IDN Talk

IDN domains start getting fair playing ground

Written on September 4th, 2006 in IDN Market by Olney

It’s almost a year since IDN Forums was launched. A year ago many domain investors labeled IDN domains worthless because they felt they couldn’t generate any revenue from parking. Earlier this year NameDrive was the first parking service to let IDN investors park IDN domains showing the domains as unicode instead of punycode.

Then finally we were able to display targeted ads in native languages. This was geotargetted so a user in Japan would see Japanese ads & a user in the US would just see English ads. This was exactly what I & others had waited for. Even though final release of IE7 which will be IDN compatible wouldn’t come until the end of 2006 I was sure now that native ads are showing up, we can just get traffic from search engines & make a hefty profit.

Up until now my portfolio was getting an average of $.34 per click, in Japan most of my domains are bidded on at Overture for over $2 a click up to over $20 a click. With a 22% CTR on 600 IDN domains. I started thinking just by search traffic alone if each domain could get just 5 uniques a day
Even if I round off the numbers
600 domains X 5 unique users X 30 days X $.25 per click X 20% Click through rate
That’s a potential of $4,500 a month
(These stats are only the potential in the target region)

So as the months went on I started to wonder, why aren’t my IDNs getting traffic from the search engines at least? If the domains are indexed with relative content then they should at least get picked up for some related terms. They were displaying Japanese ads in Japan.

Then I went & checked on Yahoo! & realized something that would help our domains gain equal ground as ASCII domains. Yahoo! & Google are US based search engines. Yahoo! Japan & Google Japan do not control the search database in Japan. Google.co.jp & Yahoo.co.jp just use the data provided by the US office. The reason why this is important is because the data crawlers all have US IPs. Even though we can see Japanese ads on the pages in Japan, Google Japan, & Yahoo! Japan only have data supplied by the crawlers from the US. This data was just English content, which means we couldn’t rank for anything in search results.

This week NameDrive has upgraded their system to allow more international based ads to show up in all regions. This means the search engines will start to pick up relative content in the correct language the domain is in. Once this happens we have the potential of achieving my goal of 5 uniques a day even before IE7 is launched.

I know many will wonder why we would want ads to show up worldwide. When you think of it not as an English speaker, English is showed worldwide, why shouldn’t a Japanese domain always show Japanese ads? Why shouldn’t a Chinese domain always show Chinese ads? I personally want conversions, on my parked sites. Chinese are all over the globe & not just in Asia. A better conversion rate can be achieved by a Chinese person going to a Chinese domain with related ads in Chinese. This can be in Beijing, San Francisco, Boston, Paris, anywhere.

So since parked pages can finally show related targetted text finally we are moving in the right direction to monetize IDN Domains. Most members with optimized portfolios are already showing growth, with this new change I think by the end of November there will be more members with portfolios making X,XXX a month.

Just remember the guys who hooked you up…

If you have IDN Domains you can Also park them at NameDrive.