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Name Intelligence Awards for 2006

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Users' Choice Awards in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias
(in Alphabetic order)

Bulk Register


Dotster


eNom


GoDaddy.com


Melbourne IT


Name.com


Network Solutions


Register.com


Tucows
Users' Choice Awards:

The Users' Choice Awards were compiled from a variety of overall quality metrics, polling, and community/user feedback.

We weighed in the community feedback across the DomainTools.com user base of 250,000 users as metrics and collected comments into category buckets identified below. Favorable comments were additive factors, negative comments were used as demerits.

The key areas that were heavily weighted in the selection criteria to meet the mark for recognition in the Users' Choice category were:

  • For consumer-facing registrars or registrars that service the general public:
    • Pricing and Service
    • Basic verbal and written comments that we have been provided regarding customer satisfaction with their customer service experiences, that the person answering was knowledgeable, friendly, and empowered to assist.  Support contact was met with rapid response, competency and patience.
    • Portal and tools -- Ease of use, and name security/integrity.  Other comments from users surrounded levels of confidence with the management and security of their domain name(s) and overall portal/management experience.
    • Responsive and knowledgeable support staff and/or knowledge base systems that allow for customers to quickly self-serve or resolve customer issues.
  • For Wholesale or Reseller facing registrars who provide domain provisioning services:
    • Pricing and Service
    • Overall quality of reseller provisioning and management system.
    • Easy to use and intuitive reseller interface.
    • Technically sound provisioning and management API/interfacing.
    • Responsive and knowledgeable support staff and/or knowledge base systems that allow for their resellers to quickly self-serve or resolve customer issues.

Factoring users' choice awards was a challenge, so we used a check and balance system to ensure some validity to the metrics used to select our 9 winners. As an overall check and balance of the metrics used to designate the Users' Choice Name Intelligence Awards, we used a blind poll on the Domain Roundtable Registration form as final selection criteria towards the accuracy of our findings.

The registration form for the Domain Roundtable Conference contained a survey that collected a user's choice for their favorite registrar from a drop down list of the top 74 registrars by volume of registration.  This was a great metric corroboration with overall user comment, as each of the 9 registrars awarded with the Users' Choice distinction were identified as the top 9 registrars selected by Domain Roundtable Conference registrants using the registration form (limited to those elections submitted by non-registrar participants).


Best Community Registrar in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias

Moniker 		Best Community Registrar
Moniker.com
The Best Community Registrar is an award designed to recognize a registrar that has made huge strides in increasing industry awareness and building the overall perception and integrity of the domain industry as a whole.
Areas of such advocacy include, but are not limited to: blogging, podcasting, tradeshow presence beyond the domain industry, and a willingness to participate on a regular basis to expand awareness of this great industry to other internet users.
Monte Cahn of Moniker is a person who has dedicated the past 4 years of his life to evangelizing domain names in almost every tradeshow in existence, such as SES, Ad:Tech, and the Domain Roundtable. He also operates a weekly podcast on the domain industry, the first of its kind, called Domain Masters on Webmasterradio.fm, where he has star powered guests on to talk about the domain industry.
Moniker.com is recognized as the 2006 'Best Community Registrar'

Best ICANN Registrar Reseller in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias

eNom

The Best ICANN Reseller
This award went to eNom for their distinctive reseller program because of the following hard metrics, as indicated by Name Intelligence's data management services and domain name root zone monitoring :

  • Volume of names supported
  • Volume of resellers supported
  • Lowest frequency of egress (outgoing) transfers from nameservers
  • Lowest frequency of egress (outgoing) registrar transfers of names
  • Pricing and Service, as reported by user polls

Best Performing Parking Program in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias

Domain Sponsor 		Best Performing Parking Program
In terms of marking the overall metric success of this particular category, the award for Best Performing Parking Program was given to Domain Sponsor for their overall market share and dominance in the US Marketplace, as evidenced by information gathered by Name Intelligence's weekly internet scan, in conjunction with our data collection in the Com, Net, Org, Info, Biz, and US TLDs. The overall number of domains that destined at Domain Sponsor was higher than any other provider, evidencing significant domain manager selection.

Best Place to Talk in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias

DNForum.com		 Best Place to talk Award
DNForum – "The place to talk, buy and sell domains", is an immensely popular and well visited community where domainers and the domain name industry meet to talk about domains. A recent MVP poll identified a tie for key community members who both participate and help other members and grow and support the community.

We recognize DNForum as the Best Place to Talk for 2006.

Community awards – new to the 2006 Name Intelligence awards.

The Domain Industry is something that has grown through great companies, visionary technologists and marketers, and fantastic communities of users who connect and discuss events. We contacted some of the larger communities that discuss domains and the domain industry, and we asked them to identify some of their key community members so that we could recognize their efforts in growing awareness and supporting the industry.

Community Award in 2006
Award Recipient About


CircleID
Bruce Levinson		 CircleID – a popular community hub for the Internet's Core Infrastructure & Policies, is a place where a who's who of industry participants post valuable information and articles on and comment about current events. Bruce Levinson, a cyber security advocate, has been member of CircleID since November 2003, has posted 27 articles. He was designated by the community there as their community award winner.

NamePros
Eric Sizemore		 NamePros – "Buy, Sell, Discuss Domain Names".
Eric Sizemore, known to NamePros members as SecondVersion, is an active paricipant in the forum and the most constant presence in the live chat room. He has helped many by freely sharing his knowledge of PHP and domain names.

DNForum
John Berryhill

DNForum
Joseph Slabaugh 		DNForum – "The place to talk, buy and sell domains", is an immensely popular and well visited community where domainers and the domain name industry meet to talk about domains. A recent MVP poll identified a tie for key community members who both participate and help other members and grow and support the community. The commentary and voting surrounded strong praise for both ‘MrDeleted’ (Joe Slabaugh) and ‘JBerryhill’ (John Berryhill) in their willingness to answer questions and provide valuable and sincere help to their fellow community members.

DomainState
Charles Christopher		 DomainState – "Domain News & Views". DomainState is a community of over 7500 domain owners who congregate on the forum to discuss events and buy and sell domain names.

Community of the Year in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias

ICANNWiki		 A new community that started in ICANN Luxemburg as a grass roots word of month compaign. By the end of ICANN Vancouver 2/3 of all ICANN participants were on the site.

The Giving Back Award in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias

Public Interest Registry
 Giving Back
Public Interest Registry, the operators of the .ORG Registry are the recipients of the 'Giving Back' award, a new category for the 2006 Name Intelligence Awards.

Public Interest Registry is a nonprofit organization working for positive change. It uses its resources to expand Internet access around the world, particularly in developing areas, and to promote growth of the Internet and its capabilities.

The basic fundamental structure of PIR and the .ORG registry are designed to return profits to the Internet Society for the purposes of Education initiatives, Infrastructure development, Internet expansion programs, and Worldwide programs developed on behalf of PIR.

.ORG is the home of noncommercial organizations; the Internet's most trusted Web sites; web sites that are known for providing valuable, trusted information; and web sites that are the top choices for fundraising.

PIR also provides services for individuals who hold domain names (registrants), funds programs that improve Internet access in developing areas throughout the world, advocates for policy initiatives on behalf of the .ORG community, and participates in efforts to improve and expand the Internet.

We applaud PIR and their successes and milestones, and recognize them proudly with this award for their efforts in giving back to the greater community.

Largest Net Gain in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias

GoDaddy.com

Largest Net Gain
Name Intelligence operates DailyChanges.com and provides the data research and reporting for the registrarstats.com website. The sheer amount of processing and data management gives Name Intelligence a unique perspective on the domain industry, and allows us to recognize trends, events, and noteworthy milestones. One such pattern in data reporting is a continued trend of significant growth in the net quantity of domains in management at any given ICANN accredited registrar across the Com, Net, Org, Info, Biz, and US TLDs. The largest net gain award, as evidenced by statistics, went to GoDaddy.com for their continued pace of growth in overall domain registrations

Most Innovative with Domains in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias



Microsoft		 Most Innovative with Domains
As the operators of the largest and most popular Whois database worldwide, Name Intelligence has a perspective on overall marketplace trends from all of the data mining and research work that we perform daily for our user base.

In the domain marketplace, innovation is a constant, and this results in a need to adapt quickly to change. When we recognize data trends that standout as anomalous, we analyze the 'why' behind them in a constant effort to improve our tools and keep at or ahead of the marketplace on behalf of the 250,000 users that count on us for daily data.
One recent spike that stood out surrounded IDN or Internationalized Domain Names.

Registration pace of IDN has been at a slight but steady growth since it's standards had been basically established, and many of the best practices have grown.

We noticed significant growth trends happening around the popularity of domain names prefixed with xn––, which is punicode prefix used to mark and store the registration of an IDN domain) directly after the announcement of the built in support of IDN in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7, and another large spike at the release of the Beta 2 version of the browser.

Microsoft's participation in the standards groups and in the ICANN IDN Working group, most notably Michel Suignard's efforts, are something that made a huge impact on the domain industry and the user base of domain registrants worldwide.

Microsoft is also innovating in domain names through their new Live offering, with their new personal domains line within hotmail.

We here at Name Intelligence applaud Microsoft and recognize them with the 2006 "Most Innovative with Domains" award, and look forward to further technology innovations from them in the domain names space.

Outstanding Drop Catcher in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias

eNom 		Outstanding Drop Catcher
The awards for the outstanding Drop Catcher went to companies that displayed high levels of technical sophistication, success, and positive user experience in their systems.

The systems designed by Pool.com and eNom's Club Drop both received high marks for the overall success rate of the ability to obtain names at time of Drop.

The award to Snapnames was to recognize them for the distinction of excellence for the Transfer Fulfillment process that they have designed, which improves the overall customer experience on expiring inventory of domain names.

Snapnames

Pool.com

Best Industry Coverage in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias

DNJournal		 Reporting domain sales and covering important events has been synonymous with DNJournal this year.

Outstanding Secondary Market in 2006
Award Recipient Criterias

Afternic


Sedo

Outstanding Secondary Market

We take many factors into consideration on giving these awards. Each of the following were criteria used to narrow the recipients for 2006:

  • Recognition of outreach and advocacy to grow the industry through event participation, such as ICANN meetings and conferences like the Domain Roundtable and other industry trade shows.
  • User feedback on overall customer experience with the company's listing, search, buying, selling, appraisal, consultation, customer service, and overall escrow processes.
  • Quality of consumer portal and portfolio listing / management
  • Incorporation of additional quality metrics for the buyer and seller experience, such as statistics, mail forwarding, wild-carded third level, and monetization during listing.
  • Overall number of names in management,
  • Integrity/Trust of each service's core management team in the industry and marketplace.