Quick follow-up on my post about IDNs from few days ago:
In the post I wrote that IDNs have not performed all-too well traffic-wise, in my experience. However, I asked a fellow German domainer, Nico Zeifang, who owns some high-value IDNs, for his opinion on this topic. He was so kind to share his experiences and some traffic numbers in the post’s comments area. Here is what he said:
Hello Everybody,
Dominik asked me whether I could comment on the traffic issues for German IDN’s as I was responsible for the purchase of two of the more well-publicized (through dnjournal) purchases of German Keyword IDN Domain names. Let me comment on Ernährung.de first which I bought more than a year ago. Ernährung is the proper German spelling for nutrition and I excpect (although it is hard to say) to get about the same amount as the non-IDN version (although the IDN version is gaining ground and the non-IDN version should be loosing ground as people get more used to being able to use the natural spelling – which is IDN – in their Domain names). Traffic numbers (Unique visitors) by month since the purchase were:
October 2006 351
November 2006 404
December 2006 349
January 2007 729
February 2007 587
March 2007 727
April 2007 569
May 2007 776
June 2007 753
July 2007 606
August 2007 574
September 2007 742
October 2007 870
November 2007 694
December 2007 467
January 2008 901So as you can see, traffic is clearly on the rise. Overall, I am very very happy with this investment. I have received considerably higher offers on this name already and would put it in the Euro xxx xxx value range at the moment.
The other purchase published in DnJournal.com was Bücher.com (German for Books). This is a more tricky one to comment on as it has not been constantly parked but rather used with different affiliate programs as well as leased out on a flat fee in the past. The name is getting about 300 – 500 unique visitors a month. It is another investment I am very happy with.
To conclude this: In languages, where the IDN spelling is the natural spelling and the IDN characters are readily accessible on the keyboard (as is the case in Germany) I would prefer to own the IDN version over the non IDN version any time.
Hope this helps Dominik, keep up the great blog!
Nico
Related posts:
I am wondering if this traffic increase is not simply due to the fact the domain get indexed by search engines.
Otherwise I do not see anything logical to explain why the type in traffic should have doubled in just one year like if people behavior was different today than a year ago or the german internet population doubled.
Now my doubts don’t change anything to the fact it appears some IDN domains are getting a strong type in traffic.
Nico, thanks a lot to have shared your experience.
Francois…
A difference in traffic would account to browser compatibility. Once IE6 is no longer the browser God, type-in should increase significantly for IDNs–especially after there is awareness.
Always good to hear of success in the IDN space. In time, I suspect people will begin to split IDN’s into two groups: Latin-script and non-Latin-Script.
German is a language which has only a few characters on the keyboard that are different in comparison to say, Chinese, which has a keyboard full of different letters. From what I can tell so far, the latin-script languages are growing faster than the others, although German could actually be skewing the results due to the quick implementation of IDN’s into their society there.
Just to give you an idea that there is traffic (and this is type-in) to IDN’s, here’s a list of the amount of traffic I got to my most popular IDN in various languages last month:
French (Canadian) 6415
French 3059
Turkish 2450
Hungarian 1360
Spanish 998
Russian 877
Persian 715
Russian (2 letter) 658
German (Austrian) 519
German 499
Russian (3 letter) 492
Japanese 480
Arabic 348
Polish 294
No way to compare each one because the domains are of varying qualities, but the traffic IS THERE, as you can see.
Hey Drew,
if you are considering selling your german traffic IDNs, contact me at contact ///at//// zeifang.com and I will make you a nice offer if I like the names. Always looking to buy traffic IDNs in a language I speak.
Thanks a lot
Nico