December 2005
You are currently browsing the articles from WhoisIreland Review written in the month of December 2005.
A review of 2005 Irish tech journalism scene on John Collin’s blog mulling over the events and the shift of some Irish tech journos to Public Relations raised an interesting possibility: Could tech publishing have a “long tail” effect? Piaras Kelly’s blog had a post that seemed to confirm the possibilty.
Prior to a mass market, the publishing market would be specialist. In an early mass market, basically anyone can jump in because the barriers to entry are low and the knowledge requirements are low as well. Everyone is looking for information and they are not actively filtering. The tech publishing scene followed that model precisely in the dot.bomb era. There was an influx of journalists all writing about the web and technology for a general audience who could not tell the difference between fact and press release. At this point you could almost see the rise of the personality tech journalism where journos considered themselves more important than the story. These were the main targets for the PR people. Remember the end of the movie “The Devil’s Advocate”?
As the market changes from an early market to a mature market, some of the early players will fall by the wayside and some of the journos will disappear too. But those who are left tend, generally, to get better and develop a following. The crunch time is when the market matures. A lot of the journos that the PR people spent years cultivating will have disappeared from the field or have gotten jobs elsewhere.
A mature publishing market has high barriers to entry and the readership is more sophisticated. The new/learner readership segment has reduced and readers now consider themselves more clueful. The market that a lot of the early journalists were writing for has disappeared. At this stage the tech publishing market tends to be dominated by a few key players in the mass market side and a few specialist publications on the niche market side.
Many tech publications in Ireland shifted their emphasis from news to being a PR conduit though that happened years ago for some of them. ENN has managed to leverage that so that it has in effect become a PR content provider. It is quite a clever commercial exploitation of a niche but I wonder if it has done so by compromising its credibility as a news source. Siliconrepublic’s ties to the print world are probably essential to its survival. If it loses any of them, then it could have problems.
The Irish tech publishing market has too small an audience to support good news coverage so there is a temptation for editors to rely on press releases. Any tech publication has a mix of news/press releases/events/features/advertising. Getting this right is one of the hardest things for any publisher.
Press releases are a neccessary part of tech publishing but becoming reliant on them has a corrosive effect for the publication. In 2002, John O’Sullivan of DCU published a paper (Microsoft Word format) on newspapers and the effects of the web. It is a very interesting paper because you can see the attitudes of journalists who were struggling to cope with the effect of the web on journalism.
Tags: IrishBlogs, Publishing, Technology Journalism, HackWatch
Written by John McCormac on December 20th, 2005 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.
The latest Computerscope magazine had an article, written by John Collins, on the Irish hosting scene. The article was interesting because it had a quote from the CIO of BT Ireland, Martin Wickham, about the Irish hosting market being a “fragmented and dysfunctional market with a lot of offerings around pure space rental.” This quote seems to demonstrate the lack of situational awareness common in ISP management.
The Irish hosting market is far from a dysfunctional market. Though without accurate data, the Irish market can seem to be fragmented and dysfunctional especially if you rely on dubious information sources such as webhosting.info etc. The real battle in the Irish hosting business is for the high value .ie clients. And it is a battle in which BT Ireland, like other ISPs continues to lose ground.
As with any market where the barrier to entry is low, the lower end of the market is always going to appear highly fragmented. But at the top of the market, it takes on a very structured form. The top Irish hosters account for over 54% of the Irish market. The ISPs are losing market share because these HSPs can provide a highly automated and very efficient service. And in a ruthlessly efficient market, only the fittest survive.
The Computerscope article showed a good understanding of the Irish hosting situation. I don’t think that the Irish web hosting service providers (HSPs) would like to be referred to as “indie hosters” especially when some of them have more clients hosted than many ISPs.
Just looking at BT Ireland’s domain counts from December 2000 to December 2005, (part of a report on the history of the Irish Hosting Business that will be published next week) it is easy to see why ISPs continue lose market share to HSPs. The HSPs are small and often very efficiently run operations where the business owner has everything on the line. The ISP management just don’t have that kind of dedication. And in a service driven industry, that can prove fatal.
Irish HosterStats Reports
Tags: IrishBlogs,IEDR, Domains, Internet Statistics , Webhosting,.EU
Written by John McCormac on December 17th, 2005 with 5 comments.
Read more articles on Irish Tech News.
For a non-profit organisation running .ie ccTLD, IEDR made a rather large profit from the high price of .ie domains. Arguably most of this profit went to pay off debts incurred during previous years. Now, a relatively debt-free IEDR has cut the trade price of .ie domains by 20%. Could it be that the impending free-for-all in .eu forced the change?
The Irish hosting industry has been complaining that the .ie price is too high. The launch of .eu gave IEDR the impetus for change. The .eu gTLD is still in the Sunrise phase 1 where registrations are limited to owners of trademarks and geographic rights. The real knife-fight will not happen until April 2006 when the .eu is a free for all.
If IEDR is to cope with the onslaught of .eu, it has to make changes. One of these, importantly, is the pricing of .ie domains. The second is a change in the board of IEDR. The board of IEDR does not have any members with operational expertise in the domain/hosting business. It is hardly a reservoir of domain expertise. The management of IEDR, as distinct from the board, is more in tune with the industry. The .eu launch may bring some of the changes that the industry would like to see with .ie ccTLD. With the price cuts, IEDR may consider that .ie is competing with .eu gTLD. However the real opponent is .com and IEDR is unlikely to cut prices that to make .ie a competitor for .com gTLD. And of course there is another question - will Irish hosters pass on the price cuts?
Irish HosterStats Reports
Tags: IrishBlogs,IEDR, Domains, Internet Statistics , Webhosting,.EU
Written by John McCormac on December 15th, 2005 with 3 comments.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics and Irish Tech News.
The Irish webhosting market is beginning to consolidate. The smaller hosters and the ISPs are gradually being edged out of the market by the pure play Hosting Service Providers (HSPs). This shift happened a few years ago in most other countries but due to Ireland having an almost Third World telecoms system, the shift has been delayed. With the growing broadband penetration, the numbers of domain registrations increase. This growth has led to the rise of the budget hosters in the Irish hosting market. Some of these hosters have come from nowhere in the space of a year to being Tier 2 players.
The bulk of the Irish market is concentrated on the Tier 2 hosting service providers. The top hosters there all have their own dedicated setup while a few have datacentres. The pattern over the last year has been that most of the business has been done by the hosters in Tier 2 and the ISPs and the lower tiers have lost domains and clients to these hosters. The Irish hosting market is consolidating though it is a long term shift.
Irish HosterStats Reports
2005
Market Shares As Of 01 December 2005 - Identified Domains = 108917
Hosters Domains Market Share - Market Segments
Tier 1 22 24807 22.78% Traditional Early Market Hosters (ISPs)
Tier 2 24 59578 54.70% Hosting Service Providers > 500 domains
Tier 3 67 14066 12.91% HSPs 101 - 500 domains
Tier 4 330 9852 9.05% HSPs/Web Developers 7 - 100 domains
Tier 5 378 795 0.93% Individuals/Firms/WebDevs <7 domains
Tier 6 44 1075 0.99% Educational And Government And Registry
2004
Market Shares As Of 01 December 2004 - Identified Domains= 85733
Hosters Domains Market Share - Market Segments
Tier 1 24 25585 29.88% Traditional Early Market Hosters (ISPs)
Tier 2 21 41448 48.41% Hosting Service Providers > 500 domains
Tier 3 54 10701 12.50% HSPs 101 - 500 domains
Tier 4 263 7437 8.69% HSPs/Web Developers 7 - 100 domains
Tier 5 450 855 1.00% Individuals/Firms/WebDevs < 7 domains
Tier 6 24 776 0.91% Educational And Government Hosting
(2004 figures based on identified hosters as of 01/12/2004)
Tags: IrishBlogs , Domains, Internet Statistics , Webhosting
Written by John McCormac on December 10th, 2005 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Domains And Statistics.