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Let me first describe the process of what I just went though (using Firefox):
1. Typed in Google “Inquisitive+word”, was looking at a term which I was interested in.
2. Top right corner there is a link for word definition for “inquisitive”, clicked on it.
3. Link goes to Answers.com with the following definition:
in·quis·i·tive (Än-kwÄz’Ä-tÄv) pronunciation
adj.1. Inclined to investigate; eager for knowledge.
2. Unduly curious and inquiring. See synonyms at curious.[Middle English inquisitif, from Old French, from Late Latin inquīsītīvus, from Latin inquīsītus, past participle of inquīrere, to inquire. See inquire.]
I then copied a word from the definition above, not noticing some characters are not English, the word was “inquÄ«sÄ«tÄ«vus”.
4. I took the word “inquÄ«sÄ«tÄ«vus”, pasted in the URL bar, added .com, and clicked “enter”.
5. Results was page not found for “http://www.xn--inqustvus-8nbbb.com/”
At first I thought maybe the original domain I pasted was forwarded to this new domain but that isn’t the case. That new domain is a IDN translation of the characters I pasted, and is free to register.
What does it all mean? It means that since keywords are potential domain type-ins, then when it comes to users who copy/paste as I have, IDN owners win.
I think this is what is know as “the Light Bulb Moment”.
This is something not many have really understood. They talk about owning generic ASCII keyword domains and IDNs being crap. It just never made sense to me. Domains are domains. People in other countries do the SAME THING. They too will type in Educate.com… in their language… on their address bar. Only problem was browser support. Everyday Firefox IE7 dominate a little more of the old market–Internet Explorer 6; and everyday there is more and more traffic to IDNs.
At the end of the day, business is business. I don’t choose sides, I just go where I feel money is, and within the my reach. From what I’ve seen, IDNs are the real-deal for people who didn’t get in to domaining early. Traffic is shooting through the roof and revenue is starting to be made. Can’t release stats due to competition, but things are looking bright.
Great post!
Even though this very thought occurred to me 2 years and over a thousand prime IDN domains ago, it is always nice to record the moment that others “get it”. Thanks.
ΕÏ?Ï?ηκα
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_(word)
[QOUTE]…then when it comes to users who [B]copy/paste[/B] as I have, IDN owners win.[/QUOTE]
Sal, only works with copy and paste?
A person in Israel would not need to copy and paste Hebrew, I’m sure.
BTW, belated congrats on your blog and the coming of Assista.
I personally don’t think IDNs are “crap”, I just don’t understand them, and I don’t invest in things I don’t understand.
The example above is a good one, but really, how often does someone accidentally paste Late Latin into Google? There is only one “inquisitive.com” … how many domains would you have to register to cover that word in every dialect of every language that will fully adopt IDNs? I do understand the appeal of IDNs to the users of those languages, but the very diversity that makes IDNs attractive to their end users is the same diversity that makes it less attractive to a domain investor who benefits mostly from traffic being consolidated to a central standard (which happens to be .COM for most ASCII names).
Then again, there’s over a billion people in China. Would they all spell their IDN for “inquisitive” the same way? I honestly don’t know, so this isn’t an attack or a snub on IDNs, just an observation /question from an admittedly under-informed reader.
DP you are a joke - How can you not understand IDNs??? They shouldn’t even be called IDNs… They are domains in someones native tongue. Not everyone in the world speaks english.
ASCII domains are like bacon, eggs, hash browns, toast and coffee for breakfast to americans, canadians, brits and others.
and they are like: xxddrth, 2231, dd34-44dd, 989eee, bobanoodle, for breakfast to chinese, korean, russian, french, german and japanese etc etc.
They have been living with xxddrth for quite some time now, and IDN’s will be a great relief to them. Like a breath of fresh air.
They will actually be able to type in what they want, and more than likely get it. Just like we can go to chubbysanta.com to do some christmas shopping, a french man or woman can go to LEPÈRENOËL.COM to go shopping for christmas. Actually, they can do it right now…if they have ie7 or a later release of mozilla.
Hey, DP. I think the Latin example was just an example.
Yes, people who speak & write Chinese, Japanese, French, Arabic, Spanish, Russian, etc. do have specific words for specific things.
Yes, they have used those languages all their lives, have built cultures, technologies, histories, and empires using those languages. That is what makes it attractive to end users and domain investors.
Yes, people in other countries use dot COM. Oddly enough, IDNs are dot COM, NET, and other gTLDs and ccTLDs. They have been available for about seven years.
Finally, it would be a wonderful idea to register the domains: games, video, women, sports, news, cars, money, loans, sex, etc. in every major language. However, I don’t think any one person has done that.
They are just domains. They are entered with a different keyboard than you probably use. You are obviously not the target market for these domains (judging from your response). Rest assured that plenty of people out there do speak & write other languages. Those people are happy to register and monetize the domains you do not understand.
The thing that baffles me is the domain tasters will taste any old junk to see if it has traffic. It doesn’t have to mean anything as long as it gets traffics which can be converted into cash. However, when it comes to IDN which clearly do mean something to millions of Internet users, there is such a mental block that it is like the void between their ears has suddenly been grouted up. In terms of monetisation at the moment, I am doing no more than putting the Keyword in the domain back into Namedrive to direct the domain towards advertising. As ever in the World of IDN, the answer is simply to cut and paste. Of course if you are a local you will do it intuitively on your keyboard just like an American with his ASCII dot coms. However, we who regard ourselves as professionals should be able to straddle such minor hurdles with ease. Those of you who cannot really would be better getting hold of a copy of “Facebook for Dummies” from Amazon.com!
But why spend 5 dollars on such a domain, when 1 blog post could get you in #2 for this “keyword” within a few hours on google?
http://www.google.com/search?q=inquīsītīvus
You have instant targetted traffic…. yes I know, you miss the CTR of 25% on a blog that you have on a domain parking.
Sometimes domainers think strange… (or you could argue the opposite for SEO-ers)
Yvo,
You are of course possibly right to some degree, however, to get the traffic from a Japanese keyword, you would need to establish that blog post in Japanese.
There is a massive gap here. There are two camps and it has nothing to do with IDN. On one hand you have those with super generics that cannot get ranked it the first several hundred on any of the search engines, so they are settling for very lucrative direct navigation traffic.
The other camp is settling for domains that hardly get any type-in but can be ranked for word combos or phrases. Lot of ball breaking work, but top keywords and extension are optional.
The whole point of IDN speculation is that if you don’t have a chance in hell of joining the first group by buying in the secondary market, you can achieve much the same result in another language. Even in the second group people are experiencing much more success than they did in their Mother Tongue English.
At the end of the day, it is all down to whether you wish to address a potentially lucrative global market or not, and how you do it. Many are trying to market to Asian cultures by just appending a local ccTLD to English Keywords. This approach merely shows how little real understanding of the industry many domainers actually have. If this is how they transfer what they have learnt into new market, I am forced to conclude that they have learnt nothing about their home market.
Wow, Sahar got ahead of Frank on this one. Frank, better buck up! :p
Yvo,
He picked a bad example… Most IDNs have millions of results in google not 200….
Some of the better one are into the hundreds of millions even billions!
No the domain here is a very poor example but give the guy a break, he was only stumbling into the domain space. To dive in go here:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?n=10&ei=UTF-8&va_vt=url&vo_vt=any&ve_vt=any&vp_vt=any&vd=all&vst=0&vf=all&vm=p&fl=1&vl=lang_zh-CN&p=inurl:xn--
or here:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?n=10&ei=UTF-8&va_vt=url&vo_vt=any&ve_vt=any&vp_vt=any&vd=all&vst=0&vf=all&vm=p&fl=1&vl=lang_ko&p=inurl:xn--
or here:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?n=10&ei=UTF-8&va_vt=url&vo_vt=any&ve_vt=any&vp_vt=any&vd=all&vst=0&vf=all&vm=p&fl=1&vl=lang_ja&p=inurl:xn--
or
http://search.yahoo.com/search?n=10&ei=UTF-8&va_vt=url&vo_vt=any&ve_vt=any&vp_vt=any&vd=all&vst=0&vf=all&vm=p&fl=1&vl=lang_ru&p=inurl:xn--
or
http://search.yahoo.com/search?n=10&ei=UTF-8&va_vt=url&vo_vt=any&ve_vt=any&vp_vt=any&vd=all&vst=0&vf=all&vm=p&fl=1&vl=lang_ar&p=inurl:xn--
To HVAC-
Frank has posted and sparred a good bit on IDNs. He knows they will go mainstream, he just thinks they will have primarily a regional impact. There are huge markets, I would say that 1.3 billion Chinese is significant by any “regional” standard.
Frank has said a few times that IDNs are probably not something he is planning to get into, no doubt his plate is already pretty full. He did put up a piece on his blog about a month ago regarding IDNs that ended with something to the effect that “if you understand the languages, go get em!”
Hey Sahar, nice to put up this post about IDNs. The SEO advantage has long been known to those who have made sites or had parked IDNs. For those interested, IDNForums.com is a good place to learn, but also keep your eyes open for some good domain investment opportunities.
“DP you are a joke - How can you not understand IDNs??? They shouldn’t even be called IDNs”¦ They are domains in someones native tongue. Not everyone in the world speaks english.”
Nice. I believe my point of view was expressed respectfully and did not even question the validity of IDNs, just stated why they’re “not for me”. How exactly is your response any better than the arrogance IDNers claim that English speakers have towards non-ASCII domains? FFS I feel like I just insulted a cult.
DP
Not everyone in the world speaks english. Repeat that quote 100x. Just cause it doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean it won’t work for someone else. What if you were born in Japan? You’d be saying #%#% now I’ll have to learn english just to type urls that make sense.
The point that IDNs will only have a regional impact is right on the money.
However, the perception that English will ever go global in any meaningful sense is ludicrous in the extreme. Yes, big business will talk to each other in English, but is that really of any great relevance to our Industry? Consumer enquiries that result in online sales will occur in local languages and scripts almost regardless of whether individuals speak English or not. In many instances sales sites will not even support English. All Arabs that speak English will also speak Arabic. So why not just put your site up in Arabic if the geographic area you serve is only going to extend to Arab speaking countries?