- Impact
- 33
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.
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.
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