News
Tobias Flaitz out as Sedo CEO
Flaitz to be replaced by 1&1 veteran.
Matthias Conrad, new CEO of Sedo
Tobia Flaitz has left his post as CEO of domain name marketplace and parking platform Sedo after seven years in the role. He will be replaced by Matthias Conrad, who has held several VP positions at 1&1 Internet. 1&1 is part of United Internet, which also owns Sedo.
Flaitz has been CEO of Sedo since 2012 when he took over for co-founder Tim Schumacher. Flaitz steered the company through challenging times as the domain parking market continued to struggle and GoDaddy consolidated power in the domain aftermarket. He brought a unique perspective to the market because he came from outside the industry.
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NameSilo hits $20 million in bookings for 2018
Domain registrar continues to show solid growth.
Domain name registrar NameSilo (PINKSHEETS: NTCEF, URL:CSE) is reporting that it had US $20.1 million in bookings during 2018. It defines bookings as cash received from new domain registrations, renewals and other services. Fourth quarter bookings were $5.4 million.
The registrar has been on a tear in recent years, especially after it was acquired last year. It is often among the top ten registrars in terms of new monthly .com domain registrations.
In a release, the company states that it added 420,000 domains under management (DUMs) last quarter across all top level domains. It says it’s the largest registrar for .ICU domains, so the DUMs are inflated a bit by inexpensive domains. But it had nearly 1.5 million .com domains as of the end of September, making it one of the top 15 domain name registrars overall for .com.
NameSilo reports that it has 240,000 customers.
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Another reason to not let your web developer register your domain name
Even if they aren’t a bad person, something could happen to them.
I’ve written many times about disputes over domain names between web developers/designers and their clients. Usually, these are cases of a web developer registering the domain in his or her name and holding it hostage if the client ever wants to get control of the domain name. There are similar disputes with employees who register company names in their own name.
It might be difficult for a client to explain to their developer that they want to register a domain in their own name because they don’t necessarily trust the developer. So here’s another, simpler argument for always registering a domain in your company’s name rather than the developer’s: the developer might get hit by a bus.
In a recent National Arbitration Forum case, Ohio company Thermotion, LLC claimed that its web developer ceased operations, apparently because of the death of its operator. The company is now having difficulty getting control of the domain name. The case was denied because Thermotion didn’t show that the registrant lacked rights or legitimate interests in the domain.
So the next time a web developer pushes back on who controls the domain name, clients have something other than “I don’t trust you not to screw me” as an argument. They can point to this case as an example in which the client couldn’t access the domain despite an apparent lack of mal intent by the developer.
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.Com Winners & Losers
How domain name registrars performed in the latest official report.
ICANN has published the latest official data from Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) about the .com namespace. This registrar-by-registrar report covers September 2018.
Here’s how registrars did in terms of new .com registrations.
1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 868,031 (920,365 in August)
2. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 174,114 (200,563)
3. Xin Net Technology Corporation 170,284 (144,999)
4. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 143,179 (153,130)
5. NameCheap Inc. 139,581 (139,914)
6. Alibaba (HiChina) 133,156 (224,383)
7. Web.com++ 99,859 (103,022)
8. NameSilo 88,409 (86,955)
9. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 85,550 (95,841)
10. 1&1 44,580 (47,333)
Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations as of the end of September 2018. Base on trends, I suspect Google overtook GMO in October 2018.
1. GoDaddy* 49,079,269 (48,907,328 in August)
2. Tucows** 12,751,782 (12,816,784)
3. Endurance+ 7,335,322 (7,357,344)
4. Web.com++ 6,722,165 (6,722,545)
5. Alibaba 5,852,659 (5,813,977)
6. Namecheap 4,405,568 (4,354,411)
7. 1&1 3,688,497 (3,701,944)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,522,185 (2,376,346)
9. GMO 1,979,668 (1,993,491)
10. Google 1,953,943(1,903,695)
Many domain companies have multiple accreditations and I’ve tried to capture the largest ones. See the notes below.
* Includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains
** Includes Tucows and Enom
+ Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain and Bigrock. There are other Endurance registrars, but these are the biggest.
++ Includes Network Solutions and Register.com
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NameJet sales include 12 5-number domains that sold for the same price
One bidder found the market price for a dozen domain names.
NameJet is out with its final sales report of 2018. The domain marketplace sold 74 domains for $2,000 or more in December 2018 for a total of about $350,000.
One buyer bought 12 five-number domain names all with a high bid of $4,499.
A few other notable sales are:
Autographed.com $5,000 – I love this name. Although -ed is technically past tense and usually not as valuable, autographed here is more of an adjective.
MovingVan.com $4,077 – This could be used for moving rental and services lead generation or as a brand in the space.
OnlinePsychic.com $3,001 – I don’t know much about the market for only psychic services but it seems like it would be a good business.
Here’s the full list of sales of $2,000 or greater.
DomainPrice xnk.com21000 fridges.com20089 info.net17588 hapo.com15000 pacifiers.com10000 purefood.com10000 agecheck.com10000 babyboy.com8138 fridley.com7602 voka.com5755 ledshoes.com5751 olds.com5655 woye.com5211 headbanger.com5210 adplus.com5100 indore.com5000 autographed.com5000 ifunded.com5000 newyorks.com4999 optimate.com4989 maturedate.com4877 bookmarker.com4701 oneoff.com4544 62889.com4499 98557.com4499 38856.com4499 12887.com4499 76855.com4499 79855.com4499 66839.com4499 66938.com4499 55786.com4499 97886.com4499 98355.com4499 55969.com4499 coddle.com4230 movingvan.com4077 livinghome.com3804 theparents.com3100 cybit.com3088 shoptools.com3004 bellia.com3002 onlinepsychic.com3001 interexpress.com2989 perfectbreasts.com2977 purecotton.com2911 kohols.com2754 therush.com2750 caroo.com2600 corporatereputation.com2600 beachmaster.com2599 silently.com2511 bbay.com2502 z5z.com2500 nationalparalegal.org2500 1r.net2434 saper.com2433 climateregistry.org2423 mobilesales.com2422 lovington.com2400 bluedelta.com2255 66992.com2200 houseofdebt.org2110 tequipment.com2103 screenz.com2100 crisispapers.org2100 customtools.com2097 jowi.com2088 toju.com2060 sushiking.com2020 thetax.com2009 privateclinic.com2002 82336.com2000 vnsvns.com2000© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.
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A domain name lesson on CNBC’s The Profit
Company upgrades from .net to .com after The Profit host Marcus Lemonis invests in business.
This toy store upgraded its domain to SantasToys.com.
Over the holidays, CNBC’s The Profit featured a store in Santa Claus, Indiana called Santa’s Toys.
On The Profit, host Marcus Lemonis invests in a business and works one-on-one with its owners to help it improve.
In this episode, Lemonis invests $75,000 in the business but lets the owner keep 100% of the store. He’s more interested in the nascent e-commerce business, of which he negotiates for 50%.
There’s a big problem with Santa’s Toys web presence, though. It’s on SantasToys.net instead of .com.
Around the 5 minute mark of the episode, Lemonis asks the owners why they went with .net instead of .com. They said the .com domain was more expensive each year.
Actually, the problem was that the .com was registered well before the owners got SantasToys.com.
Lemonis doesn’t like .net and blames some of the site’s lackluster success on the choice of domain. “Maybe because nobody knows .net,” he says.
He buys SantasToys.com as part of the site relaunch.
It’s an interesting episode that you can check out here.
(Hat tip: Bill Sweetman at Name Ninja)
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Year in Review: .App domain names
Google’s .App launch brought visibility to new top level domains.
It’s been a while since a top level domain name launch caught mainstream attention but Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) launch of .App made waves in 2018.
Perhaps it’s because it is a great string. (Google paid $25 million to acquire rights to the domain.) Perhaps it’s because Google was behind it. Whatever the reason, .app took off.
People registered 7,500 domains during early access. Over 100,000 domains were registered within a day of general availability in May. As of the end of the year, there were over 350,000 registrations.
All of this happened despite two potential roadblocks to registering .app domains. First, there was no heavy discounting. Second, an SSL certificate is required to use a .app domain name.
The SSL is required because .app is on the HSTS preload list. This makes it tricky to park .app domains, but some people came up with solutions to this.
Buying an existing .app domain can be tricky, too. Even before GDPR took effect Google had already obscured Whois records, making it impossible to figure out who owns a .app domain.
Google subsequently launched .page but that domain hasn’t cracked 10,000 registrations.
It will be interesting to see what happens when Google launches .Dev in early 2019.
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Year in review: record new TLD sales
Three second level domains under new top level domains sold for least $500,000 each.
Big dollar sales of new top level domain names are rare, but Donuts announced three blockbuster deals in 2018–each clipping the prior record by a small amount.
First, Donuts announced that Home.Loans sold for $500,000 to a Florida entrepreneur. Blake Janover had success with other new top level domains before plunking down a half million dollars for this one. (Listen to a podcast with Blake here.)
Then a Missouri entrepreneur bested that sale by paying $500,300 for Vacation.Rentals. The extra $300 was not random. Mike Kugler wanted the press that came with being the record holder. (Listen to a podcast with Mike here.)
That record lasted until November, when Domain Name Wire broke the news that Donuts sold Online.Casino for $510,000.
The home.loans and vacation.rentals buyers both cited perceived search engine optimization benefits as a key reason for paying so much money. At the time of writing, both are on the first page of Google for the search term matching the second and top level portions of their domains, e.g. home loans and vacation rentals.
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Citadel should have sent an email rather than filing a UDRP
Investment firm might have achieved its desired result by sending an email. Instead, it lost a UDRP.
Fund manager Citadel Enterprise Americas LLC lost a UDRP it filed against the domain name citadel-investment.com, and it’s a lesson in determining the best approach to go after a potentially infringing domain name.
A company in Oman registered the domain name in August 2018. Citadel was concerned that it would be used in an infringing way because of the inclusion of ‘investment’ in the domain. That’s understandable.
It turns out that the registrant registered the domain name on behalf of its client Citadel Investment LLC, which was founded in 2004 and holds a commercial license issued in that name by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in Oman.
Given the short timeframe and the explanation for registration, the National Arbitration Forum panel denied the claim because Citadel Enterprise Americas did not show that the domain was registered in bad faith.
Here’s the kicker: in its response, the domain owner offered to transfer the domain to the Complainant for its out-of-pocket costs.
This seems like a case in which the Complainant would have been better off sending an email to the domain owner before filing a UDRP. The domain is registered at GoDaddy and has a public Whois record, so it would have been easy to contact the owner.
Now the company wasted money on a UDRP and still doesn’t have the domain.
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Year in Review: Verisign gets its price hikes
The U.S. Government gave the green light to increase prices on .com domain names.
It’s an obscure contract issued by the U.S. government. For the domain industry, it means a lot.
On November 1, The U.S. National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) amended and extended its Cooperative Agreement with Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) for running .com.
Think of the Cooperative Agreement as a check on the contract between ICANN and Verisign for .com.
The NTIA’s role in this agreement was rather trivial for a while. Then in 2012, the NTIA effectively overruled a contract extension that ICANN and Verisign agreed to that would have allowed Verisign to increase .com prices 7% per year for four out of six years of the contract. That was the status quo from the previous contract, but NTIA questioned why price increases were justified.
Prices have been fixed at $7.85 ever since.
But the amended agreement restores price increases of 7% in four out of six years, although not until the last four years of each six. ICANN doesn’t have to agree to the price increases, but if it does then Verisign will be able to charge $10.29 per domain six years from now.
That might not seem like much, but it represents hundreds of millions of dollars directly to Verisign’s bottom line (and out of consumers’ pockets). Verisign’s competitors would gladly offer significantly lower prices if they could bid on the contract.
You would think Verisign would jump for joy after the contract amendment. So it was surprising when Verisign published an inflammatory article the very next day criticizing domain investors for their role in the market. Yes, the same group of people that Verisign has been marketing to for the past decade so it could sell more .com domain name registrations.
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Domain inquiries heading into annual high season
January and February tend to have a spike in domain name purchase inquiries.
The first two months of the year tend to be good ones for domain sales, or at least domain name inquiries.
Ryan McKegney, CEO of domain offer system DomainAgents, says that the platform has a 10% spike in offer volumes during January and February each year. Many other platforms (and large domainers) experience a similar bump.
Multiple factors seem to be at play.
“Companies often have new budgets and individuals are pursuing their New Year’s resolutions,” McKegney told Domain Name Wire.
The latter seems to be a big factor for smaller domain sales of $1,000-$3,000. Many people decide to start a new business or “side hustle” in conjunction with the new year.
Whatever the reason, domain investors should take advantage of this by making sure their portfolio is listed for sale and all domains link to relevant “for sale” landers.
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2018 in Review – DNW Podcast #217
Here’s a rewind of the last year in the domain business.
In this special episode of the DNW Podcast, we review some of the top stories in the domain name business from the past year. I review GDPR and what impact this has had on the domain business. We discuss major acquisitions in 2018. A huge new top level domain release…and record setting new TLD sales. What role should registrars have in policing the use of domain names? What’s going on with Verisign and .com?
Enjoy this final episode of 2018 and we’ll see you next year.
Subscribe via iTunes to listen to the Domain Name Wire podcast on your iPhone or iPad, view on Google Play Music, or click play above or download to begin listening. (Listen to previous podcasts here.)
© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.
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Year in Review: MMX acquires .XXX
Adult top level domain company was one of many acquisitions in the domain business during 2018.
MMX, also know as Minds + Machines, is a new top level domain name company with a portfolio of strings such as .beer, .miami and .VIP. It’s publicly traded on the London AIM market (MMX), so it faces the daily pressure of being a public company in a business that is still seeking its footing.
It underwent a strategic review over the past year to see if it should sell itself of bulk up. It chose the later.
In May, MMX announced that it was acquiring ICM Registry for $10.0 million in cash and 225 million shares, which were valued at $31.0 million at the time of the announcement.
ICM registry isn’t your run-of-the-mill top level domain registry. Its domains are adult-themed including .xxx, .sex, .adult and .porn.
While the domains are controversial, the move will shore up MMX’s earnings and add stability to its income statement. This gives the company breathing room.
ICM started its life with a hard-fought battle to get .XXX. The domain was a sponsored top level domain introduced in 2011. The timing was good because it didn’t face competition from new TLDs.
There were three other notable acquisitions during the year.
CentralNic, another domain company traded on the London AIM (CNIC), bought KeyDrive for $55 million.
Private equity group Abry Partners bought new TLD company Donuts in a heated bidding war.
And Neustar bought out Verisign’s (NASDAQ: VRSN) security business that includes things like DDoS protection. The deal will be for somewhere between $50 million and $120 million depending on customer migrations.
© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.
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Registry websites for former FFM top level domains are all down
Registry sites with contact information have gone dark.
[Update: I heard back from the court-appointed administrator. The problem has been fixed.]
The registry websites for top level domain names that were formerly owned by Famous Four Media are all down.
Famous Four Media’s domains are now part of a portfolio owned by Global Registry Services (GRS) Ltd after some sort of investor revolt, as outlined at Domain Incite. GRS is being managed by a court-appointed administrator who works at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
With a low-price strategy, these domains have over 4 million domains second level domains. .Loan has 2.2 million domains in the zone file. Other top domains include .win, .men and .stream.
But for about the past week, DNW readers report they have been unable to visit any of the nic.TLD sites such as nic.loan. These sites include abuse contacts for the domains.
I have reached out to the court-appointed administrator for comment.
© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.
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Year in Review: Domain names and free speech
Registrars continue to grapple with thorny questions about content.
What role do domain name organizations play when it comes to free speech? This continued to be a hot topic in 2018.
In the United States, the government cannot limit free speech. But businesses are not obliged to do the same.
Domain name companies try to stay out of thorny issues about content on websites but they have limits. Last year, GoDaddy told the operator of the white nationalist site Daily Stormer to move his domain off the platform after the death during the Charlottesville rallies. The website’s content wasn’t hosted at GoDaddy, but GoDaddy faced lots of pressure. The kicker was when GoDaddy determined that the site was inciting violence.
This year GoDaddy took similar action with Gab.com after the person who murdered people in a Pittsburgh synagogue was found to have posted hate speech on the site.
Rob Monster, the founder and CEO of domain name registrar Epik, welcomed Gab.com onto his platform. Although he doesn’t agree with much of the commentary on the site, he believes that sites should not be “de-platformed”. The decision to accept the domain brought a lot of heat and a subpoena from Pennsylvania’s attorney general.
It will be interesting to see how domain companies approach this thorny issue going forward. Will registries get more involved on various types of domain takedowns?
© DomainNameWire.com 2018. This is copyrighted content. Domain Name Wire full-text RSS feeds are made available for personal use only, and may not be published on any site without permission. If you see this message on a website, contact copyright (at) domainnamewire.com. Latest domain news at DNW.com: Domain Name Wire.
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Google publishes their TLD registry software: Nomulus
Google announced this morning that they are releasing their TLD registry platform, Nomulus, which is written in Java, under an Apache 2.0 license. The company uses the software to run their own registry for their TLDs. Portfolio TLD applicant Donuts has partnered with Google and contributed to the source code – they will also be running a public test instance of the system, which is geared towards being run on the Google Cloud Platform. So far, Rightside (NASDAQ: NAME) has been operating Donuts’ registry backend.
Also covered by:
- DomainNameWire: Google open sources domain registry, Donuts collaborates as pressure on registry providers mounts. The article focusses on the rising pressure on Domain Registry Operators, and a potential switch of platforms by Donuts away from Rightside.
Here’s the full press release:
Introducing Nomulus: an Open Source Top-Level Domain Name RegistryDate: Tuesday, October 18, 2016 8:00am PT
Author: Ben McIlwain, Software Engineer
Today, Google is proud to announce the release of Nomulus, a new open source cloud-based registry platform that powers Google’s top level domains (TLDs). We’re excited to make this piece of Internet infrastructure available to everyone.
TLDs are the top level of the Internet Domain Name System (DNS), and they collectively host every domain name on the Internet. To manage a TLD, you need a domain name registry — a behind-the-scenes system that stores registration details and DNS information for all domain names under that TLD. It handles WHOIS queries and requests to buy, check, transfer, and renew domain names. When you purchase a domain name on a TLD using a domain name registrar, such as Google Domains, the registrar is actually conducting business with that TLD’s registry on your behalf. That’s why you can transfer a domain from one registrar to another and have it remain active and 100% yours the entire time.
The project that became Nomulus began in 2011 when the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) announced the biggest ever expansion of Internet namespace, aimed at improving choice and spurring innovation for Internet users. Google applied to operate a number of new generic TLDs, and built Nomulus to help run them.
We designed Nomulus to be a brand-new registry platform that takes advantage of the scalability and easy operation of Google Cloud Platform. Nomulus runs on Google App Engine and is backed by Google Cloud Datastore, a highly scalable NoSQL database. Nomulus can manage any number of TLDs in a single shared instance and supports the full range of TLD functionality required by ICANN, including the Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP), WHOIS, reporting, and trademark protection. It is written in Java and is released under the Apache 2.0 license.
We hope that by providing access to our implementation of core registry functions and up-and-coming services like Registration Data Access Protocol (RDAP), we can demonstrate advanced features of Google Cloud Platform and encourage interoperability and open standards in the domain name industry for registry operators like Donuts. With approximately 200 TLDs, Donuts has made early contributions to the Nomulus code base and has spun up an instance which they’ll be sharing soon.
For more information, view Nomulus on GitHub.
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