IDN Talk

Last night I regged one of the best domains I could possibly want for the Japanese market. The English translation is not appealing as what the domain means for young Japanese guys.

One of my first batches of domain registrations landed me グラビアアイドル.com

Gravia Idols is the term for the buxom bikini clad models plastered everywhere in Japan. They never pose nude but it’s easy to imagine.

Anyway on Yahoo alone this term グラビアアイドル is searched for over 1,000,000 times a month. The industry for these girls might even make more money than adult because of TV endorsements DVDs etc. Fans are everywhere.

Well I thought I was lucky enough to own the dot com. Last year I got the term ダイヤモンド.jp (Diamond) as a drop. I thought after that I couldn’t get any better quality.

Last week I was talking to my roommate who owns a small Advertising agency & told him about the domain market. I told him about Gravia Idol.com & he informed me it would be better if I had the jp because this is what he’s seeing recently around the web.

Something told me to check it out & by pure luck it was about to expire. What’s the actual odds of owning a premium keyword in any competitive market & getting the same keyword in an equal or better extension.

Yep that’s right. I couldn’t believe it myself.

I own グラビアアイドル.com & グラビアアイドル.jp
The dot jp has nothing on it but I am seriously thinking of how to develop this baby or sell it off to one of the companies that manages these girls. My roommate & the company I work for both have clients that are the management companies of a few of the biggest Gravia Idols in Japan…

The Overture for last month was
1163191 グラビアアイドル

Since I bought the domain the OVT has been in the millions. This is truly one of the most searched terms in Japan… Sometimes I see domains with extremely high OVT & don’t exactly see why the domain is worthwhile. This one is no mistake.
I won’t say I can’t get better. I just don’t think I can get better paying reg fee prices.

So these babies are my biggest pair (pun intended)

I decided to revamp DNFocus.com
The new version of dnfocus.com is a domain name site related search engine. All the results come from Google, I’m not crawling the sites but actually using what’s already indexed to produce search results.

So far it’s using
IDN Forums
DN Forum
DN Journal
DN Local
Acorn Domains
Eachnic
Name Pros
& Domain State

I’ll be adding more sites & blogs as I run across them. I made it simple so that it can be used in any language.

www.dnfocus.com 

& truthfully with DNForum, DNJournal, & DNLocal running it’s pretty hard for me too to not make a mistake typing in my URL.

So far in Japan one of the best run affiliate programs is operated by Value Commerce . They literally have hundreds of thousands of affiliate products. When I signed up just less than a month ago I actually loved the system since it was bilingual, English & Japanese. The only problem I had was the affiliate URLs. You have to make what is called an “Ad Flight”, this is code that contains ads for a particular theme, or category.

For example I have a few Career related IDN sites.

I can create an Ad Flight called “Career standard banners”. I can set it to contain only 468×60 image ads with the career related affiliate programs I choose. It works like a built in Banner rotation tool.

The amount of margins I’ve seen can range from $5 to $200. It depends on the niche. You can also use the amounts as a guide to see what markets are spending money online. I haven’t put up too many links yet but I think the system is great.

The big problem that people are having is you need a Japan based bank account. I spoke to a Value Commerce employee the other day & they are fully aware of that. The can not offer it right now but people within the company do want to get a solution.

So if you want to know in Japan

アフィリエイト is Value Commerce

In 2005 many of investors in the search of a place to research, buy, & sell IDN Domains left DNForums.com. In 2006 I think it was a big surprise to all of us when DNF made sections catering to IDN investors. At the time Adam Dicker was still actively the global admin for the site.

Not only did Adam create IDN sections but I believe he was the first speaker to speak about the potential of IDN Domains at TRAFFIC. I still haven’t seen more than 2 of his registrations but hear he has a large collection in various languages. The rumor is Adam aka DCG (Dot Com God) has about 5,000 of these babies closed away.

Adam was also scooped up to work in domain acquisitions for iReit to provide a way for domainers to sell portfolios. It seems like he has a good vision for IDNs & I’m wondering how DNF will change with the recent interest in global investing.

There are a lot of changes in the industry as a whole, search engines, type in traffic, browser support, PPC, parking affiliates, but DNF has been stable as the biggest business resource for domainers. You can access the IDN sales section at DNF here