Seeking Next Treasured .com Name Overseas

NEW YORK, New York, January 11, 2010 /PRNewswire/ — Domain name investors, having exhausted most of the possibilities in the U.S. are now heading overseas to stake their claims to as-yet unused domain categories. And language is not a barrier. With the Internet a truly global tool, not only are domain names in Japanese characters (i.e. [Japanese].com) now available to register, but according to a recent statement by Chuck Gomes at Verisign, soon owners of foreign .com names will be able to unlock an extension instead of dot com that is in a corresponding foreign script, such as www.[Japanese]dot[Japanese].

A foreign language domain name is known as an IDN, which stands for “Internationalized Domain Name.” Domain name investors who have struck it rich from buying and flipping domain names years ago in the .com gold rush are now buying thousands of IDNs in languages such as Chinese, Russian and Japanese. While English domain names such as business.com (sold for $360 million) and vodka.com (sold for $3 million) have brought very high returns on investment, investors see a similar future for the developing IDN domain market, which has not yet peaked.

Aaron Krawitz and Gary Males, founders of IDNTools.com have built careers by catering to such IDN investors. Their company’s most popular service is an IDN droplist http://www.idndroplist.com , which lists all previously owned domains that are expiring and becoming available that day. The logic for subscribing to such a droplist is that formerly owned domains were once bought because they hold value, and therefore, it is helpful for an investor to know which previously purchased IDNs are becoming available.

“Droplist subscribers have been able to purchase premium IDNs for pennies on the dollar,” Males said, “as dropped names have included premium terms such as ‘work’, ‘shopping’, ‘medicine’ and ‘real estate.'”

Krawitz stated, “I have always wished I could have been there in the 1990s to buy up .com’s while they were undervalued and I believe that an equivalent opportunity exists today for IDNs.” With the Internet expanding into foreign markets rapidly, and for all those who believe that the Internet will continue to broaden its reach — IDN investing is attracting a much wider market than previously.