Feb 03 2008
Understanding IDN Traffic
Yesterday, Dominik Mueller discussed this topic and released some traffic stats from one of his readers. I have been wanting to discuss this subject for sometime now. I do not not know much about IDNs and was hoping for readers to share some insight on these. I have no doubt in my mind that IDNs receive type-in traffic from consumers, but I do not know how these work in general.
It is crazy to expect the rest of the world relies only on english domains to access the internet. For you IDN Owners, can you please share some insight of IDNs and post some type-in stats to give readers an idea how this niche industry is growing among consumers across the world?
I am the owner of a mid-sized IDN portfolio which spans across 16 languages. I got into the IDN game fairly late (March 2007), but I have still managed to pick up some nice domains through the usual combination of methods that one would use to build an ASCII portfolio.
The IDN industry may be “niche” today in terms of sales and type-in traffic (and especially end-user awareness), but those do currently exist to some degree. The IDN industry is in about the same state today as the ASCII domain industry was in during 1994/1995 - waiting for serious traffic. The thing which kept ASCII domains from achieving serious traffic in 1994/1995 was the lack of an easy way to get on the internet - Microsoft Windows 3.1/3.11 didn’t include a TCP/IP networking stack or Dial-Up Networking wizards. It took an engineer to get on the internet before Win95 was released, which was actually in January 1996. The release of Win95 fueled the explosion of the internet and with it, ASCII domains. IDNs are waiting on critical mass deployment of IDN enabled browsers (in practice this means saturation of IE7) as well as user awareness that they exist and work. Once these two things are in place, the serious traffic will begin to ramp up.
There are lots of arguments and kickback against IDNs by SEO “experts”, webmasters, ASCII domainers, etc. The reasons for these generally stem from fear of losing the status quo to newcomers that own good IDNs. That fear is absolutely warranted. Google displays IDN URLs correctly in SERPs and the temptation to choose IDN SERPs is irresistible to most, as this selection process of familiarity falls well below conscious thinking. IDN URLs are subliminally powerful. It is suspected by some that the reason Google refuses to allow IDN URLs (today) in Adwords campaigns is that an IDN owner would be able to bid far lower than competitors, thus ranking in a lower position on the page, yet still receive the majority of the clicks. This may or may not be the real reason; Google refuses to comment, as usual.
Regarding traffic, I have type-in and parking revenue on many of my IDNs. Some of them are receiving daily type-in traffic (20-30 visits) and revenue. I know people who receive far more than this (hundreds or thousands a day), as they have far better domains than I do. Parking revenue currently subsidizes about 25% of my portfolio, while a handful of minisites covers the rest in addition to turning a profit. The minisites receive a substantial amount of search traffic, and it appears that type-in is currently around 2-4% of total traffic, on average.
Typing in IDN domains is nearly as simple as typing anything else, in many cases just as simple. For example, if a German speaking person wanted to visit the German version of “accessories.de” or “accessories.com”, he/she would simply type “zubehör.de” or “zubehör.com” (note the umlaut over the o character) into the address bar of the browser and hit enter. Assuming the person had an IDN enabled browser (Firefox, Opera, Safari, IE7), the person would land at the IDN website. Things are just slightly more complicated for IDNs which are not in the latin script, as IDNs do not yet have IDN extensions. So today, a user needs to enter IDN.com, IDN.net, etc. The dot com is the easiest, simply type the IDN label into the browser’s address bar and hit control-enter (the browser will append the .com automatically). Note that one does not need an IDN enabled browser to visit an IDN site from a SERP, as the URL is displayed with the native language characters but the link is in punycode (ascii representation of decoded unicode characters).
I hope this gives you some of the answers that you were looking for.
***SMO***
Jackson,
Thank you for taking the time to write this out. I really appreciate it!
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.
***SMO***
Drew,
Thanks for providing this data
Steve, the whole point is that you really won’t need to know how they work. All you really need to understand is that they won’t work until browser support is in place. For the Far East that means waiting at least another week!
Your article gives an interesting analogy and brings back memories. too. I imagine we will see IDN traffic ramping up as browser support and public awareness increase.