A stark contrast to the mobee and IDN pump and dumpers.
In the case of IDNs the "flippers" are few and far between. The market dried up about 2 years ago for the better names. There are very few "top tier" IDN names for sale here, and those have asking price of x,xxx and up.
In regards to IDN, follow the money...many public documents available. ICANN Budgets for 2009, 2010, jp registry, ccnic, ru registry, india registry etc. Hundreds of millions of dollars when you add it all up being spent between last year and next few years...
Will computer users that don't read or write English use native language IDN domains? Guess we will have to see. A lot of money being spent by native registries, and a 10 year "struggle" with a lot of politics behind the scenes to finally bring native language urls to mainstream use. But it is now certain idn.idn WILL happen in 2010 and beyond.
IDNs are an advertisers dream...imagine being about to put up a native language keyword on a billboard or TV ad that millions of eyes can actually read (and especially words they can easily remember in their own language). That would seem like a great part of any marketing and advertising strategy for an investment at reg fee of $ 7.50 a year. :lol:
There are Russian IDN.com getting over 1,000,000 visitors annually and making mid to high x,xxx from parking alone...maybe more.
(Don't take it from me...ask Ed from Namedrive for some basic highlights of traffic to idns...I can assure you it is anything but non-existant).
Russian IDN across the board are doing amazingly well on the huge publicity that started 18 months ago. Other languages are lagging behind, but should follow suit when idn.idn is implemented and the publicity hits the news. The news is what jumpstarted it for Russian idn.com, and it was a pretty amazing thing to see the traffic come flowing in. Yahoo, Yandex and Bing are treating IDN indexing nicely, Google will hopefully add unicode into their algorithm soon. Namedrive and SEDO are both investing in IDN parking and monetization, this is no doubt happening based on the growing stats I am sure.
IDNs are just another way to diversify your portfolio, some people have done very well so far with xx,xxx and even xxx,xxx sales. Reported IDN sales continue to climb in price and value. Most people are now holding and developing. .mobi is another story that will not play out for many more years it seems. On the otherhand, IDN.IDN is being "moved" to the launch pad as we speak, and from all accounts appear to be headed for a BIG lift off and happy ending for those that took the chance to grab a few good names.
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