Speedboat to China - a challenge to conventional domainer thinking

[mole]

India-based search marketing firm Pinstorm founder and chief executive Mahesh Murthy offered some insights for marketers truly seeking a global perspective. Murthy suggested that advertisers keep an open mind when approaching new markets -- trial and error in determining which strategies are most important can be critical to entering a new market. Recognizing that much of the world’s population does not speak English, keywords in multiple languages can be purchased at much lower costs than their English counterparts.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/7297.asp

[Rubber Duck]

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/7297.asp

Nice article. Local Keywords? What kind of domains relate to those? Is he suggesting that we should be buying Latin Transliterations? Or is there a better way?

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

Actually, reading this is beginning to look like very good news, as one of our main obstacles to obtaining traffic revenue from China has been the low population of Google Adwords in China.

Google have loads of good ads in Japan that are paying for local keywords. Indeed last night I got €1.80 for a Japanese IDN on a Kanji keyword, but up until now we are still using English Keywords for China. It looks like there is now real commitment there to turn this around, not only from Google but the SEO community.

[GeneralBill]

I've bought a handful of Chinese domains that get traffic on a daily basis. You need dot coms in pinyin.

[Rubber Duck]

I've bought a handful of Chinese domains that get traffic on a daily basis. You need dot coms in pinyin.

Well it is difficult to gauge at the moment as Local Overture for China was running in Beta but then disappeared again. Probably be out again soon though.

If you look at Japan Overture all the search is in local characters. I get regular traffic on both Hirigana and Kanji domains and get click through against Kanji and Hirigana Keywords. Actually got one click last night worth over $2.

Sure, there is traffic on Pinyin at the moment, as that has been the only way of doing things. The biggest problem with China at the moment is there is very little traffic coming out. I had nothing, then over a hundred clicks per day on both Latin and IDN domains, and then nothing again. Probably just a hole in the firewall! I am convinced that the low baseline of traffic that I am getting actually comes from outside the PRC as indeed it is likely that your pinyin does.

Long-term pinyin is only likely to survive in the expatriate Chinese Community who don't bother to equip themselves with a Chinese Keyboard.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[GeneralBill]

I have friends in China and have lived there for about half a year, so I have good insight into how they have been doing the Internet and will probably continue to do the Internet. IDNs are not popular. English and pinyin are the long established choices for domain names. IDNs pose a huge problem for email compatibility. I've hedged myself with a mixture of IDNs, as well as pinyin and English dot cn and dot coms. However, I see the brightest future for the pinyin dot coms. Just like coms are where all the money is in the US because they become popular first, I believe pinyin and English domains are where all the money is for domains in China. Dot cn and dot com are the only two extensions worth investing in in my opinion. I must admit that I trust the com tld more than the cn tld for stability of ownership.

[Rubber Duck]

I have friends in China and have lived there for about half a year, so I have good insight into how they have been doing the Internet and will probably continue to do the Internet. IDNs are not popular. English and pinyin are the long established choices for domain names. IDNs pose a huge problem for email compatibility. I've hedged myself with a mixture of IDNs, as well as pinyin and English dot cn and dot coms. However, I see the brightest future for the pinyin dot coms. Just like coms are where all the money is in the US because they become popular first, I believe pinyin and English domains are where all the money is for domains in China. Dot cn and dot com are the only two extensions worth investing in in my opinion. I must admit that I trust the com tld more than the cn tld for stability of ownership.

I agree with you on the dot com and we have proved that these carry more traffic than dot cn.

One of the things that is going to mitigate against pinyin is the amount of space it will take on a mobile phone. In fact Chinese characters will display more information in given space than any other language on the planet. More Chinese actually access the internet by mobile phone than by computer.

Inputting speeds are also a factor. Ten year ago inputting Chinese Characters was a nightmare due to the shear numbers, but they have developed keyboards and software that enable characters to be compiled rather than selected. I think it is likely that the same information can probably be input faster in Chinese Characters now than is possible in English on a Qwerty Keyboard.

Email compatibility will be an issue until Vista is widely adopted, as Outlook won't handle email without a pluggin. There is not a problem per se as long as you have the right equipment. The Chinese have already surmounted huge problems in converting characters to Unicode and enabling search in Chinese. Yes, there are still further problems to be resolved in regard to IDN, but these are more political than technical and the political will to resolve these problems has not only been explicitily express by China, but also India and Saudi Arabia.

Despite the descenters, the eventual adoption of IDN is a forgone conclusion. It is only really a question of it being brought on within a realistic time frame. Not only are all the important institutions of Asia commited to this, but so are the main US players i.e. Microsoft, Verisign, Google and Yahoo.

There are important reasons for having IDN domains and one of the most important is the ability to Index Keywords in the URL against search terms. Google and Yahoo have already done this, although characteristically Microsoft is lagging behind. Having said that Microsoft has now got all the major languages of Asia indexed for search.

Many here regard this as trivial and irritating. Clearly some do not understand the difference between a ccTLD and an IDN. It does not really matter as the markets that most of the participants of this forum address will be largely unaffected by the adoption of IDN. However, more than half of humanity live in Asia and do not write in Latin Characters. The adoption of IDN is essential to the future growth of developing economies and the World Economy in general. It will happen, it is not just another tower of Babel, but the time scale is still uncertain.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[none]

I have friends in China and have lived there for about half a year, so I have good insight into how they have been doing the Internet and will probably continue to do the Internet.

I've lived in Asia almost all my life and speak Chinese. I can assure you that mainland Chinese find it much more natural to communicate in chinese characters than pinyin. Have you ever looked for directions in Shanghai with an address scribbled in pinyin? Good luck with that ;-)

[Rubber Duck]

I've lived in Asia almost all my life and speak Chinese. I can assure you that mainland Chinese find it much more natural to communicate in chinese characters than pinyin. Have you ever looked for directions in Shanghai with an address scribbled in pinyin? Good luck with that ;-)

And just how many website are in pinyin? If you do a Google search, then convert pinyin to Chinese characters and repeat to get a quotient, it will be a small fraction of 1%. Frankly, it is about as usefual as Esperanto, although that still has its adherents.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[none]

I would argue that Esperanto is more useful!

In all seriousness, pinyin is indeed very useful -- to people who want to learn Mandarin.

Congrats on the Warning Level Dave :-p. Just noticed that... you must be testing a paradigm somewhere on this board.

[Rubber Duck]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_method

The Wubi method is based on the structure of characters rather than their pronunciation, making it possible to input unfamiliar characters, as well as not being too closely linked to any particular Chinese dialect. It is also extremely efficient: every character that one would want to write can be written with at most 5 keystrokes. In practice, most characters can be written with less. There are reports of experienced typists hitting 160 wpm with Wubi. What this means in the context of Chinese is not entirely clear, as words are an ill-defined unit in such a largely isolating language, but it is true that wubi is extremely fast when used by an experienced typist. The main reason for this is that, unlike with traditional phonetic input methods, one does not have to spend time selecting the desired character from a list of homophonic possibilities: virtually all characters have a unique representation.


Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

Yeah, I guess it a bit like speeding tickets. If you drive a lot you tend to pick up a few.

[GeneralBill]

Well, I think the best thing to do is hedge yourself like I mentioned above.

I have a question about IDNs in Mandarin. Whenever I type them in, I first have to switch to chinese character input. I type the word in chinese. Then, I have to switch back to english to enter the .com or .cn on the end of the domain. This is quite annoying. What is the natural away around this?

[Rubber Duck]

Well, I think the best thing to do is hedge yourself like I mentioned above.

I have a question about IDNs in Mandarin. Whenever I type them in, I first have to switch to chinese character input. I type the word in chinese. Then, I have to switch back to english to enter the .com or .cn on the end of the domain. This is quite annoying. What is the natural away around this?

Well, I have to admit, I have never typed a single letter in Mandarin. Just can't, so I cut and paste.

The IDN concept is partially implemented at best. The idea is that eventually the first level will also be typed in Mandarin or whatever language you please. Dot com will eventually be represented in many different ways to the user on his browser. It will, however, be part of the dot com registry and resolved by the DNS to exactly the same location whether it typed in English, Mandarin or indeed Hindi. I think the way it will go is that there will be a look up table in your browser that will be set to the local language. ICANN are doing a lot of work on this at the moment and final decisions on the exact method of implementation are still pending, but I think there will be sustantial progress on this at the next meeting in Vancouver.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon

[touchring]

You can enable Chinese in IME (choose Quanyin), and then you can type Chinese by using Alt-Shift to switch between the languages. E.g. To key in America， type 'meiguo' in pinyin and it will appear in the Chinese character.

I just tried Firefox, even without the .com entered, it will still resolve back to the .com automatically.

I think IDN will kick off only after 5 years in China (XP updates need license verification and probably 80% of PCs use pirated Windows).

[carlton]

Interesting reading your thoughts on chinese domains. I think the number of English speaking domainers who have knowledge of Chinese characters and language must be extremely small. So you guys may enjoy a unique advantage on something looming large. Are your language translation services for hire? :-D

[Rubber Duck]

You can enable Chinese in IME (choose Quanyin), and then you can type Chinese by using Alt-Shift to switch between the languages. E.g. To key in America， type 'meiguo' in pinyin and it will appear in the Chinese character.

I just tried Firefox, even without the .com entered, it will still resolve back to the .com automatically.

I think IDN will kick off only after 5 years in China (XP updates need license verification and probably 80% of PCs use pirated Windows).

In that case they will all have Vista about a week after it is launched.

There are also a couple of serious points that need to be made here.

The Chinese have a unfied writing system. Chinese Glyphs can be understood not only by Mandarin speakers but also by by the speakers of hundreds of other languages and dialects within China, and also often have meaning in Japanese which is not from the same language family at all. Pinyin on the other hand is language specific so can only really be understood by Mandarin speakers.

We entered the IDN market after realizing that language skills are not essential for the purposes of domain speculation. All you need to be able to do is identifiy the characters you need and register them. We do not have any real language skills either in Chinese, or indeed any of the other languages that we have invested, including Japanese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Telugu or Thai. When we started out most of speculation was based either purely on translations from online dictionaries. Only in Chinese and Japanese did we even have Google Scores. Now Overture Results are available for many of these languages, but we have also used Yandex.com for Russian and 3721.com for Chinese amongst other sources. More recently www.wikipedia.org has been an invaluable supply of local character keywords for cities and other important terms that are not generally in the dictionary. Because we were a long way ahead of the curve in many instances, we were working on the basis of very limited imformation, but were able to register very common terms including many of the Characters that on the Wubi keyboard as well as Chinese Cities and Provinces. We have sold most of the Chinese cities that we had. We did, however, make quite a few mistakes and registered some rubbish, but at $8 a throw we felt that the risk of registering some rubbish was acceptable!

We have used Pinyin, in as much as we have taken transliterations from western news articles to help identify terms in Chinese Characters.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon