I want to let you know about some important changes that we at Public Interest Registry are making to the discount, rebate and marketing products that we offer registrars.
The first change is that we won’t be offering any further volume discounts when the current agreements expire. While volume discounts are a long established product offered by many registries, they clearly favor larger registrars as only the larger registrars can reach the volumes necessary to qualify for the discount. We don’t think this is fair and we want all our products in the future to be equally accessible to registrars of all sizes.
The second change is that we’re going to measure the success of our products on more key performance indicators than just the number of creates they produce. For a start we’re going to be looking at the overall revenue of a product – does it cost more to offer the product than the additional revenue we get from it? Then we’re going to look at the quality of the new registrations generated – do they have a higher incidence of technical abuse such as malware or phishing? We’re also going to look at whether there is a positive impact on our brand attributes and how registrars and registrants perceive us.
Measuring brand in this way means two things. It signals a shift from a sales-led organization to a marketing-led organization so that we can focus on strengthening the core characteristics of .org, such as trust. It also means that we will need to conduct more registrar and registrant surveys to help us understand and measure the impact of our products and we will need registrar cooperation to achieve that.
The third change is that in future we will no longer offer products where we take all the risk and will instead ask for the risk to be shared along with the reward. Registrars and registries are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the use of data and together we can design products where we both have confidence in the outcome.
We think these changes and our new approach are better suited to developing strong partnerships with registrars and generating quality, sustainable growth. We may see a dip in headline numbers as we put this strategy in place, but from the actions we’ve taken so far in cutting back our target market discount, the loss of income from the drop in creates is more than compensated for by the saving in expenditure.
To support all these changes we’ve invested heavily in our channel services team with three new hirings, Rick Terry, Scott McBreen and Gianni Ponzi, who join our Senior Director Inma del Rosal Mendez. These new members of the team have extensive experience in our industry with long stints working for registrars and they are looking forward to building strong partnerships with .org registrars.
If you have any questions then please get in touch with the team directly at PIRChannelServices@pir.org.
Jay Daley
Interim President and CEO
Public Interest Registry