IDN Drops Market Hotting Up

[Rubber Duck]

In the process of managing my IDN portfolio, I let a lot of Domains drop when they came up for renewal. However, using Jword.jp and 3721.com a few showed up as being Luke Warm rather than Stone Cold, so I decided to renew them but they had already gone Redemption Period, so I decided to pick them up after they had dropped. Fell asleep on the Sofa the day they dropped so was about 3 hrs later when I tried to re-register them. I lot 4 out of 5 apparently to other speculators notably to a Japanese Guy using Enom as a registrar.

Just goes to show that this market can no longer be taken for granted and if you don't want to loose your domains, do not let them expire!

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[Theo]

It makes sense that they went to the local (Japanese) market as they're able to monetize it better. I don't see that as a trend of a move towards IDN names but rather as an opportunity to get new names.

 

[Rubber Duck]

It makes sense that they went to the local (Japanese) market as they're able to monetize it better. I don't see that as a trend of a move towards IDN names but rather as an opportunity to get new names.

Sorry, there is no logic to that. The whole point is several people out there are now actively tracking dropping IDN names.

I have in the past done this once, manually, when Network Solutions cleared their books of IDN. I can assure you that is no easy task, because even if you speak Japanese, it is very difficult to recognise a Japanese IDN simply by staring at the Punycode.

This is quite distinct from someone haphazardly trying to register domains for keywords that they might have an interest in. The fact that someone is doing this so effectively, at this time, for fairly low key domains, probably means that they have a sophisticated script to enable them to do this. OK, it is the work of a speculator, but it shows a level of sophistication that frankly has surprised me. It is clearly evidence that the market in IDN, in Japan at least, is moving to another level.

This is significant in at least one more way. I always new that IDN would eventually make an impact in Chinese and even Arabic, but there was a chance that the Japanese being more western oriented would stick with conventional Romanic dot coms. This suggests that the opposite is true and that the transition to IDN is well underway, even in Japan. It is also interesting that that they are targeting Hirigana rather than Kanji. This is particularly pleasing from my perspective as we have registered a large number of single character Hirigana. I certainly won't be letting anymore of these drop!

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

 

[Bramiozo]

Dwrixon, you seem to be forgetting that domain popularity is determined by it's general use of the public, it's end-use so to speak. At most this shows that resellers see an increasing chance to monetize their IDN-investments.

It might as well be the case that the non-roman IDN-market is viable only when the extensions are IDN as well in which case non-roman IDN.roman are worthless, that is something to consider.

By the way, even one-characted IDN's seem to be unattractive to domain resellers, I can't get rid of them.

 

[Rubber Duck]

Dwrixon, you seem to be forgetting that domain popularity is determined by it's general use of the public, it's end-use so to speak. At most this shows that resellers see an increasing chance to monetize their IDN-investments.

It might as well be the case that the non-roman IDN-market is viable only when the extensions are IDN as well.

Yes, I take your point, but they are actually quite widely used for small businesses in Japan and Korea.

The non-romanic extensions are really a browser issue. What is likely to happen is that the browsers will end up with look-up tables and extensions will be translated within the browser to display in the language selected by the user. There is unlikely to ever be any modification of the DNS, as this is impractical and unnecessary.

As IE 7.0 can be updated through Service Pack 2, this could be introduced at any time and updated as required when new extensions support IDN.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon