IDN Domains - Are Multilingual Domain Names Worth it?

A few years back the answer was clearly NO. Some webmasters today still agree that they are a waste of time. But times may be changing.

Multilingual domains, or "Internationalized Domain Names" - are ones that use accent marks & other multilingual characters like ñ, í, é, etc. These domains are unreadable by the majority of browsers being used today, although you can enable these characters by downloading a plug in from Verisign, called the iNav Plug.

Verisign appears to be getting aggressive about pushing the IDNs into the mainstream, most likely because it will represent a large source of revenue once it catches on, and these domains "in your language" become widely used.

Germany is way ahead of the pack on this one - I'm not sure if German users already have a multilingual URL reading browser, or if they are downloading plugins, but domains with funky characters in them are selling right and left in this market. And while most registrars only support Spanish or French characters in the .com, .net, and way underused .bz endings...Several big registars are now offering German language IDN names in a wider variety of endings, such as the .info one.

This is a good sign! But if you buy a Spanish language URL, like Quépasa.com, which I just bought - your URL doesn't have a heck of a lot of value this very minute. My hope is that this waiting game could prove to be very profitable, as Spanish language internet users are growing around 25% faster than English ones.

My guess is that the company that could push IDNs into the mainstream faster than anyone is Microsoft. If a future version of IE (Internet Explorer, the web browser) had an iNav like plugin already in place - and hence the ability to read multilingual characters in the URL with no additional effort on the part of the user - the values of well positioned multilingual domain names would skyrocket. Perhaps a deal between Verisign & Microsoft is on the horizon...