IDN are very confusing

[michaeldotcom]

I have personally nothing against IDN and I think they could do well in the future in many countries and non-Latin languages.

However I'm not sure that IDN will do that well in Latin languages. Why ? Because I think they can be very confusing.

Let me give you a few examples.

The German word for "austria" is "österreich". But before IDNs, this was often written "oesterreich" in URLs. This means that if you want to make a German .com website about Austria and buy the domain österreich.com (IDN), you will definitely lose lots of traffic to oesterreich.com (non-IDN) and osterreich.com (non-IDN).

So unless you own each of these three domains, you will lose a lot of traffic to competitors. And I must say that it's already extremely expensive to buy even one country geo .com domain. Will any business want to spend lots of money on a IDN .com domain like österreich.com if they know that they will lose lots of traffic to competitors who own oesterreich.com and osterreich.com ? I guess not.

Another example in French. "Students" is an excellent keyword. A domain like students.com is surely very valuable and expensive. The French for "students" is "étudiants". But will someone pay a huge amount of money for étudiants.com if they know that they will lose a lot of traffic to etudiants.com ? I'm not sure.

I've been talking about that with some average Internet users from France recently. They were actually trying to convince me that it's impossible to use French accents in URLs. As you can see, IDN are still not known by the public.

I think it's much better to own and develop both étudiants.info and etudiants.info rather than developing étudiants.com without owning etudiants.com (lots of lost traffic there).

But still I think that IDN are really confusing in Latin languages and that's probably why IDN sales have been fairly low in value so far.

 

[WhoNet]

My favorite IDN = Numeric Domains

I've got some Thai numeric IDNs

 

[thefabfive]

...

and numbers are also represented with native characters in Chinese like;

八八八八八八 meaning 888888

What's interesting to me is that the most popular languages in the world have there own numbers -- Hindi, Chinese and Arabic.

I actually think domain like 八八八.com translate better as eighteighteight.com rather than 888.com. The Chinese use the standard numerals (1,2,3, etc). Short domains like 八.com, 八八.com, or even 八八八.com are probably still worthwhile, but I'm not sure any longer such domain are any good.

 

[Phio]

good points. Looks like 八 is gaining on 8

baidu results 八 73,400,000
8 99,800,000

yi 一 er 二 san 三 si 四 wu 五
one two three four five

liu 六 qi 七 ba 八 jiu 九 shi 十
six seven eight nine ten

What makes Chinese numbers Lucky, is the pronunciation.
“Ba” sounds similar to “fa” (good fortune)

%%-

 

[domain_trader]

I think every domain name is potentially losing traffic to some other version, particularly when we think about plurals, different extensions, etc.

I'm fairly confident that Latin IDNs will take front stage at some point over their ASCII counterparts, particularly in countries that have non-equivalent characters (e.g., Swedish, German) and in countries where native accents are a matter of cultural pride or part of the standard keyboard set-up.

The rise of IDNs will be incremental and ultimately a snowball effect. When awareness expands, so too will the number of visitors to IDNs. When visitors increase, large commercial enterprises and government agencies (financial institutions, etc) will want to get a bite of that traffic, and also brand according to their proper names (involving accents), and will themselves purchase IDNs. When their websites are grinded into the public consciousness, traffic will start snowballing. Just how long this whole process will take is uncertain - in some places it will happen sooner than others.

 

[Rubber Duck]

The bottom line is that those that need it explaining will probably never get it, whilst those that get it will never need it explaining!

I actually think domain like 八八八.com translate better as eighteighteight.com rather than 888.com. The Chinese use the standard numerals (1,2,3, etc). Short domains like 八.com, 八八.com, or even 八八八.com are probably still worthwhile, but I'm not sure any longer such domain are any good.

Well hopefully your mind will be put at rest in Paris.

 

[labrocca]

People lose traffic to typo's, name variations, other TLD's all the time. IDN is no different.

 

[Hurley4540]

I do not like these domains; I see no worth in them , but there ARE some nice sales!

 

[DNWizardX9]

I do not like these domains; I see no worth in them , but there ARE some nice sales!

If you are a native english speaker why would you? These are geared towards people in other nations where english is not the main language..


Enjoy your AA-A.com, LLLL.org domains.... Creative profile.... but I see more worth in IDNs... Cheers

 

[Bramiozo]

I think IDNs could be quite successful in the future for non-Latin languages indeed, but not really for Latin character sets.

Based on what do you say this ?

Your examples only indicate that traffic is lost, not that there will be no significant traffic nor that the IDN's can't be the primary term, it doesn't serve to proof anything but the fact that businesses need to acquire more names to get the same of amount of type-ins for the keyword. It will diminish the value of equivalent non-idn's which is probably the most important reason for conventional ascii-investors to moan and groan about idn's.

I am positive that constructions like oe -> ö will become a thing of the past, unlike some non-latin languages most of the 'special' characters can be typed easily and the user doesn't have to switch keyboard layout (like with chinese characters). These constructions like "oe" are sensible only when the user cannot input the correct characters.

Besides, the German IDN market is as strong as the non-idn market, albeit there are less German IDN sales then pure ascii sales simply because most german words do not contain these diacritic marks.

But let's say you own avião.com. Wouldn't you be worried to lose a massive amount of traffic to aviao.com ?

I understand what you mean, but in so many cases, good .net sites are losing traffic to .com already (big .net sites are often paying a lot to buy the .com in order to prevent this huge amount of traffic loss).

I think that unless you own both avião.com and aviao.com, you'll be losing way too much traffic. That's the major problem of IDNs in Latin languages.

Wouldn't he be more worried if he didn't have avião.com OR aviao.com ?

What's too much traffic ? Too much for what, to pay the reg-fee ?

You have to consider that avião.com is in his possession because it was available and because aviao.com was taken, avião.com was most likely acquired at reg-fee, so losing traffic to aviao.com is not an issue.
It is most like aviao.com which might consider buying avião.com instead of the other way around, that's the point, most of the scooped up IDN's are meant for speculation or mini-sites. It is the established order which must consider buying IDN's after which they would own both the idn and the ascii version. This already confirms the value of idn's hypothetically since ascii investors need to acquire idn's to maintain the value of their portfolio.