Are the days of the $10 IDN drawing to a close?

[mulligan]

Is it me or has anyone else noticed the price of domains going up in the past few weeks?

The flippers are now not happy with $10 and some of their names are rising clear into the stratosphere. Our venerable friends are possibly seeing inherent, long term value in domains from their own language and are now jacking the price's accordingly.

A good sign I say as it would seem to mean local people are coming round to thinking that domains in their native language might actually be worth something and they are worth way more than reg fee + $3

Are the days of flogging 'rubbish' to the unknowing, uncaring, big spending outsiders coming to an end and native language speakers beginning to regret the gems they have already dropped by the wayside?

Of course it could just be a conspiracy and actually you are all Sahoo in disguise.

[touchring]

This isn't the first time something like this happened immediately after a big sale by a flipper that spread on the native forums. I can recall it happening at least a few times the past one year. The earliest which i still remember was the shanghairealestate.com sale.

$8000 is 60,000RMB, 1 year's worth of wage for a professor in a Chinese university.

[Rubber Duck]

Domains go for substantial sums in China.

IDN has not really caught on amongst the mainstream speculators there in a big way. Once it does it is going to rock the market like a nuclear explosion. On reflection, we were bound to see a few false dawns before that happened. Doesn't mean that the big one is not just around the corner.

We know from the ICANN Board Resolutions that it is about 99% certain that the first production IDN.IDN will go onstream in November, whether policy is finalised or not. Microsoft must know that maintaining browser dominance is the key to their future. With Safari jumping into the Windows browser market, they cannot afford to loose a huge swathe of the Far East Browser market. They haven't got a hope in hell of maintaining market share with IE6, so we can expect the IE7 AU Rollout very soon. If not MS are toast.