Brandsight recently concluded their Third Annual Domain Management Survey. Designed to uncover issues of greatest concern to corporate domain name professionals, the survey was sent to more than 300 companies. The companies that responded spanned all verticals, ranging from financial services to high-tech to consumer packaged goods. Of those that responded, 18% had portfolios smaller than 500 domains, 34% had mid-sized portfolios containing 501–3,000 domains, 32% had large portfolios containing 3,001–10,000 domains. Sixteen percent had portfolios with more than 10,000 domains.

Similar to last year, this year’s survey revealed that ensuring the security of domain name portfolios was an extremely important goal for the vast majority of respondents. And more than half of all respondents felt that managing their respective domain name portfolios had become more difficult over the past year, which represented a slight increase over last year. Seventy-seven percent cited cutting costs as a goal, and 69% said that paring portfolios is a challenge.

Highlight’s from this year’s survey included:

• 91% of respondents stated the ensuring the security of their domain name portfolio was an extremely important goal, and 69% percent found doing so to be a challenge
• 83% of respondents said that dealing with the impact of GDPR and the inability to access WHOIS contact information has been a challenge for them, which represents a slight drop of 5 percentage points over last year’s survey
• 76% of respondents said that reducing domain name expenditures was an extremely important or somewhat important goal for their domain name portfolio, which represented a drop of 12 percentage points from last year
• 69% of respondents said that paring back bloated portfolios was a challenge, which represented a drop of 12 percentage points from last year
• 54% respondents said that managing their domain name portfolio has become more difficult over the past year, which represents a very slight increase of 1% percentage points over last year

While domain professionals aren’t dealing with lots of new registry launches, there is still pressure to contain costs, pare portfolios, and justify ROI. Add in the new complexity of not having access to full domain name ownership information, and it’s completely understandable why more than half of domain professionals feel that their job is becoming more difficult.