My name is Lee Hodgson, and I am perhaps best known for publishing the Domain Goldrush series of articles between 2001 and 2003 under the name Domain Guru.

Since then I have focused on what I believe is the most exciting thing to have happened to domain names – the whole Internet perhaps – in the last 20 years – the introduction of domain names in languages other than English – Internationalized Domain Names, or IDNs.

IDN Domains – Finally the Web is Going Local

As someone reading this in English, you might say, what’s the fuss, everyone uses English domains right? Yes, they do, but out of necessity not choice. 80% of the world’s population doesn’t speak English as their first language. Why should these people be forced to used domain names in a foreign language?

The good news is the wait is finally over. IDN.com domain names are here now, and will be converted to “full” IDN.IDN domain names in 2010. So people all around the globe will finally be able to use the web just in their local language, just as nature intended

What Is The Opportunity?

There are huge opportunities in the IDN space for those with the vision to act, whether it be in IDN domain acquisition, IDN site development, or ultimately both.

Think about it – with ASCII there is just one games.com domain in the world to acquire and develop. But with IDN, there is one “games”.com for each language that can be represented with IDN domains! And each one is a popular local language search term. So for the first time domains can be leveraged to optimize search engine performance for non-English search terms. And guess what, most of the searches done around the world are not in English…

And there’s more!

Each IDN domain is automatically a GEO domain as well.

“What”? I hear you say. As an example, for the “games”.com site we developed in Thai, not only did 99.5% of visitors come from within Thailand, but around 70% were typically in Bangkok alone. That’s an amazing advantage compared with ASCII sites where visitors are spread (often globally) and hence very hard to monetize effectively. Such laser-targeted GEO traffic enables local advertising solutions hence significantly enhanced revenues.

As both an IDN domainer since 2001 and IDN site developer since 2006 (I have developed what is probably the most trafficked IDN website on the planet to date – case study here ) I am in an almost unique position to have a 360° view of the IDN world. So please contact me and let me know your IDN needs. I’m sure we can talk the same language.

Lee Hodgson