[ga] Research: Alternative Perspectives on Registrar Market Shares

["Ben Edelman" <edelman@law.harvard.edu>]

So many people -- including quite a few GA members -- had (such helpful!)
comments on my initial Fortune 1000 work that I've extended the work
significantly.

The revised document is posted at:
  <http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/registrar-choice/>.


A summary of the improvements:

* I've extended the listing from the biggest American firms (the Fortune
1000) to the biggest international firms, as reported in the Forbes
International 500.  The results are consistent with intuition -- that non-US
registrars have somewhat larger market share in this international group,
and that Verisign's share is somewhat smaller.

* I've returned to the core question that I believe is of greatest interest
here: Which registrars have the largest market shares?  Prior answers to
this question have weighted all domains equally and have simply divided each
registrar's registration count by the total number of registered domains;
see, for example, the continued work of State of the Domain.  This is a
sensible way to begin, but since we ask about current registrar market share
in order to, in general, assess likely future market share, another
important factor to consider is likelihood of domain renewal.  With that in
mind, I've investigated a class of domains particularly likely to be
renewed -- all domains with at least one listing in Yahoo -- and have found
that, even for new additions to Yahoo, Verisign's market share remains
somewhat larger than suggested by a simple quotient of registration counts.

* I've added further charts and tables for those who are interested, and
I've further fleshed out the discussion and implications.

I look forward to further comments from GA members, and I hope to further
improve my work according to your suggestions.


Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/edelman




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ben Edelman [mailto:edelman@law.harvard.edu]
> Sent: Thursday, May 23, 2002 5:48 PM
> To: ga@dnso.org
> Subject: Research: Which domains do the Fortune 1000 use?
>
>
> From time to time, discussion on this list has turned to
> questions of registrar choice (whether for personal or
> organizational registrations) and of register financial viability
> going forwards.
>
> One data source that can be brought to bear on both these
> questions is a listing of registrars used by large corporations
> such as those on the Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 lists.
> ...

--
This message was passed to you via the ga-full@dnso.org list.
Send mail to majordomo@dnso.org to unsubscribe
("unsubscribe ga-full" in the body of the message).
Archives at http://www.dnso.org/archives.html