Irish web registry's profits fall 15% after price cut
the iedr will publish it's 2006 annual report today but i got a sneak peak of it yesterday for this piece in today's paper. the online community has always loved bashing this organisation in the past but to me it seems to have firmly got its act together. the fact that they slashed prices but revenue fell only 2 per cent suggests lots of organisations are now grabbing .ie domains as quickly as the alternatives.
those statements will probably bring a storm of comments from the usual suspects but would be interested to hear people's take on this.
Despite making wholesale price cuts of 26 per cent, IE Domain Registry, the company which operates the .ie address space on the internet, saw only a 15 per cent drop in profits to €734,058 for 2006.
In its annual report published today, the registry said that net growth in registration of new domains was 30 per cent, with 22,590 new .ie addresses registered during the year. Revenue from registrations fell only 2 per cent to €2,309,332.
Strong growth has continued into 2007, with 7,213 addresses registered in the first quarter - the most the registry has ever dealt with in a single quarter.
The domain registry cut prices a further 13 per cent in January.
In the report, chief executive David Curtin cautions that there is a small correlation between domain costs and numbers of new registrations as the cost of the domain is small relative to the other costs involved in establishing a website.
Mr Curtin said that it had been a "great year" for the registry and a number of other factors had driven growth.
These include enhancements to its own systems which improved the automated service which was offered to its resellers, the general buoyancy of the economy and wider broadband availability, which meant that more small businesses were starting to trade online.
Approximately 98 per cent of .ie web addresses are sold through the registry's network of resellers.
Due to the improvements in automation, Mr Curtin said that most new registrations are now turned around in a couple of hours.
By the end of 2006, members' funds had doubled on the previous year to €1.54 million. The company's tax bill fell significantly from €116,944 in 2005 to €87,728 in 2006, largely due to capital allowances as a result of its investments in infrastructure.
Earlier this year, US security software company McAfee identified .ie as the second safest top-level internet domain in the world.
Mr Curtin said that this was because all applications are authenticated to ensure the identity of the company or individual is established.
In a joint venture with Austrian registry IPA, the IE Domain Registry has won a five-year contract to operate Ireland's national Enum registry.
This system will enable people to be contacted through a variety of electronic media, provided the caller has their registered landline number.
Enum will launch in Ireland on Thursday and Mr Curtin said that he expected it to be a "slow burner", until the convergence of telecommunications and internet services became more common.
The results are pretty uninspiring. A monopoly owner of a critical resource should be doing better I think. Speaking as a non techie who has had to deal with them I feel that they have not done a good job communicating what it is they are trying to do - is .ie a "safe" domain which keeps out riff raff, or are they a free for all domain? They're in this strange middle place where it seems that voodoo and being "in the know" will get you any .ie domain you want, but you have to know the right questions to ask and you need to know the secret combination.
Posted by: Keith | May 30, 2007 at 09:21 PM
Why should those comments bring a storm of comments from the usual suspects? Curtin's administration of IEDR has been good for the industry. The automation of registry operations has worked well for most hosters.
I don't think that webhosting.info's statistics are reliable enough to base any projections on. And the mention of .eu ccTLD in the report failed to highlight a very important fact - .eu ccTLD has been an irrelevance for Irish registrants and most hosters with the exception of IEinternet/Euinternet. This is based on mapping the distribution of approximately 2.134M .eu domains and tracking registration patterns since the landrush. While EURid claims that there are over 26.8K Irish owned .eu domains, only 5.5K or so have been identified on Irish hosters. Part of this may be due to the fact that Irish front companies have been used by non-EU players such as Marchex to take advantage of the .eu landrush. If anything, the incompetence of EURid in handling the abuse of trademarks, cybersquatting and warehousing has forced businesses in the EU to prioritise their local ccTLD. The .ie ccTLD has become, as a direct result, more important for local businesses.
IEDR still has a large percentage of historical domain registrations that were registered directly through the registry rather than through resellers. This still irritates some in the domain names industry. However the shift away from direct registration has worked well for the Irish domain names industry and some hosters are now selling near to cost.
The lack of domain industry expertise on the board of IEDR has been a problem in the past. None of them are recognised experts in the domain name industry. However that is largely irrelevant now. There is a very important point that you may have missed: IEDR is not ultimately responsible for .ie ccTLD policy due to the change in legislation. Indeed IEDR is on a very short leash with the real power now being vested in ComReg.
Compared to five years ago, the .ie ccTLD is in a far healthier state. The ISP share of the Irish domain industry has collapsed and ISPs (Eircom,Esat,etc) only account for about 17.27% of the market as of 01/Jun/2007. The large second generation hosters (each with more than 1000 domains hosted) like Hosting365.ie, Blacknight.ie and Novara.ie account for approximately 64.5% of the market. That is quite a shift and the second generation hosters are all highly automated. The only major player in the ISP sector now is Digiweb.ie - the rest of the ISPs are on borrowed time as their historical marketshares slowly ebb. Eircom has almost flatlined and Esat has been continually bleeding domains and clients for the last few years. Both Eircom and Esat were market leaders five years ago - now they can't even compete with the second generation hosters. Eircom had a net change of +17 biz/info/org/net/ie/com domains as of between 01/May and 01/June. Blacknight by comparison had a net change of +564 domains over the same period
The .ie ccTLD will probably go over 80K registrations later this month. While some problems remain (mainly some cybersquatting and cyberwarehousing issues) nobody in the industry would want to return to the bad old days.
Posted by: John McCormac | June 06, 2007 at 12:39 AM