Via DomainBits:
How does becoming wealthier than Frank Schilling sound? Schilling, the most successful individual domainer in the world, has a portfolio of about 300,000 names, estimated revenue of $20 million dollars per year, and has received several 9-figures offers for his portfolio. Yet according to long-time IDN investor and IDN expert David Wrixon, “[t]here are IDN investors out there that will make Frank Schilling look like an amateur.”
When it comes to making money in domaining, there are many strategies. But if you are looking to capitalize on one strategy that holds a lot of potential, you should check out IDNs. Although you may never be as successful as Schilling, the timing for getting into IDNs is good.
In general I think IDN has good chance to be something one day however on a personal/corporate level, we do not have any of those. It is still extremely speculative if you wish to make your money on traffic. For example, others who thought to make their living off IDN traffic got into it at the earliest December 1999 and still cannot make a living off that traffic, something many dot com investors can do many times over.
Overall a good read, but still I would consider it as a highly speculative investment. Invest with caution!
Hi Sahar,
What are your thoughts on straight-out (non-IDN) foreign .com names, specifically Spanish? With the number of foreign users coming online, are you sticking in the ccTLD (ie .es or .ar) or would you go .com for any name no matter what the language?
Thanks!
~Christian
At the time when people were hand-registering prime ascii domains, they were also considered as highly speculative investments. Nobody really knew if the internet was going to take off or not back between 1994 and 1996.
One thing is for sure, there certainly have been a lot of IDN registrations popping up lately at Moniker with Whois Privacy enabled. As well, I have seen IDNs across multiple languages registered to at least one big and well known ASCII player who doesn’t feel the need to hide his IDN registrations behind Whois Privacy.
It could very well be that the big boys are publicly downplaying IDN while they are privately acquiring in stealth. Most of the high-value IDN sales of late have been kept under the radar which NDAs required by the buyers, not the sellers. What do you think is really going on?
Thanks Sahar,
We really are going to have to get past this dot Com investor classification though. Dot Coms is exactly what I am in invested in, just not Latin Dot Coms. My domains are part of the same registry as your domains, and in most parts of the World they press exactly the same buttons.
Traffic is still an issue with IDN, but browser support is still missing to a large extent in most markets. We are now past 50% in Russia and traffic is growing steadily there, which is encouraging because Russia is actually the one place where dot Com never made much impact previously. The Auto Updates of IE7 start February 13th in the Far East. This could start to make a huge difference, particularly in Japan where $5 per click payouts are quite common.
I amazed why Traffic is such a barrier to investment. IDN are already attracting a hell of lot more traffic than dot Mobi!
The other day I spotted a post on idnforums that an Arabic com IDN is getting 5k typins with $150 USD revenue everyday. I personally own an idn that gets 700 daily typins.