IDN Opportunities
Why don't you subscribe to my blog while you're here? I'm a freelance web developer and I blog about Ruby, Rails, and business online.
Go ahead and subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Few people know about Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) and even less are taking advantage of such a great opportunity. IDN’s are domain names that contain non-ASCII characters. This allows non-ASCII Internet users such as Japanese, and Chinese to simply type in domain names. Previously, these users were much more likely to surf via a search engine, or to punch in one of the many foreign “romanized” number domain names that are part of many native languages (E.g. 163.com). To work with the Internet DNS architecture, the non-ASCII characters are translated to an ASCII encoding which begins with the prefix “xn--”.
Unfortunately, if you are only just learning about IDN now (as I am) then you are quite late to the game. Don’t despair, I believe that some opportunities still exist. I’m not an expert but I suspect that the IDN opportunities now exist in picking up valuable domains in the secondary market in the $xx, $xxx+ range, or for the native speakers, picking up brand new word combinations like, say, the equivalent of cheaphotels.com in Chinese for a registration cost (<$10).
The “alternative media” are starting to pick up on IDN, and no doubt the main stream media will start taking note in a few years (give or take a decade I guess).
Despite being uni-lingual, my money is literally on Chinese domains. This is one way I see of directly capitalizing on the impending Chinese world domination. With 10% of the Chinese population making up such a huge part of the Internet population (12%) I think it’s reasonable to suggest that we’re going to see a day when the Chinese language dominates the currently English dominated (I assume?) Internet. Admittedly, it’s speculation based on future estimates as opposed to investment on current figures, but it’s almost already too late to get in without serious money, so what the heck.
That said, I’ve read of a few people in forums claiming to have made in the hundred thousand range already. Unconfirmed, but somewhat believable.
FYI: You can find language stats here.
