I have spoken to many people who genuinely have closed deals of this magnitude over the last 18 months, there is a real sense of an underground market at play here. Many deals simply just don’t go reported, and the names pulling in the big traffic, again are all under wraps.
There are some very ordinary every day people who have collections of IDN’s that make my heart skip a beat, and in talking to them they laugh privately at how this opportunity has been missed by 99.9% of seasoned domainers.

I have come to my own conclusion as to why this is, and I think falls into 2 categories:

1) Back in 2006 the Domain King Rick Schwartz had a public bust up with a couple of IDNers, and ever since then he has totally ignored IDN’s. Rick broke the golden rule, by letting emotion get in the way of business. I have a lot of respect for Rick, he is successful more than anyone I know, but the issue here is that he is a leader, and while he can afford to ignore an opportunity like IDN, those that religiously follow in his footsteps necessarily cannot.

2) I rub shoulders with old-school domainers every day, and it is quite apparent that they have acquired almost priceless skills in buying/selling/mining traditional English domains. And their idea of a new opportunity is simply to jump on the next extensions band wagon, be that mobi, tel or me – or even the next fad be that LLLL, L-L-L or whatever crazy idea surfaces to suck your cash away from your pocket – and why don’t they investigate the IDN space? Because it would be like starting all over, and learning from scratch, because working with IDN’s is very different. I had a recent conversation with a very well known household name domainer the other day about IDN, and although we both knew that I knew 10000% more on the topic, you could just tell that he wasn’t listening, didn’t want to learn – he was asking me questions but telling me answers, maybe after many years of success he didn’t want to settle back into the newbie role and just learn.

Its funny watching the major IDNers, most of them smile in public and laugh their ass off in private, as they know all this above, and are they worried that the big wallets of old-school domainers haven’t come their way to buy their IDN’s? not at all, in fact they see it all as a perfect storm – after all, if it hadn’t played out like this, anything of any value would have been scooped up by the old guard long ago with their scripts and endless resources; instead it was left to a bunch of new faces to sit their registering one at a time for the last 3 years.

I think the traditional domain world as we know it are in for a shock fairly soon. The day of the IDNer is coming.