More interesting news from Sedo this week, well interesting if you're backing IDNs as a solid investment for the future anyway.

Théâtre.com (French dictionary spelling of Theatre) sold for 3,000 Euros (just over $3,800) during the week ending 13th April 2009, so a nice return on a domain that is less than 6 years after first registration.

It's also nice to see more and more European and IDNs domains popping up in the weekly sales charts as both domain investors and end users get more used to seeing domain names in languages other than English.

The weeks other main Spanish language and IDN sales were
 

International domain names (IDNs) are starting to work their way into buyer's conciousness, but a recent sale really shows the immense & immediate potential of good generic IDNs.

I hand registered a generic Spanish domain, MáquinaTragamonedas.com (SlotMachine.com) on the 30th December 2008. This was the first time this domain had been registered and cost me the $7.50 reg fee (bulk pricing) through Dynadot.

On the same day of registration I received an offer of $270 through Sedo. I countered and the buyer then upped their offer to $800. One week later the buyer offered $1340 (1000 Euros), so I started a Sedo auction using that offer as a reserve just in case another buyer stepped in. The auction closed on the 14th January for $1340, the original buyer paid and the sale was completed soon after. I think that the domain was worth a lot more in the longer term, but getting a 4 figure offer that soon after registration was too good to turn down with so many domains available in this space.

Why am I sharing this with you? Well, I strongly believe that generic Spanish domains are amongst the most attractive investments domainers can make right now - but unless people share stories like this then the market will remains largely beneath most domainers radar. For those of you that want to see some proof of the sale, the Sedo auction link is here, and the dates and historical whois records showing the dates, myself and the new purchaser are available on services like DomainTools.com.

For the record, another generic Spanish language IDN Mamá.es, just sold on Sedo for $7,500 at the end of March.

Is there actually a tried and tested way to making your fortune domaining?

Although it may sound unrealistic to say it - it is still possible, and there is a method to doing it. Not only that, but it's a method that a handful of very high profile domainers have done in public. They've even shared their secret - but even so, not everyone seems to realise that the essence of what they did can be applied to today's market.

So what did Rick Schwartz, Frank Schilling, the Castello Brothers and the other top domainers have in common?

Elsewhere on this site I talk about the fantastic opportunities in buying international domain names (IDNs), but they're still not without their problems, most of which are legacy issues caused as the internet embraces the new technology - the situation is analogous to what happened as users migrated to broadband connections 6 or 7 years ago - when sites optimised for broadband became largely unusable for dial up users.

As such, I think it's worth reporting on the problems with IDN encoded domains as they are at present - one of the reasons for using Posición.com as the address of this site is to experience at first hand the issues facing both IDN developers and the people who use services on IDN domains - and until the technical problems are sorted out these domains will struggle to be fully embraced by the domaining community in a larger sense.

One of the most measurable effects of the recent domain boom was the establishment of "market prices" for LLL.com domain names.

These names experienced a huge increase in average values, especially at the non premium (ie with difficult letters)...  for example, look at these sales figures from 2004-2005...

2004-11-15 KQF.com $1,600 Afternic.com

2005-02-09 YVQ.com $860 Afternic.com

Tomorrow marks the second birthday of Ricksblog.com, home of the veteran domainer Rick Schwartz, who recently sold Candy.com for a pretty cool $3 million plus ongoing percentage.

For those of you that don't follow Rick, if you're interested in domains and domaining you probably should. This is a guy who started buying domains in 1995, whilst most of the rest of us were wondering what the hell this internet thing was going to be all about (I bought my first domains in Jan 1999, so was a little bit late to the party!).

It might seem that guys like Rick, Frank Schilling and the rest have the whole domain business tied up, but the internet is still evolving, and there are still limitless opportunities out there if you're willing to think outside of the box a little, and not just blindly follow the crowd.