The following is a guest post written by Morgan Linton. Morgan is the President of Linton Investments, a Los Angeles-based Domain Investment Firm. Morgan runs a ccTLD Brokerage Newsletter and is the publisher of ccTLD Investors magazine. Morgan writes about his adventures in Domain Investing on his blog – MorganLinton.com.
Let’s face it – IDNs will slowly change how people use the Internet all over the world. As more people from countries like India, China, and Brazil come online – it is no surprise that we’ll see a rather dramatic increase in people searching for things in their local language. While people certainly do search in their local language already – with tens of millions of new Internet users around the world there will be changes in how people use the Internet and search for information.
With IDNs it is possible to buy exact-match domains matching very high-volume search strings without spending the kind of money .com, .net, and .org investors do on generic keyword domains.
Just think – if you grew-up in China, speak Chinese, and are just starting to use the Internet for the first time what language will you be using – Chinese! Which means that a Chinese IDN.cn domain might be a better fit for more and more Internet users over time as they will naturally be more comfortable with a domain or website that is in their own language and the domain name itself is a great indicator of what language the website will be in.
So how will IDNs change the ccTLD Market? I think IDNs will grow the market dramatically as it creates two different way to invest in a particular domain space. Suppose I want to invest in Japanese domains – as an investor it would be smart for me to buy my keywords in both English and Japanese to capture both ends of the search market. As IDNs become more commonplace I think we’ll see more people investing in the space and thus more liquidity with IDN domains.
Since many of these IDNs will have type-in traffic right-away this also allows new investors to hand-register domains that already has a base of traffic to monetize. It’s a bit reminiscent of what early .com investors experienced – registering a domain and finding that the traffic was already there.
The ccTLD market is in its infancy and IDNs represent a new opportunity in the space and a place on the ground-floor for new domain investors looking to get involved in the Global Domain Market. So now it’s time to ask yourself – are you a Global Domain Investor? If not…now is a great time to get started!