Business Intelligence (BI) is almost a buzz word these days, with companies using the term loosely when they talk about data. According to Gartner, business intelligence “includes the applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance.”
The Donuts BI team – led by our Director, Business Intelligence Kelvin Osborn and Senior Business Analyst Sarath Vejandla – focuses on these practices to inform and help optimize Donuts’ overall business performance:
- Provide relevant data and detailed analysis of the Donuts business across 242 TLDs and other products and services
- Provide relevant data and detailed analysis of the domain industry and how Donuts products perform relative to the greater domain name space
- Utilize data-driven insights to identify untapped potential in Donuts existing business operations and to explore new business opportunities
On any given day, Kelvin and Sarath are working with many groups on many projects in the Donuts organization, including business development, marketing, product engineering and the executive team.
TLD Health Intelligence and Why It Matters
The Donuts BI team certainly monitors DUMs for each TLD, but considers it their responsibility to use a weighted range of criteria to better measure TLD health for the Donuts portfolio and other registry portfolios. This approach enables BI to understand Donuts’ TLD health relative to the broader market, and allows Donuts to identify and troubleshoot individual TLDs that may have health issues. Critical criteria we use to assess TLD Health include:
To date, the most commonly used success metric for new top-level domains has been Domains Under Management (DUMs). Industry analyses often equate DUMs with gTLD success – those gTLDs with more associated DUMs means greater success. Donuts agrees that consistent growth in DUMs is an important KPI, but DUMs don’t guarantee that a particular TLD will be successful in the long-term. Sole focus on DUMs in the short term may distract registries and registrars from truly understanding how healthy – or unhealthy – certain TLDs are and what that will mean for their long-term viability.
- Abuse: Domains flagged as being used for an abusive purpose, such as spam, malware, phishing, or other nefarious activity;
- Usage: Domain names developed or being used as a redirect to a live website;
- Renewal Rates: Percentage of domain names that are renewed annually;
- Average Registration Length: Years that domain names were originally registered for; or
- Geographic Distribution: Domain names and the regions in which they are registered.
TLD Health analysis clearly shows which of our TLD vertical categories are healthiest and have the most potential to drive profitable growth for registrar. Some of the healthiest TLD categories in the industry include:
Donuts’ BI team will perpetually analyze TLD Health and share insights with Donuts’ business teams and the industry to maintain our healthiest TLDs and improve those that need help. Not all TLDs are created equal, and it is Donuts’ mission to deliver products that make our customers successful.
If you’d like to learn more about the Donuts Business Intelligence team, TLD Health, or any of the other projects our BI team is working on, please don’t hesitate to reach out: partners@donuts.email.
