I think it's not appropriate to generalize idn, one must remember the differences in cultures, wealth, internet penetration, and anglo-affinity of the different countries.
Absolute agree, all market need careful analysis.
For example, English is considered an elite language among tertiary educated people in commonwealth states - which is practically the entire internet user base for many improverished countries.
True, but if the rest are being excluded due to language barriers then the argument for the adoption of IDN is all more the powerful.
If the assumption is that you are only attempting to market to the Tertiary educated English fluent minority, then don't go the IDN route!
However, the internet has been a huge boon to the US economy and many in the third world see it being such there. Ultimately, popular sites have to be aimed at the lowest common denominator, and that will be the local lanaguage.
In the far east, China is more comfortable with ABC due to pinyin and English being the second language, while Koreans are nationalistic and prefer to use Hangul more than any other languages, be it Hanja or ABC, and i guess that the Japanese are somewhere in between.
The Chinese will undoubtedly use English to market to the US, they are not stupid, but the presumption that the Chinese Economy is purely about sweat shop manufacture for Western consumption to earn the daily bowl of rice, is total wrong. Most of China's economy is based on internal supply and demand, indeed most of the investment is coming from internal sources, and the proceeds are going to finance US debt.
If you want to market to growing middle class within China, it will have to be done in Chinese. The Chinese do not access the internet using either English or Pinyin. This is now the biggest market in the world for certain classes of consumer good, notably mobile phones, computers and even cars. The US cannot sell its car production at home, if it thinks it will do so in China using advertising in English, then its car industry is surely doomed.
In terms of broadband Internet user base, Korea has the highest market penetration (higher than in the West), followed distantly by Japan, and then China.
Well, this may be true but China now has more Broadband connections than the US and is rolling them out at an incredible rate. If you are building a marketing strategy it must be based on predictions about where things are going to be 2 to 5 years from now, not on out of date statistics collected 2 to 5 years ago!
I'm not so familiar with the conditions in Europe though.
In Europe things are not generally that promising for IDN, most of the major economies have languages that use Non-ASCII characters quite sparingly and these are not required for understanding. I think in most European languages IDN will play second fiddle.
Best Regards
Dave Wrixon
lawpal said:
You might as well register RamaRamaDingDing.com
Just my $.02.
:evil:
Well perhaps you should check domains wanted once in while. I have made sales in the 4 figure range and I am getting a few approaches. But if you want to carry on, like many of Newbies on here, registering any ASCII string that is less than 30 characters that is a typo of something that is conceivably pronouncable, that is fine by me!
Best Regards
Dave Wrixon
