domain was correctly registered.

From my experience, you simply cannot trust a lot of registrars to give you a 100% accurate view, and don’t get me started on DNS management.
Keep a list.



#2 – Get a bank statement

Your bank sends you a statement each month that you probably check to see if there’s anything unusual on it, so why not do the same with your domain account(s) ?

Be re-active not pro-active.
Being pro-active takes time. If you have a 1000 domains spread across ten different registrar accounts, how often should you log into each of the ten accounts and check everything is still there?
Whatever answer you said, it’s going to suck up a lot of your time, so it’s no surprise to hear that people don’t check regularly; and finding out that one of your domains went walk-about 3 months ago isn’t going to help much in it’s recovery.

A domain thief invariably has one goal and that’s to resell your domain asap, and as soon as that happens, life gets 100x more complicated for you.

I would suggest using a service like DomainTools domain monitor – it’s free, and works just fine for IDN’s.
You load in your domains, and as soon as a change is detected to owner, lock status, DNS – you get an email alert.
From my experience though the tools only monitors gTLD’s (com, net, org etc)



#3 – Your email account is not safe

Your email account associated with your domains, is like a key to a safety deposit box.

You might use a free email provider like Gmail or Yahoo!, you might have your own dedicated server hosting your own email.
You might have a strong password that is made up of numbers and letters that you keep in a safe buried in your basement, personally guarded by Jack Bauer.
It matters not.

Spend five minutes Googling and you will see there are more horror stories about hacked email accounts than you could ever read.
You should assume that anyone at anytime could access your email
With that in mind, your email account cannot be the first and last line of defence.

There are a few registrars now that are providing an extra layer of security, everything from USB keys to online security questions and phone call and ID pre-requisites. As I said, I’m no security expert, so I won’t even try to pass judgement on these solutions – all I will say is some security is better than no security, and relying solely on your email account is naive.

Personally I think it’s a bloody cheek the registrars charge for this. You wouldn’t expect a monthly charge from your bank for them to lock the vault each night – but today it is what it is.

Remember, it’s the whois record that dictates the legal owner of a domain, and it only takes 1 second to change that whois and push that domain to another account.



#4 – Use a decent registrar

The only criteria I ever see discussed, is how cheap are they?
This could be a huge topic, and not one I want to get into here, other than to say – you don’t pick a baby-sitter purely on them being the cheapest.



#5 – Keyloggers, traffic sniffers and all-round general cyber nasties

You know the drill – get a paid-for Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Anti-Malware & Firewall.



#6 – Arm yourself with some WMD

I’m not talking about the stuff world hiding champion Saddam hid so well – but Watch My Domains

I love this App. Again IDN friendly, load it up with all your domains, hit the button and it pulls back the whois record for each.

Makes life dead easy for keeping track of nameservers, owners, statuses and renewals. It even colors lines for names due renewal soon.
And if drop-catching or mining for new reg’s is your poison, then load it up with ten’s of thousands of terms and leave it running overnight.

There may be other better or cheaper products out there, but this one I fell in love with. Works with gTLD’s and most ccTLD’s, and their support team are top-notch.
If anyone is interested drop me a line and I’ll post more on this, as there are a couple of gotchas I’ve learnt.



$ummary:

#1 Keep a list – FREE
#2 Get notified – FREE
#3 Extra Level of Registrar security ~$150/year
#4 Use a registrar that prides itself on it’s security, they may be a few cents more expensive per renewal, so if you are price sensitive – just have your best names there
#5 Desktop security ~$100/year
#6 Portfolio software ~$50

If you cannot justify spending ~$300 to protect your portfolio from theft and your errors (dropping by mistake), then your portfolio simply cannot be worth what you thought it is.

Can you add to my list of 6, please leave a comment.

]]> http://www.idndemystified.com/portfolio-management-and-security-101.htm/feed 1 http://www.idndemystified.com/idn-jp-drop-catching.htm http://www.idndemystified.com/idn-jp-drop-catching.htm#comments Sat, 01 Aug 2009 11:40:26 +0000 GM http://www.idndemystified.com/?p=897 I have been drop catching IDN .jp’s for over 3 years now, and have amassed some awesome domains.

Drop catching in .jp has received very little coverage, but actually all the information is out there in the public domain.

Like all ccTLD’s there is no zone file, but I have a private database containing ten’s of thousands of entries, and almost certainly most if not all of the top terms. This has been gathered via the old Overture database that IDNtools references (some 500k historical terms) plus a few dictionaries thrown in for good measure. What it makes is a very unique reference point for good Japanese terms.

Things are changing too in the drop scene, a few formal drop catching services have emerged, and some horror stories I could talk about.

What all this means, is the game is changing, gone are the days when you can register a drop 24 hours after it dropped knowing there is little competition. Now, just like other extensions, competition is heating up and more often than not private auctions are run for drop caught domains.

Bearing all this in mind, I am considering posting an article discussing all the in’s and out’s of jp drop catching. How to be successful and which methods/services to use or not.

and most importantly, I will publish the all important drop lists via IDNtools – this is key to everything, as in this game, it’s not being fastest that will win, it’s knowing that domains are dropping in the first place.

The poll on the right will be open for 1 week, and is anonymous.



Poll Result


Do you want to see a post on IDN .jp drop catching ?

• Yes (65%, 26 Votes)
• No (35%, 14 Votes)

Total Voters: 40

Start Date: August 1, 2009 @ 12:19 pm
End Date: August 7, 2009 @ 1:19 am

It would appear there are more people than I had expected still drop catching, and while the poll was always going to favour debating this topic further – with more that half of the votes coming from active drop catchers I will stfu and file the 2nd part of this blog post along with the growing collection of draft posts categorised as not to be demystified just yet.

What I will say in summary, is that if you want to get into this game, there is clearly still a lot of scope for picking up gems – and all the info you need on the drop cycle is out there if you look. But the all important list of what is dropping is key, and this is what the drop catchers cherish the most as it’s compilation is usually the labour of many many hours of effort.. so for now, just like any other ccTLD, you’re just going to have to be creative in compiling it.

]]> http://www.idndemystified.com/idn-jp-drop-catching.htm/feed 0 http://www.idndemystified.com/japan-deep-dive.htm http://www.idndemystified.com/japan-deep-dive.htm#comments Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:19:57 +0000 GM http://www.idndemystified.com/?p=692 Japanese language domains make up the bulk of my IDN portfolio, and there’s a very good reason why this is, but before we get into that, lets take a quick look at the country itself.



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.

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