Donuts may make .travel names easier to buy after acquiring its first legacy gTLD

Donuts has added .travel to its swelling portfolio of gTLDs, under a deal with original registry Tralliance announced today.
It’s the company’s first acquisition of a legacy, pre-2012 gTLD, and the first “community” gTLD to join its stable of strings, which now stands at 239.
.travel went live in 2005, a part of ICANN’s 2003 round of “sponsored” TLD applications.
As a sponsored TLD, .travel has eligibility and authentication requirements, but executive vice president Jon Nevett told DI that Donuts will look at “tinkering with” the current process to make domains easier to buy.
The current system requires what amounts to basically a self-declaration that you belong to the travel community, he said, but you have to visit the registry’s web site to obtain an authentication code before a registrar will let you buy a .travel domain.
Given that the community captured by .travel is extremely broad — you could be somebody blogging about their vacations and qualify — it seems to be a barrier of limited usefulness.
Nevett said Donuts has no immediate plans to migrate the TLD away from the Neustar back-end upon which it currently sits.
The rest of its portfolio runs on its own in-house registry platform, and one imagines that .travel will wind up there one day.
While .travel is one of Donuts most-expensive domains — priced at $99 retail at its own Name.com registrar — Nevett said there are no plans to cut pricing as yet.
There may be discounts, he said, and possibly promotions involving bundling with other travel-related gTLDs in its portfolio.
Donuts already runs .city, .holiday, .flights, .cruises, .vacations and several other thematically synergistic name spaces.
.travel had about 18,000 domains registered at the last count, with EnCirca, Name.com, 101domain, Key-Systems and CSC Corporate as its top five registrars.
It peaked 10 years ago at just under 215,000 registrations, largely due to to speculative bulk registrations made by parties connected to the registry that were dumped a couple of years later.
It’s been at under 20,000 names for the last five years, shrinking by small amounts every year.
The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Famous Four chair pumps $5.4 million into AlpNames to settle COO lawsuit

Famous Four Media chair Iain Roache has bought out his former COO’s stake in AlpNames, its affiliated registrar, settling a lawsuit between the two men.
He’s acquired Charles Melvin’s 20% stake in the company for £3.9 million ($5.4 million), according to a press release.
A spokesperson confirmed that the deal settles a lawsuit in the companies’ home territory of Gibraltar, which we reported on in December.
Roache said in the press release that he has a plan to grow AlpNames into a “Tier 1 registrar”:
“I’ve got a 10 year strategic plan, which includes significant additional investment, to set the business up for future growth and success,” he said. “We’re going to bring the competition to the incumbents!”
AlpNames is basically the registrar arm of Famous Four, over the last few years supporting the gTLD portfolio registry’s strategy of selling domains in the sub-$1 range and racking up huge market share as a result.
But it’s on a bit of a slide, volume-wise, right now, as hundreds of thousands of junk domains are allowed to expire.
According to today’s press release, AlpNames has 794,000 gTLD domains under management. That’s a far cry from its peak of 3.1 million just under a year ago.
Seller Melvin, according to the press release, “has decided to pursue other interests outside of the domain name industry”.
It appears he left his COO job at Famous Four some time last year, and then sued Roache and CEO Geir Rasmussen (also an AlpNames investor) over a financial matter. Previous attempts to buy him out were rebuffed.
Last October, the Gibraltar court ruled that the defendants has supplied the court with “forged documents” in the form of inaccurately dated invoices between the registry and AlpNames.
The pair insisted to the court that the documents were an honest mistake and their lawyer told DI that there was no “forgery” in the usual sense of the word.
But it appears that Melvin’s split from the companies was less than friendly and the £3.9 million buyout should probably be viewed in that light.

MMX profitable as acquisition talks drag on

New gTLD registry Minds + Machines became profitable as an operating company for the first time in 2017, the company announced on Friday.
MMX saw billings of $10 million in the second half of the year, compared to $5.6 million in the first half, as domains under management grew 67% to 1.32 million.
Billings is a measure of sales, rather than the more formal measure of revenue for accounting purposes.
Renewals accounted for $5.6 million of billings in the year, which “for the first-time has exceeded fixed operating costs which have been reduced to below $5.5 million for 2017”.
The company’s bottom line will also boosted by $2.1 million due to MMX losing the .inc and .llc new gTLD auctions.
MMX also provided an update on its “strategic review”, a code word for the “acquisition by or sale/merger of the Company” that it announced last May.
The company said “the longevity of the discussions has been at times frustrating” but that it hopes to have something to announce by the time it reports its formal 2017 results in April.
MMX had originally hoped to have concluded these talks before last September.

CentralNic now owns .sk after $30m deal closes

CentralNic has just closed its acquisition of SK-NIC, the ccTLD operator for Slovakia, the company announced today.
The London-based firm announced the deal back in August, when it was to be worth €21.27 million up front, with a deferred performance-related cash payout of €4.85 million cash over three years.
But the deal, originally intended to close in September, was delayed by legal “complexities” and restructured from an asset purchase to a purchase of SK-NIC, including its liabilities, in its entirety.
The purchase price is now €20.27 million in advance, with €5.85 million deferred. That’s still a total of €26.12 million ($30.67 million).
The acquisition is unusual in that it sees a ccTLD transferring to control of a foreign entity, and was opposed by many in the Slovakian internet community.
A petition was organized calling for the transfer of .sk to a new independent body with more community and government oversight.
There had been fears that CentralNic would do to .sk what it has to Laos’ .la — repurpose it to mean something other than “Slovakia” — but CentralNic told DI that it will no do so.
The deal means .sk will move from its outdated old registry infrastructure to CentralNic’s standards-based EPP platform, which should make it easier for registrars to integrate.
It’s also likely to mean it’s going to be much easier for non-Slovaks to be able to register .sk domains.
SK-NIC currently has about 360,000 domains under management.

CentralNic promises $30 million .sk will only ever mean “Slovakia”

CentralNic has committed that it will not repurpose Slovakian ccTLD .sk to mean anything other than “Slovakia”, following its purchase of SK-NIC this week.
The acquisition of the Bratislava-based registry, which will cost between €21 million and €26 million ($25 million to $31 million) depending on performance, has been controversial in Slovakia, with many leading registrars campaigning against the sale.
One of the charges leveled against CentralNic was that its modus operandi has been to market ccTLDs as if they have other meanings. It markets Laos’ .la as a TLD for Los Angeles, and acts as the back-end for Palau’s .pw, which is marketed as an acronym for “Professional Web”.
“From a technical point of view, it’s definitely a good acquisition. CentralNic has a good system that is stable and working well, but we don’t agree with their sales and marketing policies,” Ondrej Jombik of Slovak registrar Platon told DI today.
Jombik is the person who organized a petition against the sale that attracted almost 10,000 signatures.
“We don’t agree with how they manage national TLD registries,” he said. “What they do in Palau is not acceptable. What they do in Laos is not acceptable. We’re kind of scared what they plan to do with our domain, how they plan to market it.”
But CentralNic CEO Ben Crawford said in an email interview that these concerns are misplaced. He said:

CentralNic has never had plans to repurpose .sk, and CentralNic commits not to market it with any other meaning than as the Slovak country code. Moreover, while some of the ccTLDs we work with welcome the export revenues from repurposing their TLDs, such practices are specifically restricted under recent contractual requirements put in place by the Slovak Government in response to this concern being raised by SK-NIC’s policy committee.

Jombik’s petition, which claimed to be supported by 13 of the top 15 .sk registrars covering 73% of .sk’s 360,000 domains, called for the ccTLD to be handed over to a “new independent non-profit organization” that more fairly represented the Slovak internet community.
But Crawford said that .sk already has strong community representation, which is guaranteed by the registry’s contract with the Slovak government.
“I am honestly unaware of any ccTLD where the Government, the internet community in general and the registrars all have such a defined and important role,” he said, adding:

There will be changes under our management: The Government contract has recently been beefed up placing further stability and disclosure responsibilities on SK-NIC, including escrowing the registry data to the Government cloud, a formalised Service Level Agreement, giving the Government the right to audit SK-NIC’s performance, etc., all of which we will abide by. We have other ideas too on contributing to the Slovak internet, and we are planning to hold discussions with not for profits, industry associations, Universities and other such entities in Slovakia, to seek their guidance on the best ways to do this.

Whether these promises and actions will be enough to assuage critics of the deal, who are also motivated by a sense of national pride and aggrieved that what is arguably a national resource is falling into foreign hands, remains to be seen.
Having a ccTLD manager acquired outright by a foreign entity without a redelegation by ICANN/IANA is an unusual occurrence. Only the $109 million acquisition of .CO Internet by US-based Neustar back in 2014 springs to mind.

Donuts to complete Rightside acquisition tonight

Donuts is on the verge of closing its acquisition of coopetitor Rightside, after the vast majority of Rightside shareholders agreed to sell up.
Rightside just disclosed that owners of 92% of its shares — 17,740,054 shares — have agreed to sell at Donuts’ offer price of $10.60 per share.
That means the remaining 8% of shares that were not tendered will be converted into the right to receive $10.60 and Donuts can close the acquisition before the Nasdaq opens tomorrow morning.
After the $213 million deal closes, Rightside will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Donuts and Donuts can get on with implementing whatever efficiencies it has identified.
Rightside will cease to be publicly listed afterwards.
Together the combined company will be the registry for about 240 new gTLDs, as well as owning its own back-end registry infrastructure and the retail registrar Name.com.

GoDaddy flips hosting business for $456 million

GoDaddy has sold off its recently acquired PlusServer business for €397 million ($456 million).
The buyer is a private equity firm, BC Partners.
The registrar had taken control of the business when it spent $1.79 billion on Host Europe Group earlier this year, but had said from the start that the asset was for sale.
PlusServer sells hosting to larger companies, which have more demanding support needs that small-business-focused GoDaddy is accustomed to dealing with.
The unit was bringing in annual revenue approaching $100 million per year.
GoDaddy said it planned to put the proceeds of the flip towards paying off some loans.

ICANN gives the nod to Donuts-Rightside merger

ICANN has given its consent to the acquisition of Rightside by rival new gTLD registry Donuts, according to the companies.
The nod means that one barrier to the $213 million deal has been lifted.
Rightside, which is listed on Nasdaq, still needs the majority of its shareholders to agree to the deal and to satisfy other customary closing conditions.
ICANN approval does not mean the organization has passed any judgment about whether the deal is pro-competition or anything like that, it just means it’s checked that the buyer has the funds and the nous to run the TLDs in question and is compliant with various policies.
All new gTLD Registry Agreements given ICANN the right to consent — or not — to the contract being assigned to a third party.
The acquisition was announced last month at the end of a turbulent year or so for Rightside.

GoDaddy launches security service after Sucuri acquisition

GoDaddy has revealed the first fruits of its March acquisition of web security service provider Sucuri.
It’s GoDaddy Website Security, what appears to be a budget version of the services Sucuri already offers on a standalone basis.
For $6.99 per month ($83.88/year), the service monitors your web site for malware and removes it upon request. It also keeps tabs on major blacklists to make sure you’re not being blocked by Google, Norton or McAfee.
This low-end offering gets you a 12-hour response time for the cleanup component. You can up that to 30 minutes by taking out the $299.99 per year plan.
The more expensive plan also includes DDoS protection, a malware firewall and integration with a content delivery network for performance.
There’s also an intermediate, $19.99-per-month ($239.88/year) plan that includes the extra features but keeps the response time at 12 hours.
An SSL certificate is included in the two more-expensive packages.
The pricing and feature set looks to compare reasonably well with Sucuri’s standalone products, which start at $16.66 a month and offer response times as fast as four hours.
As somebody who has suffered from three major security problems on GoDaddy over the last decade or so, and found GoDaddy’s response abysmal on all three occasions (despite my generally positive views of its customer service), the new service is a somewhat tempting proposition.

Donuts to pay $213 million for Rightside

Donuts is to acquire Rightside for $213 million, the companies have just announced.
The $10.60 per share cash offer represents a 12% premium over Rightside’s average closing share price over the last 30 days. Rightside’s 52-week high is over $12.
Just one year ago, Donuts offered $70 million for Rightside’s portfolio of gTLDs, but was shot down.
Rightside also turned down a $5 million offer for four gTLDs from XYZ.com in April 2016.
The $213 million offer is funded at least partly by Silicon Valley Bank, which is providing a credit facility to Donuts.
Assuming the deal closes — which will require the holders of more than half its shares to agree to the price — it will make Rightside a private company once more, as a wholly owned Donuts subsidiary.
The two gTLD registries are already partners, with Rightside providing domain registry services for Donuts’ roughly 200 new gTLDs.
There was talk of a split last year, with Donuts apparent endorsement of Google’s Nomulus platform, but the two companies reaffirmed their relationship earlier this year.
Rightside itself has a portfolio of 40 gTLDs, but it’s faced criticism from shareholders over the last year or so over their relatively poor performance.
Activist investor J Carlo Cannell, who owns almost 9% of Rightside, has been pressuring the company’s board to take radical action for the last 15 months.
Earlier this year, Rightside got out of the once-core wholesale registrar game by selling eNom to rival Tucows for $83.5 million.