.ie Domain Profile Report 2023

Covid period domain registrations – where are they now? It's generally accepted that domains are a forward economic indicator of digital intentions. Most often, a domain is registered first, then the holder may decide to activate the domain with a website or e-mail. Some are intended for a short term purpose - for a specific project, or a marketing campaign. Less frequently, a domain is registered for speculative purposes, for portfolio building, or to protect intellectual property, or perhaps to block a competitor from using a similar name or indeed just to hold a family name for posterity. At .ie we wanted to understand more about domains which were newly registered during the ‘Covid period’ which brought government-imposed travel restrictions, and work from home obligations. The extent of digital transformation during the period is well documented and we could observe in real time that many domain holders realised that to be found during Covid they needed to be online. The starting point for many was to use websites and email for communicating with customers - and many more hoped to enable e-commerce functionality on their new websites. For SMEs their first step was to register their preferred domain name as a digital identity for their business. We were curious to see how many succeeded with their initial digital intentions, and in particular for those Covid period domains- „ What is their status? Are they still in the database? Are they being used? „ If still registered, did they get a website,? Did the website have some published content? „ Was the original digital intention still alive, specifically was it labelled ‘coming soon/under construction’? „ Were they registered by new or existing customers? Does it make a difference to the domain churn (‘stickiness’) if the new registrant already owned other .ie domains? .ie Domain Profile Report 2023 | X Key:- Web usage categories for .ie domains: - High Content: is defined as a website with meaningful custom content. - Unknown: no web page was fetched, due to a variety of reasons. - Parked: domain has an active website with a holding page indicating the domain is registered, available to sell, etc - Not used: the page obtained represents a default web page for a specific type of software. - Upcoming: site under construction / default page. - Blocked: the page fetched indicates this is a suspended account. Covid period domains: Domains created between 31 March 2020 and 31 December 2021 web_usage x High Content 24,390 Unknown 15,718 Parked 12,184 Not used 4,298 Upcoming 722 Blocked 184 mail server x mail server presence 19,304 (Blank) 5,086 current_status x Active 57,496 Deleted 57,033 Suspended 1,130 Pending deletion 153 Domain count 115,812 Current status The number of domains created during this 21-month period was 115,812. Figure 1 below is the distribution of the 115,812 Covid domains based on their current status in Q4 2023. „ Active – 57,496 domains, which is 49.65 % of the total created in the Covid period „ Deleted – 57,033 domains (49.25 %) „ Suspended domains – 1,130 domains (0.98%) „ Pending delete – 153 domains (0.13%) Out of 57,033 domains deleted, it appears that the good intentions at the time of registration never came to fruition. At the time of deletion we observed that only 6% had mail server capability present (even that may have been part of a bundled set of services when purchased initially). Figure 1 - Covid period domain report .ie Domain Profile Report 2023 | 5