Following on our recent announcement of our partnership and investment in IDNoptions, we ask the question, are you a proven or budding entrepreneur? Are you thinking about capturing the market of nearly 1.4 billion people in China? Through the Domain Strategies/IDNoptions partnership, we now have one of the largest portfolios of IDNs to develop. According to the March 14, 2008 Wall Street Journal article, “China reportedly has eclipsed the US with the largest internet-connected population”. Now is the time to build your business.

In October, 2006 the world opened up for our industry. As Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), it finally enabled the non-English speaking/writing world to search the internet in its own language on its own terms. A year later ICAAN, the worldwide nonprofit organization that regulates the Internet’s domain name system, launched its campaign to provide internationalized country code top-level domains (those that don’t use Latin Characters) according to CNet News.com. Why is this important for the Domain industry? It opens up quite literally a world of possibility that renews what could be considered a maturing industry.

Since IDNs are a new to the industry, even the old measurements do not apply. One can not track pay per click advertising or traffic yet (think the US circa 1997), but it’s coming if there is good content on the other end of the domain.

In Germany, six different entities own the domain for Munich. How is this possible? One owns the ASCII Munich.com, one owns Munich.de, one owns the Munchen without the umlaut with a .com, one owns the Munchen without an umlaut with a .de, one owns the IDN Munchen.de with the umlaut and finally the IDN Munchen.com with the umlaut. Who will win out? The IDNs with the best content on the other end because Germans will search in their own language for their city on their terms and whoever provides the best content on the other side of the domain will gain the traffic.