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Reader Bill Winans submits link. Via CNN:
Suppose that the Internet had been invented in Thailand, and that every Web address ended with three letters in the Thai alphabet that you needed to type out.
In such a scenario, people who speak and read only English (or another language) would be dissuaded from using and exploring the Internet, and creating things on it. Technology leaders from the United States would appeal to some Thai organization in charge of domain names to please allow them to add a few English endings — “.com” perhaps — and then wait patiently for years for it to happen.
In reality, of course, the situation is somewhat reversed, and to most English speakers the entire issue is “invisible, incomprehensible, and therefore non-existent — never mind the billions of people who face this problem every day,” says Tan Tin Wee, a professor at the National University of Singapore.
Good read. Latest developments in IDN are big news to IDN speculators. While I do not own any IDN’s I do think IDN present an interesting investment opportunity long term and will be widely adopted at some point.
If/when adopted, I do not expect major traffic on IDN’s in comparison to English domains but like ccTLD’s, there will be enough traffic there to make it a worthwhile investment and traffic play.
Be sure to read Franky’s view on IDN here.
Why would you not expect major traffic on IDN’s once there is widespread consumer adoption? Today, 25 of the top 50 websites in the world in terms of traffic are in native scrip Mandarin and Cantonese (Chinese). China is already number one in the world in mobile phone subscribers and number one in Internet users under the age of 30. But what is astonishing is that Internet penetration in china remains at less than 10% of China’s total population . Contrast that with the United States online population of 210 million but with penetration of 69.3%, and the huge room for growth in China’s online population is obvious. You don’t think that once the native speaking Chinese population begins using IDN urls (inevitable) there will not be a broad change over the years in terms of navigation habits? Just like the explosion of .com, I expect the transformation will be swift and massive and the traffic for IDN domains will see exponential growth.
This discussion seems so theoretical, but no one seems to mention that IDNs have been available since 2000. They are alive and well on the internet today. Also, it seems that y’all think IDNs are only Japanese and Chinese? Asian traffic is probably a long-term investment. However, Russian (Cyrillic) domains get a LOT of traffic now. French and Spanish IDNs get a lot of traffic now. I think that most US domainers can handle French, Spanish, and other European language domain names.
Thats all well and good but how does one know what terms are used in each country unless they speak the language? Are you just converting english search terms into IDNs and regging them or are you working out what each country joe soap searches for? If so where can this info be found? Is there a IDN equiv for wordtracker,etc..?
Cheers from Dublin,
Alan
http://www.mediahost.ie