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Rightside new gTLD renewals can top 80%

Kevin Murphy, October 14, 2016, Domain Registries

Rightside says it is seeing encouraging renewal figures from its oldest batch of new gTLDs.
The company this week revealed that renewals after two years of ownership on average stand at 81%.
In a blog post, Rightside broke out some numbers for .dance, .democrat, .ninja, .immobilien, .social, .reviews and .futbol.
Those seven are the only ones in its portfolio to have gone through two full renewal cycles.
The renewal rate after year one was a modest 69% — in other words it lost almost a third of its installed base after 12 months — but this increased to 81% after the second year.
The actual number of domains involved in quite tiny — 81% equates to just 21,000 names across all seven TLDs.
Breaking out a couple of TLDs, Rightside wrote:

Our first gTLD to market, .DANCE, saw a 70% renewal rate in year one expand to 83% in year two for that same subset of domains. Our best performing gTLD of the seven is .IMMOBILIEN, which renewed at 83% in its first year, and grew to a stupendous 87% in its second—which certainly makes sense given the permanent nature of real estate.

But Rightside reckons the numbers reflect well on the new gTLD industry. It said:

domain investors with portfolios including new gTLDs recognize the long-term value of these domain names, and rather than let them drop after the first year, are holding onto them to find the right buyer continue to earn parking revenue. Second—and likely the more significant driver—is that end users are actually picking up these domain names and putting them to use.

Rightside rejects Negari’s $5m new gTLD offer

Kevin Murphy, April 8, 2016, Domain Registries

Rightside has turned down Daniel Negari’s $5 million offer to acquire four of its new gTLDs, according to Negari.
The XYZ.com CEO told DI via email tonight:

I was looking forward to operating .Army, .Dance, .Dentist, and .Vet under the XYZ umbrella. I’m disappointed that Rightside didn’t entertain my offer, especially since I believe $5MM was more than fair. I believe these and other new TLDs are worth more to me than any other registry operator due to my growing enterprise. However, it’s understandable for Rightside to want to monetize on these assets.

Rightside has told him it had reviewed the offer and was not interested, he said.
The offer was made in a March 30 open letter to the company and Securities and Exchange Commission filing and expired last night, April 7.
There was some speculation about whether it was a genuine offer, just an attempt to boost Rightside’s share price, or both.
Negari and his COO, Mike Ambrose, own about 5% of Rightside between them, following an $8.5 million investment.
Rightside’s ability to grow revenue from its new gTLD portfolio has become the focus of attention due to the intervention of activist investor J Carlo Cannell of Cannell Capital, who reckons the company is paying too much attention to rubbish TLDs at the expense of its profitable registrar businesses.
Negari thinks he would be able to grow .army, .dance, .dentist, and .vet.
The largest of those gTLDs is .vet, with about 5,200 names in its zone file. It grew by 794 names in the last 90 days.
The other three are below 3,000 names, and are either shrinking or adding fewer than 10 names per day.
XYZ.com’s second-tier portfolio strings, such as .college, .rent and .theatre, are faring a little better, at least in terms of growth. But they are a little younger, and none are over 10,000 names.