.ie Domain Profile Report 2023

Covid period domain registrations – where are they now? [continued] .ie Domain Profile Report 2023 | 6 Current usage We analysed the websites and mail records of the Covid creates that were still registered in Q4 2023. Figure 1 on the previous page shows the web usage and mail server response of the domains. „ Web usage - of 57,496 active domains - Ÿ 41% of the domains have websites with high content Ÿ 27% returns an error like “no DNS found” Ÿ 23% of the domains are in parked or upcoming categories Ÿ around 9% are not using domains for websites or blocked the response „ eMail usage - of 57,496 active domains - Ÿ 63% of the domains have mail server present (being email capability, not necessarily in use). Analysis on the basis of domain activity The next task was to find what has been the activity on the Active Covid domains. We used the activity on the entire .ie domain during one month in Q4 2023. We ranked all domains on popularity from 1 to 330,000. For simplicity, we created five bands of activity: Very High (1), High (2), Medium (3), Low (4) and No Activity (0) per day. The activity indicator in a month is the average of the daily activity during that month. Analysis of our DNS traffic data shows that out of the 57,496 domains - „ 25,509 domains had very high activity which is ranked between 1 and 2 „ 14,731 domains had moderate activity ranked between 2 and 3 „ 17,212 domains had less activity ranked between 3 and 4 „ 44 domains had no activity over last month The activity for these domains was checked based on their web usage and the results were as follows - „ The high content domains average ranking for domain activity is between 1-2.5 which is expected „ There are some domains that blocked the crawler and their domain activity is very high ranked in between 2-2.5 „ Not used and parked domains rank between 3-4 „ There are 15,069 domains with web usage as unknown and ranked 3 which is moderate to low activity „ Surprisingly, 704 domains which are listed under upcoming category have high domain activity as shown in the illustration above. Conclusion and key findings Around 50% of the domains registered during the Covid period have either been deleted or are on the verge of getting deleted. More than 49% of the domains are still active in Q4 2023. It is interesting that 69,005 domains (~60% of the total 115,182) were created by existing .ie domain holders, meaning these returning customers were already digitally engaged, and therefore unlikely to be digital neophytes. By Q4 of 2023, the data shows that out of the original 69,005 domains with an existing domain holder, around 54% of the registrations are still active. This means that around 46% were deleted - which does not prove domain stickiness of domains which are registered by existing domain holders. We can speculate that some of the domains may have been for a special marketing purpose, or perhaps time-based events (for 2021, 2022) and therefore no longer needed. It will be interesting to monitor the longevity of the active 57,496 Covid period domains over the years to come. 3 2 1 Blocked High Content Not used Parked Unknown Upcoming WEB USAGE Figure 2 - Domain activity* and web usage of remaining active domains Activity more to less 2 3 Domain Activity rank * Activity means that the domain is being actively used, for receiving email or by those visiting its website. This activity is determined from our DNS traffic data.