IDN names--still worthless?

20 years later

[bill]

Internationalized Domain Names were first introduced in 2000 under .com and .net. Today there are hundreds of domain extensions that offer IDN keywords, and there are even a few IDN ccTLDs. Although the concept of local language domains seemed like a great idea initially, actual usage never appeared to take off.

I was wondering about the current state of IDNs. I haven't seen much discussion about IDN domains recently. A quick search on WebmasterWorld finds IDN names--worthless? [webmasterworld.com] from 2007. (TL;DR not favorable) Are they still considered worthless/useless?

Last I heard the biggest uptake of IDN was China, followed by Russia, but uptake really drops off for other countries. Is anyone actually using IDNs? I have a bunch, but I have never actually used one for a website or mail system, They're all just forwarding to other websites that use ASCII domains.

[Sissi]

IDN were a big hope for a lot of speculators.
Yes you could make some cash with.
That s over unfortunately ( I kept some ‚golden‘ one for sentimental reasons only).

Even ASCII domains are not what they use to be.

[bill]

I checked out some forums where the speculators congregate and it doesn't seem like there's a lot of activity. Some people are talking of letting their domains expire as they can't sell them.

Are there any reports on actual IDN use? I'm sure a majority of IDN are just parked with a For Sale sign on them. I'd be interested to know rough numbers of sites actually using these domains. I can't recall the last time I saw an IDN in SERPS, and I do search in Japanese and Chinese from time to time, but the industry I'm searching may not be the best for IDNs.

[creeking]

I checked out some forums where the speculators congregate

would that be in that darkweb or deepweb or whatever?

j/k

:)

[bill]

Ha! That might the only place where they really use IDN domains... ;)
However, I wasn't really interested in that sort of use...

[engine]

Unless you actually use the IDN in your own language/region, there is no point.
I can't remember that last time I had one of those, and lost interest when it was, to all intents and purposes, useless.

[RedBar]

I had a German client who used one for a few years during the noughties however the spelling caused more problems than it was worth and had to purchase all the ASCII derivations and point them at it, when they saw which one was being used the most they changed them all to that .de

I know I have a couple of Chinese suppliers who bought them and tried to use them however they failed outside of China, they do still have them but only for brand protection.

[bill]

Just came across this:

Will Chinese IDN domains become widely used? [domainnamewire.com]
Consumers may prefer Chinese content on corporate websites but do not necessarily demand the corresponding domains to be in Chinese characters. This is evident in the 2019 Top 100 Chinese Internet Companies Report where none of the leading companies use a Chinese IDN as their corporate domain.

So even in China, where we probably have the largest number of IDN registrations, they really aren't being used and the consumers aren't apparently interested. That says a lot.

[lucy24]

Consider, as always, the human user. (“Consider the say what now?”) Your browser, including the one in your smartphone, displays two things: the page <title> and the URL (probably truncated to hostname alone, at least in the case of mobiles). The <title> can easily be put into any character set you like--and if you use tabs, the <title> is what remains visible. Bookmarks show title, not URL. Links, unless the coder is spectacularly lazy, show linking text in the language and script of your choice.

Which do humans tend to look at, title or hostname?

[Sissi]

One of the issue was also related to some email systems who don‘t absorb IDNs