Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) – Worth Getting Into? Some Recent IDN Developments – Russian Domain Sold For $xxx,xxx
Posted on | August 5, 2008 | No Comments
I’ve never really mentioned IDNs on the blog before. A lot of people have actually PM’d me regarding Internationalized Domain Names ever since I posted some huge thread with some information regarding IDNs on Digital Point… but nothing has ever come up on the blog…so why start now? There has been recent news (confirmed) that there was a Russian International Domain Name (IDN) that was sold for six figures ($xxx,xxx). Don’t know the details bit by bit, but I have enough information regarding the sale and it was damn worthy of being blogged about. Why? Because domainers have been lately scratching their heads and going “Well, uh… what’s next?”
We had the whole .Asia release… then .ME release… and who knows what’s next… but are IDNs being overlooked? The certain people that I’ve really explained them in depth to have actually enjoyed the idea of attempting to invest in these domains and when you end up getting a generic domain in some language such as Chinese or Japanese… you might feel a little excited… especially when you find out how many of these users use the net daily and cannot speak English. I don’t want to say the only hope for these people is to start using IDNs, but with these domains they are given the opportunity to finally be flashed a domain on TV and they can actually remember it.
You want an example? Sure.
Scenario 1:
Two kids are sitting in South Korea watching TV. “X” car advertiser runs a cool commercial that gets the kids interested in watching and then they flash a domain… lets say from “ChoSun.com” (totally random South Korean website I chose for simplicity’s sake). Now I’m not sure what chosun means in Korean, but if they flash some sort of domain on the commercial and it lasts for 3 seconds… would the kids remember the domain if it were written in English? Probably… assuming they know Engish. Those three seconds should be enough… maybe?
Scenario 2:
Two kids are sitting in South Korea watching TV. “X” car advertiser runs a cool commercial that gets the kids interested in watching and then they flash a domain… 조선일보.com… the two kids run to their computer (Humor: hopefully IE7+ or Firefox is installed) and visit this so called “조선일보.com” that they remember dearly due to the fact that they speak Korean.
Sort of make sense? I hope it did. I actually found this little Korean pixel site also (http://www.neighbor.pe.kr)… looks like people are advertising some of their Korean IDN sites on there. Not bad.
I’m not trying to make a sales pitch here, but just trying to prevent a little future comment dispute. I’ve been asked these questions plenty of times by people who are just remotely interested in figuring out what the heck are IDNs. You also have the people that sit there and say “I won’t invest in IDNs… I’m strictly .com!” …
Well… if you don’t get why that quote up there is stupid… I’m deeply sorry.
Are IDNs catching on? 6 Figure Russian sale… Not bad. Not bad at all. There was also undisclosed information regarding some other high IDN sales as a group, but I don’t really have any information regarding those, so It’s best to just keep out what I’m not sure of at this point. IDNs, IMO, should be something worth considering. For those English only speaking domainers, it might be extremely tough to figure things out and you might not really care, but might be worth the effort. Those that speak another language? Huge advantage. Ten minutes and you can see if some domains are available or not. Don’t care? Well at least you’re a little educated about this now.
Some more IDN sales (Highest few reported):
städtereisen.de – $104,325
ärzte.de – $77,000
reisebüro.de/reise-büro.de – $71,400
städtereisen.de – $60,168
туризм.su – $50,000
работа.su – $42,999
핸드폰.com – $42,250
ausbildungsplätze.de – $40,045
휴대폰.com – $36,194
Well, that was “Part I” of my so called “news” blog post. There is a lot not included in the article and it would have probably been best to really (really) explain exactly what IDNs are since they are not very “famous”, but I’ll probably let that article be written later on and just link back to this one. I’m sure I can tweak this article a bit more to be a little more helpful, but there’s so much information that everything in one post would be overwhelming.
For those interested in checking available IDNs in any language (list of languages below), check out http://www.dynadot.com/domain/search2.html. PS: They are running a little sale on IDNs right now. I think $5.00 and you can get an IDN.com. Pretty cheap… bought myself a few when prices were reduced in different languages (Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese).
List of languages support by IDN*:
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Aragonese, Armenian, Assamese, Asturian, Avestan, Awadhi, Azerbaijani, Balinese, Baluchi, Basa, Bashkir, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Carib, Catalan, Chechen, Chinese, Chuvash, Coptic, Corsican, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Divehi, Dogri, Dutch, Estonian, Faroese, Fijian, Finnish, French, Frisian, Gaelic, Georgian, German, Gondi, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indic, Indonesian, Ingush, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kashmiri, Kazakh, Khmer, Kirghiz, Korean, Kurdish, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malayalam, Malay, Maltese, Maori, Moldavian, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Oriya, Ossetian, Panjabi, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Pushto, Rajasthani, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Sanskrit, Sardinian, Serbian, Sindhi, Sinhalese, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Syriac, Tajik, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish.
*There are still other types of coding supported by IDN… such as domains like ±.com (plus/minus sign).
Comments
Leave a Reply
