GoDaddy now making over $1 billion a quarter

It doesn’t seem like five minutes ago that GoDaddy became the first domain registrar to top $1 billion in annual revenue. It was actually 2013. Now, it’s doing that in a quarter.

The company last night reported fourth-quarter revenue of $1.02 billion, almost half of which was from domains, up from $873.9 million a year earlier.

Domains revenue was up a whopping 23.6% at $497.3 million, but this was mainly due to aftermarket sales and the registry business.

The company does not report its domains under management, growth or renewal rates in its quarterly earnings announcements.

CFO Mark McCaffrey told analysts that up to two thirds of the growth could be attributed to the aftermarket, where domains sell at premium prices, and GoDaddy “saw an uptick in both volume and average deal size”.

He also highlighted GoDaddy Registry as a key growth contributor, due to the launch in Q4 of a “reputation protection solution” that I can only assume refers to the AdultBlock service that blocks trademarks in the company’s four porn gTLDs.

GoDaddy sent out renewal notices for AdultBlock, valued at as much as $30 million, in December.

It’s not currently possible to measure the success of AdultBlock from public data sources. GoDaddy expunged the roughly 80,000 blocked .xxx domains from its zone file on December 1. Whereas they previously resolved to a registry placeholder, now they do not resolve at all.

Domains revenue for the full year was $1.81 billion, up 19.5%. Including non-domains businesses, annual revenue was $3.81 billion, up 15%.

The company had 2021 net income of $242.8 million, reversing a loss of $494.1 million in 2020.

Post-lockdown blues hit Tucows’ growth

Tucows’ domain business was pretty much flat in the fourth quarter and full-year 2021, as the company hit the trough following the spike of the pandemic lockdown bump.

The registrar said last night that its Domain Services business saw new registrations down or flat in both wholesale and retail channels, even when compared to pre-pandemic levels.

The company said (pdf) it ended the year with 25.2 million domains under management, down from 25.4 million a year earlier. The total number of new, renewed or transferred-in domains was 17.4 million, down from 18.2 million.

For the fourth quarter, the total new, renewed or transferred-in domains was 4 million, compared to 4.3 million a year earlier.

In prepared remarks (pdf), CEO Elliot Noss said that wholesale-segment registrations were down 6% to 3.7 million in Q4 and new registrations were down 27% from 2020’s pandemic-related “outsized volumes”.

In retail, total new, renewed and transferred registrations for the quarter were just over 310,000, down 16%, he said. New registrations were down 21% year over year.

The domains business reported revenue of $61.4 million in the fourth quarter, down from $61.8 million in the year-earlier period.

Domain revenue from wholesale was down to $47.1 million from $47.5 million. Retail was down to $8.7 million from $9.2 million. EBITDA across both channels was $11.6 million, down from $12.1 million.

The renewal rates for wholesale and retail were a more-than-respectable 80% and 85% respectively.

Some of the declines can be attributed to the pandemic-related bump Tucows and other registrars experienced in 2020.

Margins had been impacted a bit by the acquisition of UNR’s back-end registry business, the integration of which Noss said has now been fully completed.

For the full company, including non-domain businesses such as mobile and fiber, revenue for the year was down 2.2% at $304.3 million and net income was down 41.7% at $3.4 million.

The company also announced it has renewed its $40 million share buyback program.

Surprising nobody, Verisign to raise .com prices again

Verisign has announced its second consecutive annual price increase for .com domain names.

The wholesale registry fee for .com names will rise from $8.39 to $8.97 on September 1 this year, an extra $0.58 for every new or renewing domain, of which there are currently over 160 million.

Verisign announced the move, which was expected, as it announced a 2021 profit of $785 million and a 65.3% operating margin.

CEO Jim Bidzos, speaking to analysts, played down the impact of the increases on .com registrants, pointing out that .com prices were frozen under the Obama administration and have only gone up once before, last year, since 2012.

“This is the second wholesale price increase for COM since January of 2012,” he said. “So, if you look back over the last 10 years, that translates into a cost increase of only 1.3% CAGR over the last ten and a half years actually.”

The current .com contract, signed off by the Trump administration and ICANN, allows for two more 7% annual price increases, excluding the just-announced one, but Bidzos would not say whether Verisign plans to exercise those options.

If it does (and it almost certainly will) it would raise the price to $10.26, where it would stay until at least October 2026, he said.

“We believe .com continues to be positioned competitively,” he said.

It’s still basically free money for Verisign, which saw strong fourth-quarter and full-year 2021 results.

The company yesterday reported revenue of $1.33 billion for 2021, up 4.9%, with net income of $785 million, down from $815 million. The operating margin was 65.3%, compared to 65.2%.

For the fourth quarter, revenue was up 6.3% to $340 million, with net income of $330 million compared to $157 million. Operating margin was 65.3%, compared to 63.9%.

For 2022, the company is guiding for revenue of between $1.42 billion and $1.44 billion, based on the price increases and predicted unit growth of between 2.5% and 4.5%. The operating margin is expected to be between 64.5% and 65.5%.

Bidzos also addressed the controversial .web gTLD, which it won at auction but has been unable to launch due to legal action pursued by rival bidder Afilias/Altanovo.

An Independent Review Process panel recently threw a decision about .web back at ICANN, which is now considering Afilias’ allegations of wrongdoing at the board level.

“ICANN looks to be moving forward with making the decision on the delegation of .web, and we will be monitoring their process,” Bidzos said. He said that Verisign has not budgeted for any revenue or costs from .web in 2022.

That’s probably wise. Afilias recently told us that it has not stopped fighting against Verisign’s .web win.

GoDaddy says it turned around Neustar, and .biz numbers seem to confirm that

GoDaddy is pleased with how its new registry division is doing, with CEO Aman Bhutani claiming last night that it’s managed to turn around the fortunes of Neustar, which became part of GoDaddy Registry a year ago.

Reporting a strong third quarter of domains revenue growth, Bhutani highlighted the secondary market and the registry as drivers. In prepared remarks, he said:

On Registry, we are continuing to prove our ability to acquire, integrate, and accelerate. A great example is the cohort performance within GoDaddy Registry. When we acquired Neustar’s registry assets in Q3 last year, its new cohorts were shrinking, with new unit registrations down 4% year over year. We are now one year into the acquisition, and we’re pleased to report that within that first year, we have been able to accelerate new business significantly. We are now seeing new unit registrations increase nearly 20% year over year — all organically.

If you’re wondering what a “cohort” is, it appears to refer to GoDaddy’s way of, for analysis purposes, slicing up its customers, how much they spend and how profitable they are, into tranches according to the years in which they became customers.

So GoDaddy’s saying here that Neustar’s number of new customers was going down, and it was selling 4% fewer new domains, at the time of the acquisition last year, but that that trend has now been reversed, with new regs up 20%.

The numbers are not really possible to verify. Neustar’s main three TLDs for volume purposes were .us, .co and .biz, and of those only .biz is contractually obliged to publish its zone file and registry numbers.

But look at .biz!

That’s .biz’s daily zone file numbers for the last two years, with the August 2020 acquisition highlighted by a subtle arrow. It’s only added about 50,000 net names since the deal, but it’s reversing an otherwise negative trend.

Monthly transaction reports show .biz had been on a general downward, if spiky, line since its early 2014 peak of 2.7 million names. It’s now at about 1.4 million.

When asked how the company achieved such a feat, Bhutani credited “execution” and left it at that. Perhaps this means something to financial analysts.

When asked by an analyst whether GoDaddy was giving its own TLDs preferential treatment, promoting its owned strings on the registrar in order to better compete with .com at the registry, Bhutani denied such frowned-upon behavior:

We don’t do that. All TLDs work on our registrar side in terms of their merit. It’s about value to the customer — whatever works best irrespective of whether we own the registry side or not. That’s what we’ll sell in front of the customer.

The company reported domains revenue up 17% at $453.2 million for the third quarter, with overall revenue up 14% at $964 million compared to year-ago numbers. Net income was up to $97.7 million from $65.1 million a year ago.

GoDaddy expects domains revenue to grow in the low double digits percent-wise in the current quarter.

Verisign boss talks .web launch, timing and pricing

Verisign hasn’t fully won .web yet, but it expects to soon and is talking in general terms about what the it might look like live.

CEO Jim Bidzos yesterday told analysts that he expects the Independent Review Process panel currently considering an appeal by rival applicant Afilias to deliver its final verdict before the end of the year. No hearings are scheduled.

Afilias claims Verisign and its secret proxy, Nu Dot Co, cheated, and that ICANN broke its own rules, in the 2016 auction that saw Verisign promise to pay $135 million for .web. Verisign thinks the claims are rubbish.

Bidzos told analysts, wanting to known when they can put .web revenue into the models, that it while it’s a “bit early to speculate” when the company will launch .web, it will likely happen a “couple of quarters from delegation”.

On pricing, he noted that .web does not have the same price controls as .com and .net:

.web is, of course, different from .com and net and that it’s not a price controlled TLD… We do have flexibility with it that we don’t have with other TLDs, and premiums are available. Other sorts of options are available.

But will the company put its marketing muscle behind .web? Many people, myself included, have said that Verisign’s interest in the gTLD is more about keeping it out of its rivals hands. Bidzos said:

There certainly will be some sort of marketing launch that will occur, but I just think it’s too early to really talk about what that would look like and what the expense impact will be. But we certainly intend to market and promote .web. Our plan, our desire, as we’ve stated — and I’ll say again — is to offer our customers more choice and to make .web a very successful TLD.

His comments came as Verisign reported its third-quarter financial results.

The company reported revenue up 5.1% at $334 million and net income of $157 million compared to $171 million a year ago.

It had 172.1 million .com and .net domains in its registry at the end of the quarter, up 1.48 million sequentially and a 5.1% increase on the year-ago number.

Nothing but losses ahead for MMX

Former new gTLD registry MMX has delivered its latest set of financial results and warned that, without any operating business, it will be loss-making for the foreseeable future.

The company today reported a first-half loss of $783,000, compared to a loss of $1.25 million in the year-ago period.

That’s calculated from its ongoing operations, which since the $120 million sale of its registry business to GoDaddy comprises no revenue-generating activities but substantial costs keeping the company running and maintaining its listing on the AIM stock market.

Profit from discontinued operations was $3.38 million, compared to $2.68 million.

It still has small “RSP” business, providing non-technical back-office management services to a few former gTLD partners, but this will be wound down or sold off.

CEO Tony Farrow said in a statement:

We are now in the process of delivering the transition services agreed with GoDaddy Registry and disposing of, or otherwise winding down, our RSP Business. Whilst the transition services are being provided on a cost recovery basis, the Company’s ongoing administrative and other public company costs will result in operating losses for the Group going forward.

When the winding down of existing businesses is done, MMX will look for acquisition opportunities or act as a vessel for a reverse takeover.

It’s currently returning $80 million of its GoDaddy cash to investors with a buyback, but this is not enough to clear all of its shares.

CentralNic expects H1 revenue of $174 million

A decade ago, CentralNic was scraping by selling domain names at the third level, and now it’s now on track to clear $300 million top line this year.

The domain industry consolidator said yesterday that it expects revenue for the first half of 2021 to be in the region of $174 million, which earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of $20 million.

Third-quarter revenue is expected to be about $90 million, which works out to 63% growth or roughly 25% organic growth, excluding the impact of recent acquisitions.

Organic growth was 16% for the first quarter 2021 and 9% for the full year 2020.

The company also said cash is up and debt is down.

It’s pretty good going for a company that, when it listed on London’s AIM market in 2013 had H1 revenue of about $2 million, based on not much more than its dubious business of selling 3LDs under the likes of .gb.com and .uk.com and a couple of low-volume ccTLD back-end contracts.

Since then, its acquisition streak has seen it branch out into registrars (where it owns a bunch, wholesale and retail, of various sizes, all over the world) new gTLD back-end services (where it runs at least 90 TLDs) and, more recently, domain monetization.

CentralNic trumpets organic growth as its registrars reverse shrinkage

While positioning itself as a consolidator for the last few years, CentralNic today boasted that it’s also growing organically by a healthy amount.

The company reported Q1 revenue up 48% compared to a year ago at $84.4 million. Organic revenue growth for the same period was reported at 16%. It made a loss after tax of $1.4 million, but adjusted EBITDA of $10.1 million.

CentralNic’s indirect segment, which includes its registry and wholesale registrar businesses, saw revenue up 24% to $25.4 million, led by the registrar. Organic growth was 13%.

The direct segment, which comprises customer-facing retail and corporate registrars and brand monitoring services, saw revenue up 29% to $13.7 million. Organic growth was also 13%.

That segment had seen a drag from the corporate segment in 2020 that was blamed on the coronavirus pandemic, but today CentralNic said “both the Retail business and the Corporate business have returned to growth”.

The company’s newest and already biggest revenue-generating segment is online marketing, which boils down to domain monetization services. Revenue there was up 76% or 19% organically at $45.3 million.

This was largely driven by PubTONIC, a traffic arbitrage platform it acquired with Team Internet last year. The service basically allows web site owners to buy redirect traffic from parked domains.

MMX’s year marked by terrible renewals

MMX saw its revenue dip in 2020, and it reported shocking renewal rates at two of its highest-volume gTLDs, according to the company’s annual financial results, published this morning.

The portfolio registry, which is in the process of selling off essentially its entire operating business to GoDaddy, reported revenue of $16.8 million for the year, down from $17.2 million in 2019.

Profit was up very slighty, to $2.9 million from $2.8 million.

The 2019 results included a few one-off gains, including $588,000 from losing a new gTLD auction, which accounted for most of the 2020 revenue decline.

But the company also reported a 19% decline in domains under management, from 2.46 million to 1.99 million, based on some terrible renewal rates in its .vip and .work gTLDs.

The DUM decline can be attributed mostly to .vip, a popular TLD among Chinese speculators, which started 2020 with around 1.4 million domains but finished the year with just over a million.

.work actually ended the year up on where it started, with around 709,000 names under management.

But MMX today disclosed that the renewal rates for .vip and .work were 36% and 18% respectively. In a business where 70%+ is considered healthy, these are some poor numbers indeed.

However, the company discontinued first-year promotions on these TLDs in 2020, focusing instead on selling domains likely to lead to recurring renewal revenue, which lead to 14% (.vip) and 19% (.work) increases in revenue.

Fewer domains. More money.

MMX said that it is seeing these trends continuing into 2021. Public transaction reports show both these TLDs losing 40-50,0000 names in January. The company expects revenue to fall 4% in the first quarter compared to Q1 2020.

One bright spot appears to be “The Great Relese”, the company’s move last month to mark down hundreds of thousands of premium-priced domains. That’s brought in $170,000 since its April 23 launch.

One basket where the company is placing a lot of its eggs is AdultBlock, the trademark protection service it inherited when it acquired ICM Registry a few years back. It enables customers to block their brands in .xxx, .porn, .adult and .sex without actually having to register the names.

The 10-year period ICM allowed brands to block when it launched in 2011 is coming to an end, so MMX is banking on renewals (which retail at $349 to $799 per year before multi-year discounts) to boost revenue.

“While it is early in the AdultBlock Sunrise B renewal period, we are encouraged by Registrar interest and some early sales of this product,” CEO Tony Farrow said in a statement.

This reliance on AdultBlock for short-term organic growth was one of the reasons MMX is selling up to GoDaddy.

The market-leading registrar and fast-emerging registry consolidator agreed to pay $120 million for MMX’s portfolio, which will leave MMX as a shell company only long enough to distribute the cash to investors before fading away quietly.

That deal has an August deadline to close and is dependent on approvals from business partners, ICANN and the Chinese government.

Earnings reports: GoDaddy, Tucows and NameSilo report growth

Three of the industry’s largest registrars announced revenue growth in their latest reporting periods in recent days.

GoDaddy

Market-leading GoDaddy reported a whopping 18.8% year-over-year revenue growth from domains in its first quarter, with $422.7 million.

CEO Aman Bhutani told analysts that much of this growth is being driven by the company’s emerging strategy of acting as a secondary-market intermediary, making it easier for domainers to sell their domains quickly to end-users (what it calls “independent customers”) and vice-versa.

“Independent customers added over 200,000 domain names that had otherwise been passive into the aftermarket, spurring activity for domain investors,” Bhutani said.

It currently has over 20 million domains listed on its aftermarket platform, contributing 10% of total revenue, the first time it’s broken into double-digits, analysts were told.

Domains was the best-performing segment in growth terms by some margin.

Including its other segments, GoDaddy’s overall Q1 revenue was up 13.8% year over year, at $901.1 million. It had a net income of $10.8 million, compared to $43.2 million a year earlier.

Tucows

Tucows reported domain services revenue up 4%, from $59.5 million in Q1 2020 to $61.2 million, with adjusted EBIDTA of $13.8 million versus $11.5 million a year ago.

CEO Elliot Noss said in a statement that new domain registration growth was slowing following the “pandemic surge” it experienced in 2020, when lockdown-hit businesses flew online to keep afloat.

Including its non-domain segments, Tucows reported Q1 revenue of $70.9 million. That was down from $84 million a year earlier largely as a result of the sale of its Ting Mobile business to Dish Network.

Net income for the quarter was $2.1 million, down 24% compared to the year-ago period.

NameSilo

Fast-growing registrar NameSilo reported revenue for its full-year 2020 of $31 million, up 14.3% on 2019. That was primarily driven by domains growth and its newish add-on services, it said, but it does not break down its revenue by segment.

It had net income of $6.5 million in fiscal 2020, compared to a net loss of $4 million in 2019.

It added 235,347 net domains in gTLDs in 2020, according to reports filed with ICANN, ending 2020 with 3,663,090 names under management. NameSilo said that number is now around 3.9 million.