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Wix.com obtains ICANN accreditation — bad news for Web.com?
Kevin Murphy,
July 26, 2018, 18:49:18 (UTC),
Domain Registrars
Web site building tools provider Wix.com has got itself an ICANN accreditation, potentially bad news for current partner Web.com.
The Nasdaq-listed, Israel-based company popped up on the official registrar list in the last day or so with the IANA ID 3817.
That means it could before long start selling gTLD domains directly from the registries rather than going through its current business partner.
According to its domain services agreement and other online sources, Wix currently acts as a reseller for Network Solutions, a Web.com company.
Its retail prices are therefore, as you might expect, rather above the market average, pretty much in line with NetSol’s.
If it does choose to go solo, it could potentially pass on savings to its customers, or just pocket higher margins on domain sales.
While Wix says it has 110 million users, obviously it has sold nowhere near that number of domains.
Its relationship with NetSol is not lucrative enough for Web.com to count the relationship as a risk factor in its Securities and Exchange Commission filings, though Wix is listed as one of just a small handful of competitors.
If Web.com should lose Wix as a reseller, we won’t get to find out what impact that had on revenue; Web.com’s going private in a $2 billion deal.
Disclosure: I’ve had to listen to or skip through repetitive Wix ads on YouTube a dozen times a day for what seems like years, so I’m not naturally predisposed to like this company. Same goes for Grammarly. Grrrr!
…”Disclosure: I’ve had to listen to or skip through repetitive Wix ads on YouTube a dozen times a day for what seems like years”… what? So you don’t want to build a “dope” website with wix.com. Man, those ads are stupid and annoying, but it looks like they’re working!
If I wanted to build a “dope” site, I’d choose a .buzz domain.
Domain names have historically accounted for 7% of Wix’s revenue, so figure about $10M per quarter.
So well over one million names under management?
I would think so. They have 3.7 million paying customers. On all but the cheapest package, customers get a free domain if they pay annually.
That is the occupational hazard of a wholesale registrar – over time their bigger customers outgrow the reseller model and move on. Tough business.