Monetize what?
Parking your IDNs may be hazardous to your bottom line.
The truth is that most long term IDN investors are barely making yearly renewal fees on their parked IDNs. The reason being [besides the really low, no-good-next-to-nothing ppc payouts], IDNs in reality don’t receive much type-in traffic if any at all.
Pretty bold statement [hey, that's why I put it in bold] that needs some further ’splaining.
- Cyrillic traffic. Pretty much most everyone agrees that this traffic is due to the ‘Opera effect‘. Surfer types keyword in browser bar, hits enter, hence the traffic to your domain. And, we do know that Opera enjoys a serious market share in Russia, Ukraine and many of the ex-Soviet Republics. I’ll further venture to say that my personal belief is that most of this traffic is likely accidental or attributed to the ‘IDN branding effect’ [see below for explanation]
- Latin-character IDN traffic is most likely due to the following two factors. First, ease of use, since the user is not required to change language in order to append the ‘com’ or ‘net’ at the end of his keyword and, second, regional awareness of idn domains and/or more internet-savvy surfers. A good example here would be German or Swedish traffic.
- The ‘IDN Branding Effect‘ is something that is mostly prevalent in Japan and Russia/Ukraine, which is simply an ascii site branding their venture in local script, even if they don’t own the IDN in question. Obviously, the local user recalls and identifies with his native script and uses it in order to return to the site in question, which in turn produces the traffic spill-over to the IDN.
Most of the rest of the trickle traffic parked IDNs enjoy is from search engine indexing.
Most of the informal traffic info disclosed by some IDN domain holders, as well as my own findings, proves all the above, as the majority of our traffic comes from Cyrillic domains.
So, many an IDN investor have been waiting for the demise of IE6 [still waiting on Korea], IE7 reaching critical point – now it’s IE8, Firefox white-listing IDNs, ICANN to approve iCCTLDs [well that's finally here and now the waiting has shifted to the approval of the iGTLDs], but the bottom line is this; the ‘traffic tsunami’ which some claimed would happen a couple of years back, hasn’t happened and it ain’t gonna happen any time soon. Sure, traffic has been slowly inching upwards, which is perfectly normal, and will continue to do so with the occasional traffic surge when new news on idn comes out either globally or regionally.
Time to focus on reality.
IDN cctlds are officially here, and that’s a great milestone reached along with the idn gtlds which should be receiving approval really soon. Great exposure for IDNs which should bring in some new investor blood, but what about the multitudes of your domains sitting there collecting parking dust, while renewals are eating up your cash?
Well, besides selling off a few -if you can- for lunch money and a much needed portfolio thinning, your next alternative is…
I’ll leave that for part 2,coming in a couple of days.
