IDN Talk

I realize that many proceed with caution when buying domains in general from a seller that is not fluent in the language, or not residing in the country that the domain stems from. Even for my portfolio older does not necessarily make certain domains the best keyword or even the best translation. These are few things to research yourself or just ask the seller.

1. Katakana translation of the word in English
This has been something I thing most don’t want to point out. For many keywords this is the only word or even the best in Japanese. But just putting the English keyword in katakana & selling it, would be something to look out for. Many times the seller is thinking this is the best term for the keyword & it isn’t. Honestly with many sales no one ever usually states “Hey this isn’t the most common translation for this”. But it is “a” translation so it is correct. One of those catch 22 things.

2. Why are there so many searches for this keyword?
I’ve seen some people sell keywords that the answer for this has been “Cause its popular in Japan”. Please don’t think Japanese are just strange everything usually has a reason. The domain is mostly associated with something like a magazine, TV Show, Celebrity, or even a band name.
3. What other translations are there for this term?
I bought a term, that I was only thinking of one translation of it. It was a location. I realized later it was associated with a bigger keyword. This only happened to me once, & I was pretty one minded in thinking about matching that IDN domain with the Ascii (Romaji) in the same extension. Unfortunately to me the set as a location is more valuable to my later plans.

4. Is there a Company, service, music group. magazine etc. With this keyword as the name?
This happens all the time, & most often unknowing by the seller who might not have time to research every domain they own.

5. Would a native think this is valuable?
Try to make a Japanese friend who might have some association with the keyword. If its shopping related go on facebook or any of those SNS & meet someone & just send a message. You only need one or two people to reply.

6. Is this keyword even used in Japan?
Yep I’ve seen this too, selling keywords that are popular services in the States but aren’t in Japan.

7. English keywords with an s added to it in dot JP
Japanese “usually” use many English words in singular form even when describing something in the plural. For example Convertible.jp  works, register Convertibles.jp & selling it well, the seller just got duped. Japanese are going to forget the “S” at the end.

Anyway just my tribute to this… right back to work.

I recently started to think about unbiased domaining. Think about removing yourself from the picture as the domain owner & think of what could truly be best for the client.

With IDNs many had the change to invest in very valuable domains in various markets.

Afterwords what happens to those domains is up to the investor.

At the corporate Ad Agency level one of the things we learn is to be unbiased (for the Agency I work for especially).

What if you can unbiased?

1. Is your domain the best?
2. How many other domains might be just as good?
3. If you owned a company relating to that domain what would you pay for it?
4. Are you really giving the potential customer the best value?
A lot of the domains owned by those I knew really were the best domains for many keywords.

I believe there are also more reasons for companies to buy domains other than “Its Premium” or “Its the best”.

1. It stops the competitors from having any advantage a.k.a. Cockblocking
Toys.com just a domain redirected might be used in a campaign later but certainly blocks their competition from getting their market keyword.

2. High converting keyword
A keyword that is associated with conversion, or even as assist. The game is not just about eyes but conversions.

3. As a campaign keyword it is cheaper than the monthly PPC bill
This is my personal expertize for APAC having running campaigns. For certain markets you would be surprised how much just certain keywords make the PPC companies.

Long time ago I kept reading about Rick Schwartz & Madison Avenue getting it, or not. Its not that simple. Everything in advertising has a lot of hands in the pot. If you can go direct to the top then you are all set, if not things have to be approved, analyzed, data given to clients etc.

I do wish more tools were available to domain investors to properly document value. The old Overture bid tool was actually really helpful. Now these tools are only available to digital agencies in the local countries. Not even the North America counterparts realize that these local tools are even available.

So my point is, take yourself out the picture. Think a bit corporate if you have the real premium IDNs. The world economies are changing & we are seeing more campaigns funds being transferred to Asia especially. sit tight..

When I first started to buy Japanese domains in the dot jp extension I noticed a few of the really good premium dot coms I had they keywords were reserved by JPRS in .jp.

Its been a few years since I’ve held my portfolio & a lot of time if you talk to the same people it’s sometimes hard to think in new & different ways. What I realized is that these are reserved to sell later. JPRS is from all those I’ve talked to over in Tokyo a much for profit organization. They have reserved only the best quality Japan IDN domains to issue for sale later.

This is one of the things you have to plan in the beginning. So before anyone knew that Internet Explorer wouldn’t be IDN compatible for years they had faith in IDNs to sell. I assume so because they didn’t reserve non IDN .jp domains & both were actually launched at the same time. You can’t really launch the domains & take them back so keeping the high quality keywords was planned.

Anyway what does this mean for dot com holders. It means that later on these domains will be in use.
It also means please put some time in to develop those keywords you have before the reserved domains get sold off to Dentsu, Hakuhodo, or the government agencies. I began to notice this when a premium keyword I knew was reserved seemed to have a company name on it later when I checked it.

This is not to say which is better actually. Both dot com IDNs & jp IDNs are valuable in my opinion. With the world of advertising budgets being cut left & right this might be a chance for smart media people to pitch new ideas like domains more for adding branding.

Anyway as always just rambling from my perspective…

Released about 2 months ago

J-Word the Japanese PPC listing service now is IDN domain compatible.

Before Yahoo! Japan moved J-Word’s Ad Real Estate location on Yahoo! Japan’s portal front page J-Word listing had the best location on Yahoo! Japan’s portal. The top left location above Overture ads were owned by J-Word. Now they have been moved to the right sponsored listings location.

J-word services are based on buying keyword(s) for a set amounth each month. One keyword can be bought by only one company.

http://www.jword.com/info/info_news.jword.htm?newsid=20081022&text=LW&Link=HOME20081022

IDNForums members had a very big surprise when Tina Dam the director of ICANN’s IDN program joined to graciously answer questions by members.

http://www.idnforums.com/forums/13914-welcome-tina.html

One of the biggest concerns to IDN members is why does the media portray IDN Domains as coming out in 2008 when together IDNF members have at least hundreds of thousands of IDN Domains & even fully functional IDN based sites.

Questions like

Tina: That is a mistake and not the intention at all. We are well aware of the IDN implementation at the second level of various TLDs. The experience from this implementation and use is what is driving the IDN TLD development. I will try to see if we can find a way to make this more obvious.I expect this to be one of the longest threads on IDNF

You can join the discussion at

http://www.idnforums.com/forums/13914-welcome-tina.html

And it’s a unanimous feeling of security in knowing that one of the biggest group of IDN investors may have their voices heard.

I miay have to post this on the Japanese social groups to see if I could get questions I might not have thought of.

Again IDNF says thank you TIna.

Yahoo’s site explorer since about March had a bug where you couldn’t explore sites developped with IDN domains nor could you even add them to your site list. The intial workaround was just to include your site with punycode instead of using the native unicode characters.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ 

Since the reason update the way to input an IDN domain is just simply to put the domain in it’s native characters
for example
アニメ.com

Now you can just write your domains in Russian, Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean or whatever. Existing domains in punycode are ok but with this addition I found it doesn’t accept new sites punycode well anymore.

Who needs punycode anyway, I’ll be glad when all programs make Native language seemless with new applications.

I just saw this on IDN Forums that Google Webmaster Central added IDN compatibility.

The main portion most users will be thankful it became IDN compatible is the Google sitemaps. It’s so much better for me to easily be able to see the native Japanese characters in my domains than to see punycode.

(Read on …)

I initially started buying domains to develop only. Initially I also registered domains hoping to create Japanese sites. My initial inspiration was just to build until I heard about the sale of celebrity.com for $1,000,000. I immediately thought of buying it in Japanese & registered geinojin.com & geinokai.com. The problem that I faced was that some wrote it as geinoujin, while others might write it as geinojin with no u in the middle. This was the first indication I had as a student studying Japanese that you can write a Japanese word in Latin letters but there will be various ways to write it. The mistypes will be varied. In Japanese there will usually be one way of writing the term.

So years later now I had the chance to start the IDN market off & I started to match IDNs with ASCII letters in Japanese. As my strategy evolved I realized there are certain terms that you can do well with both Japanese & nonJapanese letters.

1. Geo Domains
Recently I got into Geo Domains inspired by the Associated Cities Group. I started collecting the ASCII & IDN version of some Hotspots I know Japanese love to go.
In my collection I’ve collected
LosAngeles.jp, ロサンゼルス.jp, & ロス.jp (Last is short for Los)
Rome.jp, ローマ.jp (Yeah your boy owns Rome)
Cairo.jp & カイロ.jp (Only found out after buying it the IDN means Chiropractics too)
Atlanta.jp & アトランタ.jp (Won’t be used for a Geo site)
Why Both? Both provides the Japanese user & any potential advertiser in the target geo location a chance to view the site easily. You can even put up an English page with stats info etc.

To be continued later

The IDN Domain is not so transparent to westerners (non Japanese). I think it really reflects how Japan is as a whole society. It’s actually pretty hidden right now (from westerners). I have my reasons for saying that.

I remember when I first came to Tokyo 12 years ago & heard about this area of Tokyo that was just great to hang out in. I only had 3 weeks so my assumption was a great place to hang out obviously would be great during the day, & quite obvious. I went there during the day on my first week, & it was completely dead. Streets were empty, nothing that a young 21 year old black American would be remotely interested in.

The first experience was the first week of my trip. The third week I ran into a guy I saw on TV there & he took me to the same area at nite, even better than that. What I saw on the street at nite wasn’t really interesting to me. He took me to a club inside of the 6th floor of a building, let’s just say it was one the best places I’ve been (at that age).

Japan in whole is just like this. From coming from Boston I would never assume to see the most luxurious places in Japan hidden inside of the 6th floor building. For Japanese it’s normal to not be transparent.

I’ve seen people use the same tactics as they would use for domaining for the Japanese market. Not in the context of what might be good to buy but seeing if the market is there.

Some may try to look at the very few Japanese domain forums to see if there is a domain market here.
Some may see that there are no reported domain sales going in DN Journal from Japan.
Some may think that they are seeing advertisements yet for IDN Domains..

Don’t expect to find Japanese on an open forum. There are other places where they are freely communicating about domains, it’s just not easy to see for nonJapanese.

Reported sales just look unnecessary at this time, also most of the companies selling domains here in Japan simply don’t care about the Western Market. There are two mid XX,XXX B2B transactions that I heard about this year.

Marketing people who run campaigns need data & guarantees before pitching things to clients. One thing that nonJapanese don’t do is search in Japanese. Currently Japanese who search for their company’s vital keywords are noticing other people are buying the IDNs for those keywords & ranking as well or even better than them. This is probably the biggest key factor to people doing research on IDNs right now. In my company I have team members who grasp this fully & are already telling clients about it, & unfortunately I have one coworker also who’s client’s competitor bought all the brand IDNs & is ranking in the top 6 spots because they bought the IDNs in different extensions.

The search value alone is high enough to make companies look for solutions to this. I expect 3 years from now half the URLs on the first pages on the search engines might be IDN Domains. We western IDNers have nothing to do with this either. We were just lucky enough to get in & buy some good premiums before natives opened their eyes. That gap for the Japanese market is now currently closed. They are aware.

The battle of the competing keywords, IDNs in the dot jp extensions being cheaper than buying dot coms for Japanese, & other changes remind me of those hidden places that a non Japanese wouldn’t expect. People telling me that dot jp cost $100 each, so they aren’t worth it really cracks me up, when I know registries in Japan only charge less than $7 for IDN dot jp…. & a campaign just ended where they were less than $4 each (and yes that is $4 USD).

oh a I have to say at the age of 21 the place went was so great because it was free, & clubs in Tokyo cost $30 entrance fee.

With the Japanese IDN market I like to look at it from a local user point of view. In my prior posts about what extensions where available I looked at some of the domain registration companies & what they offer. (Of The Domain Registries in Japan what do they offer in terms of IDN Domains?)This list of companies did not include one major hosting company that specifically caters to the average internet user.

This week I saw that Lolipop hosting has started to offer IDN Domains. Unfortunately I believe they cut a deal with JPRS because they only offer IDN.jp users can’t register IDN.coms. But the important thing is they are offering domains at a whopping 400 yen that’s less than $4 guys.

This price will only last until June 16th. I have about 250 dot jps so it’s not enough of a discount to make me register with them because theres no indication of what the price will be afterwards, but for the mass thousands of existing customers 400 yen is a price that’s tempting to get a second domain in your own language.

This is a great move by JPRS they have been cutting deals with popular registries & hosting companies that didn’t offer IDNs before to offer IDNs in the dot jp extension.

I expect a spike this month in registrations just like last month…

Lilipop’s domain registration service is http://muumuu-domain.com/

You can check the JP registration stats here

http://jprs.co.jp/en/stat/domains.html