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PIR chief: registries should stop stressing about volume

Kevin Murphy, September 11, 2018, Domain Registries

Public Interest Registry has announced some sweeping changes to how it markets .org and its other TLDs, with interim CEO Jay Daley telling DI that there’s too much focus on volumes in the industry today.
PIR is scrapping is volume discount programs after the current batch of incentives expires at the end of the year.
These are the programs that offer rebates to registrars if they hit certain performance targets, all based around newly created domains.
“They particularly favor large registrars, and we don’t think that’s appropriate going forward,” Daley told DI yesterday.
He said that when PIR removed some developed markets from its geographically-targeted discount programs, it saw creates go down but revenue improve.
He suggested that some registries have too much focus on volumes as a benchmark of success, failing to take account of important factors such as renews and abuse rates.
Part of the problem is that success is often measured (by folk including yours truly) by domains under management, rather than TLD health or revenue-per-domain.
“How many people are simply trying to get their numbers up without worrying about the underlying revenue, or taking a very low underlying revenue in order to get their numbers up?” Daley said.
“We’re not in any way somebody who is trying to get our numbers up at all costs, certainly not,” he said.
Another marketing program getting a makeover is pay-per-placement, where PIR would pay for prominent positions in the TLD drop-down menu of registrars storefronts.
These relationships have been based purely on new creates, Daley said, with appropriate “clawback” provisions when registrations turn out to be predominantly abusive.
In future, PIR intends to take a “longer-term, hygiene oriented view” of how its marketing money is used, making better use of data, he said.
“We need to be looking more at the quality of the registrations we get, the level of technical abuse generated by those registrations, looking at the renewal rates that come from those registrations,” he said.
PIR has a new four-strong channel services team that will be leading these changes.
“We are a public interest organization and need to take a public interest view on everything we do,” Daley said. “We need to be looking at our promotions for more than just commercial reasons, we need to be looking at public interest reasons as well.”
Daley, who ran New Zealand’s .nz registry from 2009 until this January, said that the big changes he is overseeing do not reflect an attempt to put his stamp on PIR and take over the CEO office on a permanent basis.
He does not want to run a registry and does not want to relocate to PIR’s headquarters in Virginia, he said.
“I’ve been a registry CEO for nine years,” he said. “I’ve done this and it’s time for me to look at other things.”
He also sits on PIR’s board of directors.