GoDaddy Super Bowl ad results “best ever”

GoDaddy said its Super Bowl commercial, which aired yesterday, resulted in its “best ever” Sunday for new customers.
The company said in a press release it had seen its “its best-ever Sunday for attracting new customers in the books”.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it sold more domains than its previous Super Bowl efforts, nor that it made more money.
It seems the web site builder service GoCentral, which is currently offered with a free trial period, accounted for “about half” of these new customers.
GoCentral was the subject of the ad, in which the abstract concept of “The Internet” is embodied as an irritating hipster. It can be viewed here:

Complaints about registrars dip in 2016

There were slightly fewer complaints about domain name registrars in 2016, compared to 2015, according to newly published ICANN data, but complaints still run into the tens of thousands.
There were 43,156 complaints about registrars to ICANN Compliance in 2016, compared to 45,926 in 2015, according to the data (pdf). That’s a dip of about 6%.
The overall volume of complaints, and the dip, can be attributed to Whois.
About three quarters of the complaints directed at registrars in 2016 were for Whois inaccuracy — 32,292 complaints in total, down from 34,740 in 2015.
The number of complaints about gTLD registries was pretty much flat at 2,230, despite hundreds of new gTLDs being delegated during the year.
The vast majority of those gTLDs were dot-brands, however, with nowhere near the same kind of potential for abuse as generally available gTLDs.
The biggest cause for complaint against registries, representing about half the total, was the Zone File Access program. I’ve filed a few of these myself, against dot-brands that decide the ZFA policy doesn’t apply to them.
Formal, published breach notices were also down on the year, with 25 breaches, four suspensions and four terminations, compared to 32 breaches, six suspensions and eight terminations in 2015.
That’s the second consecutive year the number of breach notices was down.

GoDaddy revenue tops $1.8 billion in 2016

GoDaddy today said that its revenue for 2016 topped $1.8 billion.
In a preliminary disclosure to the markets ahead of its formal February 15 earnings announcement, the registrar said that annual revenue for 2016 is expected to come in at $1.84 billion.
That compares to $1.6 billion in 2015.
Its fourth-quarter revenue is expected to be $486 million, up from $425 million in the fourth quarter of 2015.
GoDaddy said that at the end of the year it had $573 million in cash and equivalents and just over a $1 billion in long-term debt.

Celebrity cybersquatting to feature in Super Bowl commercial [video]

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.

Rightside sells eNom to Tucows for $83.5m

Tucows is to become “the second largest registrar in the world” by acquiring eNom from Rightside, paying $83.5 million.
The deal will give Tucows another 14.5 million domains under management and 28,000 resellers, giving it a total of 29 million DUM and 40,000 resellers.
That DUM number, which appears to include ccTLDs, makes Tucows the undisputed volume leader in the reseller world and the second-largest registrar overall.
GoDaddy, the DUM leader, had about 55 million domains just in gTLDs at the last count.
Tucows CEO Elliot Noss told analysts that the deal, along with the April 2016 acquisition of Melbourne IT’s reseller business, were “individual opportunistic transactions”.
He said that Tucows will take its time integrating the two companies, but expects to realize cost savings (presumably read: job losses as duplicate administrative positions are eliminated) over 24 months.
The reseller APIs will not change, and Tucows will not migrate names over to its own existing ICANN accreditations. This could help with reseller retention.
For Rightside, the company said the spin-off will allow it to focus on vertical integration between its gTLD registry business and its consumer-facing registrar, Name.com.
Rightside had come in for a certain amount of high-profile investor criticism for its dogged focus on new gTLDs at the expense of its eNom and Name.com businesses.
Activist investor J Carlo Cannell, supported by fellow investor and Uniregistry CEO Frank Schilling, a year ago accused Rightside of putting too much emphasis on “garbage” new gTLDs instead of its more profitable registrar businesses.
Since then, Rightside has rebuffed separate offers for some or all of its gTLDs by rivals Donuts and XYZ.com.
Last June, it also announced plans to modernize eNom, which Cannell and others had accused of looking stale compared to its competitors.

Domain “slammer” making millions in Oz

A company accused of the domain slamming scam made over $5 million over three years tricking companies into buying domains they didn’t need, it has been alleged.
Consumer Affairs Victoria, an Australian state government watchdog, has reportedly taken Domain Register Pty Ltd to court, claiming tens of thousands of people had been conned by fake invoices.
The company sent letters that appeared to be renewal notices for .com.au names, but were actually solicitations to buy the matching .com for AUD 249 ($186) a year, an Adelaide court reportedly heard.
Domain Register, which appears to be (or was) a reseller of TPP Wholesale, made AUD 7.7 million ($5.5 million) from 31,000 suckers between 2011 and 2014, according to local reports.
auDA, the .au domain registry, warned about the company as far back as 2011.
An example of a bogus invoice attributed to Domain Register can be found here.
It’s not clear whether the defendant in the case is linked to the Brandon Gray slamming outfit, which has also gone by names including Domain Registry of America, Domain Registry of Europe, Domain Registry of Canada and Domain Renewal Group.
Brandon Gray lost its ICANN accreditation in 2014.

ICANN terminates penis pill pimp registrar

ICANN is to terminate the contract of a Chinese registrar linked to dodgy pharmaceuticals web sites and other malfeasance.
Nanjing Imperiosus Technology Co, which does business as DomainersChoice.com, has been told it will lose its registrar accreditation February 3.
ICANN said in the termination notice that the company had failed to keep records related to abuse reports, failed to validate Whois records, and failed to provide ICANN with registration records, all in breach of the Registrar Accreditation Agreement.
The breaches related to complaints filed by illegal pharmacy watchdog LegitScript last September, I believe.
DomainersChoice and its CEO Stefan Hansmann were listed in Whois as the owners of potentially hundreds of domains that were being used to sell medicines for conditions ranging from heart disease to erectile dysfunction.
The domains 5mg-cialis20mg.com, acheterdutadalafil.com, viagra-100mgbestprice.net and 100mgviagralowestprice.net were among those apparently owned by the registrar.
According to LegitScript, thousands of DomainersChoice domains were “rogue internet pharmacies”.
The registrar has also been linked by security researchers to mass typosquatting campaigns.
The company’s web site even has a typo generator. While one could argue such tools are also useful to brand owners, DomainersChoice’s name suggests it’s geared towards domainers, not brands.
DomainersChoice had about 27,000 domains under management at the last count, which ICANN will now migrate to another registrar.
It’s not known how many of those were self-registered domains and how many were being used nefariously, but LegitScript CEO John Horton estimated (pdf) at least 2,300 dodgy pharma sites used the registrar.

Registrars off the hook for silly ICANN transfer policy

Domain name registrars have been assured that ICANN Compliance will not pursue them for failing to implement the new Transfer Policy on privacy-protected names.
As we reported late November, the new policy requires registrars to send out “change of registrant” confirmation emails whenever certain fields in the Whois are changed, regardless of whether the registrant has actually changed.
The GNSO Council pointed out to ICANN a number of unforeseen flaws in the policy, saying that vulnerable registrants privacy could be at risk in certain edge cases.
They also pointed out that the confirmation emails could be triggered, with not action by the registrant, when privacy services automatically cycle proxy email addresses in the Whois.
This appears to have already happened with at least one registrar that wasn’t paying attention.
But ICANN chair Steve Crocker told the GNSO Council chair last week that ICANN staff have been instructed to ignore violations of the new policy, which came into effect December 1, in cases involving privacy-protected domains (pdf).
It’s a temporary measure until the ICANN board decides whether or not to defer the issue to the GNSO working group currently looking at policies specifically for privacy and proxy services.

Free .shop domains until Christmas

The new .shop gTLD is likely to see growth over the coming week or so, as registrars begin to offer them for free.
Two retail registrars in the Key-Systems stable — Moniker and domaindiscount24 — said today they will offer a free .shop to each of their customers until December 23.
The offer is limited to one domain per account, so we’re unlikely to see the same level of growth, speculation and abuse we’ve seen in other TLDs that have offered free registrations.
Other popular registrars are currently selling first-year .shop names for $8 to $10, a discount on the usual retail price of between $25 and $30.
Interestingly and perhaps surprisingly, Key-Systems’ native Germany already has the most .shop registrations to date, with over a quarter of the 100,000 or so names registered so far to registrants in that country.
You have to go to number four in its geographic breakdown league to even get to the first Anglophone nation (the US).

GoDaddy will pay $1.79 billion for HEG in major Euro expansion

GoDaddy is to substantially increase the size of its European operation with the $1.79 billion acquisition of Host Europe Group.
The market-leading registrar confirmed yesterday earlier reports that it was on track to buy HEG, which counts several big-name British and German registrars among its brands.
The deal is worth €1.69 billion ($1.79 billion), which breaks down to €605 million to HEG shareholders and €1.08 billion in debt. It’s expected to close in the second quarter next year.
HEG’s domain brands include 123Reg and DomainMonster in the UK and DomainFactory in Germany.
The company says it has 1.7 million customers and manages over seven million domains.
But the acquisition is more concerned with HEG’s higher-margin small business hosting business, where the company has nine data centers in Europe and the US.
GoDaddy said in a press release:

Combining GoDaddy’s global technology platform with HEG’s footprint in Europe will enable the rapid deployment of a broader range of products to customers and allow for better scale of product development and go-to-market investments across both companies.

One part of the HEG business, the $92 million-a-year PlusServer, is likely to be sold off, however.
GoDaddy said that unit “serves larger, more mature companies that require a dedicated field sales force and account management”, which is not GoDaddy’s core strength.
The deal means that GoDaddy will become the owner of the annual NamesCon conference, which HEG picked up in August for an undisclosed amount.
The acquisition is unlikely to have closed before this coming January’s NamesCon, so there’s unlikely to be many obvious changes to the 2017 event.
GoDaddy said the acquisition is being financed by debt.
HEG’s current owner is private equity firm Cinven, which paid $545 million in 2013.