IDN Domains Talk

I remember a client that I had who had a business in high end job placements. He wanted me to be his designer because he knew that I’m always trying to throw out new innovative ideas & not just doing things a standard designer would do. hat was 10 years ago & that person’s business is still going strong. A few of the things that I remembered from him was he wanted to cater to his leads. Everything he did was catered to the people that made his company revenue. He didn’t care about millions of people seeing his site, he didn’t care if a million people applied for jobs. He said he needed to target the placements that were within his clients needs. That was 10 years ago when Hitbox was free & the only analytics software I used. At that time many was just getting on the web too.

The other thing that this person used to always say is my site has to be different. In terms of content he said he would list actually salaries on his site. Here in Japan no one listed salaries at the time. This made his site different because if you were qualified you knew what your salary would be like.

This applies to domains. It even applies to me & my portfolio site. There are no prices. This is not user friendly. When I made the site well things were different. Edwin Hayward was one of the first domainers I ever heard of in Japan. I didn’t understand his business at all when I first ran across his name like 5 years before I ever bought an IDN domain. I do remember many of his domains have set prices. Something he can live with getting if a buyer is interested.

I have to acquire a domain soon for someone & wouldn’t it be cool if I knew the price. When I started IDNForums this was one of the reasons why I had a rule of put a price if you post a domain. If not some people’s mentality is like I’m cool to sell it for $100 if they list it on their own. If someone ASKS about it then it suddenly becomes over X,XXX minimum.

I want to test a few things out in development. Also see where the market is. I realize that I don’t have set prices for domains but hopefully next month I can actually think of solid ones. I feel they should be prices I can live with for perhaps 2010 & 2011. For Example my most requested domain (EXAMPLE NOT REAL) ダイヤモンド.jp (Diamond), or アニメ.com (Anime) $300,000 each. Would I expect to get that right now? Heck no, not at all but it would be a price I could live with. Why give up my best two for anything less? Other domains such as カナダ.jp (Canada) $100,000.

Anyway it’s fun to put things out there a bit, especially I want to do this in both English & Japanese & see if it gets a bit of attention over here locally. Think different sometimes. Even if it comes to nothing, nothing is lost & people know if they have interest in what I own where to find it. The bottom line is I’ve seen a few domain sites like this http://www.dotcomagency.com/sitepages/showcase.asp . It’s a very good site with prices.

Can you rank your own domains?

I’m looking over my portfolio & thinking I want to trim down. So I thought of ranking my domains.

A) ones that I consider Premium or really want
B) ones that I want that might not be the top quality premium but I still want
C) ones that I registered or bought & have no interest in.

Truthfully I like to have about at the most 200 dot coms (or nets) (IDN & non IDNs) & 150 dot jps
In just an hour I picked out about 50 dot coms or net I would get rid of. Not drop but get rid of. Just because it doesn’t fit my personal interest doesn’t mean they are not good. For example (not selling yet this an example). Gambling my dot jp portfolio in IDNs has domains like Blackjack, Roulette. I’m not so interested in the gambling market.

So what to do comes next. Think of new & innovative ways to sell. Or copy existing ways &  change it up a bit.
If I have about 50 domains that I could shave off in com I might have another 50 in .JP. Let’s see if I create a way to offer to sell one or two a week without having a burden on my limited time. More soon maybe..

Last night I had a chance to hang out with two guys who I really love in the domain world of Japan. Darshaun Nadeau & Steve Karnas both of Wixi the first domain parking system catering specifically to Japan. The two both have been pioneers of many aspects of the domain market in Japan. Darshaun is a really active guy just getting back from mountain climbing in Africa. Me & Steve have been friends for years & alway talk for hours on what’s going on locally & how to create better services. The fact that their Wixi system is powered by the NameDrive guys who are always welcomed to hang out more in Tokyo is a blessing.

I don’t think everything here needs to be public but those who are dedicated to domain business in Japan actually almost all know each other on a very personal level. Wixi which was only launched recently is in the arms of a team of very smart & innovative individuals. Darshuan, Steve, & NameDrive (Ash & crew). I’ll write more about Wixi very soon but their site is

http://park.wixi.jp/

I usually don’t post pix on this blog but here’s Steve, me in the middle, & Darshaun. (oh the stories… )

I might be the first person revealing this.
GMO & Canon will go forward with .Canon
The press release is here

http://www.gmo.jp/en/news/article/?id=441

I am not thinking this is a bad idea. With domains or any type of technology you have to think out the box. It’s the comparing everything to everything that’s been done that kills innovation.

What I can imagine is Canon leveraging this to be tied into photo/Video/Media storage for Canon consumers.
Free or even at $20 a year plus storage space imagine that.
You get your name Tomoko.Canon  This is your photo space. You can share with family friends & if marketing correct everyone knows it’s the space for your online photo gallery.
How many canon users are there worldwide? Millions. The cost they pay to ICANN a year would be peanuts compared to the savings they would get in marketing for user loyalty.

Working at an ad agency clients want new, innovative ideas, & total plans. For me this is where I am leaning towards. If you look at this like what was done in the past. It would probably fail. If they’re smart they will tie it into an easy to use service offered by Canon for Canon consumers or Photographers in general.

Well we all face it. Setbacks in ideas & development flow. The team has now been focused on an actually more urgent project. I don’t think we can put up one new site this month let alone two.

The Japan Geo Project isn’t a race & it’s a long term project so putting a new site on the burner till we finish this big project & other things is Ok… You have to know what your goals are when you develop or get people involved with the team. One other project needs a bit more attention from us so got to give it a bit more priority.

Even though I haven’t written down what all my intentions are for the  Japan Geo Project I am hoping it does the one thing I always tried to get people to do. Start developing. I think it worked…

Since being part of GroupM Search I have the real forecast data but can’t use it in my personal blogs. For domains I think pricing & expectations should be measured in part by looking at the market.

I couldn’t find a great example but some Ad related sites do offer trend articles like this.

http://www.netimperative.com/news/2009/august/july-2009-news-roundup/worldwide-advertising-spend-forecasts

The data isn’t guesswork it’s compiled by Global Ad Agencies that make up a large percentage of the people who manage the high end ad revenue. There are other reports that break it out by country. For the data that’s produced by the WPP Group & GroupM I can clearly see how much money is spent on advertising in various countries. I don’t remember exact numbers but you have to look at it this way, if you hold a portfolio for Country X, & Online advertising for the year equals like 50 million dollars. I would not be waiting million dollar domain payoffs.

Anyway this is not to poke at anyone’s portfolio as I at this point have no idea what anyone has except for myself. This is just a suggestion on how to look at various global markets. I don’t believe IDN Domain investors need to have thousands of domains. I don’t have thousands of domains. Quality before Quantity. Get coms, get the ccTLDs of the target country & always get simple commercial terms.

I haven’t looked into my parked domains in a long time. Actually it was about a year since I logged into my NameDrive account. Talking to my friend Steve from Wixi this year I decided to start looking into my accounts. My optimization can be a lot better. My parked domains don’t make me much after looking at account for about a month I realize already new techniques to improve the entire account. I’m not in a rush so I’ll start applying changes next month.

One thing I did notice was there is quite an increase in sites that created their brands on IDNs I own. Some are blogs, some are just bbs pages. There are two that really got my attention. One is  格安旅行.jp (cheap travel, cheap vacation) & the other is 会社設立.jp (company incorporation, my translation might be slightly off). The company incorporation one seems to been launched recently. The sucky thing is the more they promote their site the more traffic comes to my parked page. Since I have ties to J-seed (Venture company in Tokyo). I thought we can do something with the domain later.

The cheap travel domain. It seems like an SEO company has invested in buying plenty of backlinks with the .jp even in the URL. It’s to the point they do rank first page for the term cheap travel but if the user tries to find the site by the brand 格安旅行.jp my site shows up first.

I believe you guys who have held onto your portfolio should know where the traffic is coming from. One ASCII dot jp I own & bought as a drop gets traffic because there is a company with co.jp. I just figured this one out today. This is the situation where it would be good to offer them a chance to buy the domain if I don’t plan to use it.

Anyway Happy investing. Think Progressive.

Since I’m doing the system backend & others are doing content for the Japan Geo project I plan to see if we can launch 2 cities at the same time this month. With these sites from first look the sites are really identical but the backend isn’t. Each one gets a little bit better.

In 2009 I’ve contacted Google to alert them about problems with certain technologies they own. This was from my normail mail account without reference to me working at a Global Ad Agency in the WPP Group. They actually responded & provided suggested fixes. I’ll post at least one later that will be beneficial to all of you.

Back to the project we may not have as many handwritten articles for these two initially since we are still working on a bigger project at the same time. We’ll push, & I want to try a few new modifications for the Japanese market.

Anyhoot. Hope those reading start to develop. We start with just 25 articles (usually) on each site. For those in areas such as New York, LA just hire native Japanese college students & give them cash to research & write articles. Find them on Facebook, Craig’s List etc. Just make sure your site doesn’t look like crap. It makes a difference. Also be firm with them about NOT copying & pasting articles. I had to fire a young writer before I even paid her several years ago because the first bunch of articles she gave to me contained something she wrote for an online mag & just changed the first line. & she was going to school for journalism… The team now is solid…