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Squarespace files to go public in New York

Kevin Murphy, April 19, 2021, Domain Registrars

Web site tools maker and registrar Squarespace has filed its papers for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company is focused on serving small businesses by simplifying the process of building web sites. It sells domains as a value-added service, but it’s not its core competency.

In filing for its IPO, the company said its revenue last year was $621 million, up 28% on 2019. It had a net profit of $30.6 million, down from $58.2 million the previous year.

Squarespace said it has 3.7 million unique subscriptions, but it did not break down how many of those are domain registrations.

Squarespace has been an ICANN-accredited registrar since 2018, but it has historically acted as a Tucows/OpenSRS reseller. That dynamic changed a little last year.

It sold about 10,000 .com domains per month on its own accreditation in the fourth quarter. It’s accredited in many other gTLDs, but has yet to sell any domains there on its own IANA tag.

Celebrity cybersquatting to feature in Super Bowl commercial [video]

Kevin Murphy, January 25, 2017, Domain Registrars

Actor turned fashion designer John Malkovich is to feature in a Super Bowl commercial themed on cybersquatting.
The ad, for web host Squarespace, sees Malkovich complaining about the domain johnmalkovich.com belonging to some other guy by the same name.
In a roundabout way, this is also a commercial for Tucows, the newly-crowned second-largest domain registrar, which Squarespace acts as a reseller for.
Here’s the ad:

In reality, Malkovich owns the the .com of his full name. He sells clothes there.
However, he’s reportedly currently suing the owner of malkovich.com in France.
Clarification: a reader has asked me to clarify that using a domain in good faith isn’t strictly “cybersquatting”. Every DI reader already knows this, but apparently unless you spell it out every single time you risk incurring the anger of cretins.