IEDR Releases More Hyped Statistics

The IEDR has obviously released some form of press release in the last few days to put a spin on its latest figures. Of course the press release isn’t on the registry’s website nor has it been sent to stakeholders yet again, though I was able to get my hands on a copy of it via a 3rd party.

So what are they trying to sell us today?

The IE Domain Registry (IEDR) today reported a 23% jump in the net number of .ie websites registered in Ireland in Q3 compared to the same period last year.
 
The growing number of companies and sole traders moving their business operations online and choosing to do so with a .ie website is one of the main reasons for the rise, in addition to five consecutive years of price reductions by the IEDR, which has made it more affordable for businesses to do so. The cost of registering a .ie domain has fallen by over 60% since 2003.

There are two serious issues with that section of their statement.
The price that the IEDR is referring to is the wholesale price NOT the retail price. The retail price is set by the registrars not the registry and for the registry to make these kind of comments about pricing is inappropriate. Other registry operators would not make comments about their registrars pricing policies, so why should the IEDR?
To claim that the price has fallen is misleading, as the fall in price / cost will only have affected the registrars not the registrants. For the registry to make allusions to pricing in this manner suggests that they are in some way influencing the retail pricing

 
The latest figures from the IEDR, the managed registry for Ireland’s official internet address .ie, show that new registrations were up by almost a fifth with 8,197 .ie websites registered in the period July to September 2008.

If the figures are official why aren’t they published openly on the IEDR’s site?

Why must they insist on referring to themselves as “the managed registry” without ever explaining what they are managing?

Registrations rose by 20.3% representing a substantial increase on figures from the same period last year, when 6,813 .ie website registrations were recorded. The increase also means the total number of .ie websites registered in Ireland now exceeds 110,000, just four months after the 100,000th barrier was broken earlier in May this year.
 
Of the .ie websites registered in Q3 83.3% of those were registered by corporate bodies and sole traders while personal domains blogs and other non-commercial websites, accounted for 2.5% of the registrations, placing Ireland on a par with the level of uptake recorded for other country code top level domains.  

Based on what criteria exactly? Claiming that Ireland is “on a par” with other countries is fine, but can they actually cite any real figures to support that claim?

Only 2.5% of IE domains are used by non-business users according to their statistics, but there is no explanation of why this is the case. There’s no comparison between Ireland and other countries in this regard either.

If you were to compare IE registrations with FR registrations, for example, I somehow doubt that IE would come out looking so well. Unlike Ireland the French registry doesn’t put silly barriers in the way of legitimate registrations.

For the first time this quarter the IEDR has also made multiyear registrations available to resellers for a period of 2 – 10 years, thus enabling .ie resellers to register and secure a .ie domain for several years at a time. The IEDR plans to extend this service by Q1 by offering resellers the option of multiyear renewals.

Wouldn’t publishing data related to this change have been a bit more newsworthy?
The public won’t understand or care what a “reseller” is in this context.
The introduction of multi-year registrations is a positive move, but the lack of multiyear renewals seriously hampers its effectiveness and causes headaches.

Commenting on the 20% rise in .ie registrations, Mr. David Curtin, Chief Executive of IE Domain Registry, said; “This has been another very strong quarter for the IEDR and one we expect to see continue into Q4, when it is predicted that the number of .ie domains registered will exceed the 115,000 mark by year end. Our reseller community, in particular, has been instrumental in driving registrations again this year and as broadband rollout and download speeds continue to improve, we expect to see more companies and SMEs, in particular, availing of .ie as a secure local online environment in which to do business”.

Curtin should get an award of some kind for fluffy meaningless statements.

If the IEDR actually cared about their resellers they would actually communicate with them, but they obviously don’t.

The reseller community drives registrations and basically keeps the IEDR and its staff in jobs, yet the IEDR do not care enough about the registrars / resellers to even bother sharing press releases with them – we have to find out from a 3rd party.

And of course nowhere in the press release is there any mention of Comreg, the extended registry downtime over the past few weeks or any of their inane proposals, such as the policy board that would not have any registrar representation.