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.CLUB revenue not all that

Kevin Murphy, August 21, 2018, 17:22:09 (UTC), Domain Registries

.CLUB Domains may be one of the 5000 fastest-growing companies in the US, according to Inc magazine, but it’s returning the majority of its revenue back to its registrars.
CEO Colin Campbell revealed this week that the company returns almost 70% of its gross revenue in the form of rebates.
The revelation came in an interview with Domain Name Wire on its latest podcast.
Campbell told Andrew Allemann that in 2017 .CLUB had $9.3 million in what he called “cash flow” or “gross revenue”.
But “net cash” or “net revenue”, after rebates was just $2.8 million, meaning $6.5 million was returned to registrars via promotions.
The interview came a few days after Inc named the company 1164th in its 2018 list of fastest-growing US companies.
Inc had .CLUB’s revenue at $7.2 million, but that appears to have been calculated using the usual accounting standards of deferring revenue into future periods over the lifetime of the domain subscription.
.club has something like 1.4 million names under management.
Campbell said that the company is “adding about a million dollars of net revenue per year” and he predicted 2018 gross cash to come in at $10.5 million and net to come in at $3.7 million.
That’s a net revenue figure, remember, not a profit or net income line. Campbell said he’s more interested in growing the business rather than paying taxes on profits.
The aggressive rebating seems to have a focus in China, where it has regular deals with the likes of Alibaba (which was .club’s biggest registrar with 20% of the market at the last count) and West.cn.
While .CLUB is private, Campbell has been frank about its performance in the past.
The DNW interview follows DI’s interview with Campbell on more or less the same topic last September, and DNW’s in 2016.
It’s a good podcast, you should have a listen.

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Comments (3)

  1. George Kirikos says:
    August 21, 2018 at 11:20 pm

    That “gross revenue” is kind of silly, and can make things easy to manipulate.
    Suppose they set the sticker price of .club to $1 million per domain, but gave each registrar a rebate of $999,990 per domain. They’d still get their $10/domain “net revenue”, but their overall gross revenue (with a million domains) would be a trillion dollars .

    Reply
  2. Brad Mugford says:
    August 22, 2018 at 12:51 am

    That seems like a rather misleading way of accounting.
    It is certainly easy to manipulate the numbers to tell a different story doing that.
    Brad

    Reply

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