Continued growth in Irish websites

The managed registry for Ireland’s official web address .ie (the IEDR), has reported that the total number of .ie domains grew by 12.9% net in 2010 to 153,419 at 31st December. New registrations for the final quarter of 2010 were marginally up by 0.7% on the same period in the previous year to 8,593 bringing total new .ie registrations for the year to 36,587, making it the strongest performing Q4 in the IEDR’s ten year history.
While total 2010 registrations are down slightly on 2009 by 1.3%, the number of new registrations is still 6.7% higher than 2008’s 34,263 newly registered .ie domains. As not every domain is needed indefinitely, the non-renewal of domains is common to all registries. It most frequently arises when there is no longer a requirement for a domain name that was once registered for a specific purpose or date, typically for public information campaigns, product launches and non-recurring events. The current non-renewal rate stands at 14%, a slight decrease on the 14.7% recorded for 2009. This resulted in 17,516 net additional .ie domains for 2010, once non-renewals had been accounted for.
Speaking about Irish businesses not exploiting the full potential of the internet, David Curtin, chief executive, IE Domain Registry (IEDR) said, “With only two thirds of Irish businesses having a web presence and just 21 per cent of these had any kind of e-commerce functionality there are considerable online opportunities for Irish business to exploit. The heavy snow before Christmas resulted in more people than ever shopping online, many for the first time. However, given the lack of e-commerce enabled Irish websites, relatively few Irish businesses were able to take advantage of what turned out to be a very lucrative time for online retailers.”