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We analyzed the results of the ORG Spanish IDN Launch. There were many duplicate pre-orders. The results below are for unique domain names. For example, many customers pre-ordered xn--espaol-zwa.org, but it only counts as one domain in our analysis.

Overall Success Rate: 19.39%

Of all the unique pre-order domains, we registered 19.39%. The other pre-order domains could not be registered for various reasons.


DOMAINS WITH MORE THAN ONE PRE-ORDER

We did a further analysis on the most popular domains, those with more than one pre-order.

FAIL: Another Registrar  10.00%
FAIL: Policy Error        4.38%
FAIL: Country Code        8.75%
FAIL: Legacy             65.00%
SUCCESS                  11.88%

The domains that returned Policy, Country Code, or Legacy errors could not be registered at all. So of the domains that could be registered, we got about half and other registrars got the other half.

Actual Success Rate: 54.29%


DESCRIPTION OF ERRORS

A Policy Error is when the domain is not allowed by the central registry rules. For example, a lot of customers placed pre-orders for xn--ida.org, even though that is a one character IDN, and is not allowed by this central registry. Also, several pre-orders were for domains not in Spanish.

A Country Code failure is caused when the domain was already registered using another country code. There are several other European languages that also have accented characters, and many Spanish words were already registered using these alternative country codes.

A Legacy Failure is caused when the domain was already registered during the first ORG IDN launch in 2001. After this 2001 launch, the ORG central registry stopped allowing IDN registrations for a while to work out technical issues. But registrants were allowed to keep most domains that they had registered.


DOMAINS WITH ONLY ONE PRE-ORDER

We did not do a breakdown of the domains that only received one pre-order. But we suspect that the actual success rate for these domains, taking out the Policy, Country Code, and Legacy errors, would be even higher than 54%.


[This post has been edited by dynadot_staff on Mar 12, 2007 12:37pm.]

Shen is the 30-day lock up? By my funky math it would be around 11:00 AM Pacific today.

We have reduced our bulk prices for ORG Spanish IDNs to $6.99.

We do have plans to try to catch more of the errors next time around, before you place your pre-orders. We agree that the more errors that can be caught ahead of time, the better. It will lead to a better customer experience, which is important to us.

The difficulty we faced was that we were not able to submit domain check commands using the Spanish language tag before the launch. So we could not say for sure whether a Spanish domain was available or not before the launch.

But we do have some ideas to work around that limitation for the next launch.


[This post has been edited by dynadot_staff on Mar 15, 2007 10:40am.]

My own failure breakdown (using Dynadot) was about the same, although I made more policy errors having not read closely about the minimum length.

Knowing what you know now about these kinds of mistakes, and knowing what you knew then, about the limitations such as legacy domains, why let so many people make mistakes that result in unnecessary charges?

I know it's not easy to factor in all those restrictions and I know you don't have an infinitely large programming department, but I think it would help in the long run with general lookups and customer trust. At the very least posting the limitations more prominently would have been worth the effort.

Thanks for the analysis, the only number missing was the total number of attempted registrations so I would feel like all those Policy Errors were my own :-)