Is the domain name gold rush finally over?

[Adam Dicker]

The internet has minted a fair share of millionaires. More than a handful have made those millions buying and selling desirable domain names. Starting with the sale of business.com for $7.5m in 1999, over the years many domains have changed hands for sizable amounts -- six, seven and even eight figures.

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[bwhhisc]

Many feel the next (and last) domain gold rush will be in IDNs - International Domain Names. If they are right, it could be "1999" all over again, only this time with .com names in Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Hindi and Thai etc. These have been available to register since 2000, but without browser support until 2007, and without ICANN putting the extensions into the root in the various languages until this year.

It is anticipated that next year the .com will be transliterated by Verisign for the most popular languages to its equivalent in the various languages, providing fully internationalized domains "idn.idn".

Most of the primary terms are registered, but there is a decent aftermarket with reasonable prices compared to the potential. The IDN program has been in process for almost 12 years, and the full implementation will occur starting in 2012.

The Russian idn.idn (Russian Federation) just went thru opening and registered now over 700,000 idn.idn to date. That might be an indicator that IDNs will have widespread acceptance in many markets (but not all as Acro has made his case for Greek idns).

QUOTE from IDNBlog.com (I am not affiliated with this site)
"IDN.РФ is on steroids. Just look at the stats. 586,000+ .РФ domains sold within the first weeks of open registration for this hot new Russian ccTLD, which is translated as “.RF”. This compares favorably to even the most successful ccTLD launches such as that of .CO. In addition, well over $50,000,000 in bids were placed on .РФ auctions via NIC.ru. Advertising campaigns in Russia promoting the adoption of .РФ have been running full steam, leading many to believe that end-users will develop these .РФ domains, which will consequently raise the profile and value of these ccTLDs".

So....maybe worth buying a "few" nice generic IDN.com names and see what happens.
Who knows...it could be 1999 all over again. Nonetheless a small risk for potentially very large returns.