The new record IDN sale is Gartenmöbel.de (”garden furniture” in German) for a fairly staggering €150,000 ($214,500).

So the question on every IDN investors lips should be “why are IDN sales so strong in Germany but not in my market(s)?” Here’s my take:

1. IDNs are a great fit for the German language.
2. The German online advertising market is very strong.
3. The German population is very technical and well-educated, so will have good knowledge of IDNs, use IDN-compatible web browsers etc.
4. IDNs have been available for a while (and popular) in the local ccTLD namespace.

So if you have invested in a similar market, 2010 should be your year. If you can only tick one of two of the boxes, prepare to keep waiting for a while before the big sales happen…..

DNJournal.com reported this week that Büromöbel.de (”office furniture” in German), sold for a whopping €69,000 ($100,749) at Sedo.

There have been other larger, probably much larger, private IDN sales, but this is the highest public sale to date. Look for larger public sales soon, especially for German IDNs which are really blazing the IDN trail at the moment.

ICANN has kept a pretty tight hold on single-letter ASCII domains. Only a few are not currently reserved by ICANN, (x.com for example is in use today), and I believe ICANN has a plan to auction them off soon, a process that I’m sure will generate huge excitement and many millions of dollars for the ICANN coffers.

But the same is not true for single-letter (and other single-character) IDN domains. They are all “out there” today, available to be registered, and bought and sold on the resale market.

Historical Note: I believe IDN single-letter domains were allowed to be registered because when they are encoded as ASCII domains, in punycode “xn--” format, they are actually a minimum of five characters in length, not just one character as with normal ASCII single-letter domains. So really it was an oversight – nobody thought to ask the question “should these domains be reserved by the registry”, and now of course it is too late to ask such policy questions….

Since single-character IDN domains are likely to be highly sought after in the near future, I will dedicate a number of posts to looking at them in detail. For example, just how many are there, which scripts and languages they come from, are they all registered, and how will any changes to the IDNA protocol affect them?