Marilyn Cade wrote:
Thanks, Ross.
Where would your 'quick popular stats at our fingertips' research approach put the 'professional portfolio' holders of thousands or millions of names? Would they have been in the business sector or the individual sector?
As I mentioned in my earlier message, this isn't my research. Verisign undertakes regular studies of the domain name industry and regularly publishes their findings. We should engage them directly if we wish to know more about their methodology. The answer would not likely materially affect the results substantially in either direction. The largest domain portfolios are held by commercial corporations, and the sizes of these portfolio's numbers in the hundreds of thousands of domains. As a percentage of overall registrations, the numbers are actually fairly small, and thus any incorrect categorization of individual portfolio's or registrations is unlikely to have a material impact on the analysis. Knowing a little bit about their methodology, my personal opinion would be that the vast majority of the names held in secondary market portfolios would probably have been classified as commercial registrations. But again, this is purely my conjecture. If we are really interested in hard data, we should ask. -ross