IDN Domains Talk

The domain registration companies here in Japan generously made sure they offered as little information as possible to customers about the IDN.jp price increase. I had a feeling it was going to be any domain renewed before the 25th will have the lower fee. So I renewed all the IDN.jp domains I had for the rest of the year.

I send money by bank transfer & it’s usually posted in my account the same day during the week by about 6pm. If I didn’t email them twice I have a feeling they weren’t going to post the credit to my account. I had asked earlier in the week if Value Domain could tell me details about the price increase. They’re response was “Wait for the announcement”. Now you know why I usually don’t post companies links on my sites.

The new prices for IDN.jp’s in Japan is now officially between 1260 to 1300 yen. Ah 660 yen was a great price but since I get a salary in yen, with the US dollar being so weak my dot com costs has gone down about 25%.

Hopefully we’ll see .日本 soon. The way I figure it the price increase only makes sense if .日本 is coming out & it pays for extra marketing.

****** UPDATE******* 11:30pm
Seems someone at Value Domain may have been jumping the gun
New price showed up & the registration fee for IDN.jp will be 1240 (or around that). They changed it back already to 640.
It’s not 100% sure if the discount will continue for old registrations.

****** UPDATE 2******* 8:30am (26th)
Domains that were registered BEFORE September 25th also have the new rate for renewals.
Renewing Before September 25th would have saved everyone money.

I finally launched my top traffic domain アニメ.com (anime). After reviewing the results of my shopping sites I decided that a site like this is going to take a while to complete. My goal is to finish sites like this & have thousands of my pages & products indexed by Christmas.

These are a few points

• In August my sites generated close to 5,000 unique visits. I think this is pretty good for the first month & most were created throughout the month.
• I’m up to 12 Shopping sites now
• I also had a good month in parking because the Japanese yen is 25% higher than the dollar compared to 2 years ago.
• My Shopping sites mainly 2 that get lots of traffic came close to beating my parking revenue
• September sales on my shopping sites already beat my Parking stats
• I’m going to revisit putting adsense on the sites but only in one location. I’ll see if this doesn’t affect ranking.
• Over the weekend I created a new template myself for the newer sites. The Anime site has this template it’s better but unfortunately it still sucks.
• I did try a new system for products & realize most commercial scripts just don’t work with Japan. Somethings always left out that you have to have an external programmer fix. Even though the programmer told me that it does work with Japan it didn’t perform well. They might fix it in the future so I won’t mention any brands.
• Development is not easy & I’m not trying to make it look that way. I started reading the Epik blog lately & if you put “/stats” you can actually publicly see how much any of their sites made last week. This is great for you to compare your sites & revenue to. Even though I can’t use it Epik is a game changer can’t say this enough.
• Also this week we launched 安泊.JP an online travel service in Japan. This is my first time owning part of a such a potentially great service in Japan. Hats off to the team working hard to put this together.