I believe that the commonly held perception that IDN are a waste of time stems mainly introverted nature of the US market. Most of the good English dot coms were acquired before the market has woken up to their value and the same will true of IDN. I can, however, understand why somebody like yourself who is well established in the conventional market might regard them as a distraction. Of course for many, the technical and cultural barriers appear insurmountable, but from my email correspondence and the traffic we are receiving, it does appear as though interest is growing.
What is important to understand is the shear size of these markets. China already has almost as many internet users as the US and that is growing very rapidly. The traffic on IDN domains similarly could grow a thousand fold over the next few years, wheras that on conventional domains may double or triple in the same time frame.
We believe that major language IDN domains (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Russian and Hindi) will eventually fetch about 10% of their dot com counterparts. This means that in the last year we have registered hundreds of domains that in several years time could be worth somewhere between $50K-100K each, possibly more. Some of these characters when pasted into Google throw up over a billion results. How many domains in your portfolio can do that?
Regards
Dave Wrixon
