GoDaddy CEO to retire at 58

GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving tonight announced his retirement from the company.
Irving, 58, said he will leave the corner office at the end of 2017, and will stick around on its board of directors until June next year.
He will be replaced by current chief operating officer Scott Wagner, who joined the registrar in 2013 from KKR, one of the three investment companies that owned GoDaddy in its interregnum between founder Bob Parsons and its 2013 initial public offering.
“After more than three decades in technology, I’ve decided it’s time to retire and begin the next phase of my life,” Irving said in a press release.
He added that revenue and profits had doubled under his watch, which commenced in 2013.
Wagner served as interim CEO of GoDaddy in 2012, after Parsons protege Warren Adelman’s short stint in the role.
He was also named president of the company last year.
GoDaddy’s share price has dipped slightly in after-hours trading in the hour or so since the announcement was made.

Comment Tagged: godaddy

Google shifts 400,000 .site domains

Google has given away what is believed to be roughly 400,000 subdomains in Radix’s .site gTLD as part of a small business web site service.
Since its launch a couple of months ago, the Google My Business web site builder offering has been offering small businesses a free one-page site with a free third-level domain under business.site.
Google My Business also offers users the ability to upgrade to a paid-for second-level domain via its Google Domains in-house registrar.
Google the search engine indexes 403,000 business.site pages currently. Because each subdomain is limited to a single page, it is possible that the number of subdomains is not too far behind that number, Radix believes.
This means that business.site is likely almost as large as the .site gTLD itself, which currently has about 450,000 names in its zone file.
Given the rapid growth rate, it seems likely the subdomain will overtake the TLD in a matter of weeks.
According to Radix, business.site was purchased off of its registry reserved premium list. The sale price has not been disclosed.
It’s good publicity for the TLD, and merely the latest endorsement by Google of the new gTLD concept.
As well as being the registry for many new gTLDs, Google parent Alphabet uses a .xyz domain and its registrar uses a .google domain.

11 Comments Tagged: .site, google, google my business, new gTLDs, radix

Another auDA director quits after conflict claims

Australian ccTLD manager auDA has lost its second director in two week with the resignation of Michaella Richards, announced today.
Richards’ position had been subject to criticism by disgruntled auDA members.
It had been speculated that her appointment to the board last December was less due to her experience in the domain industry, reportedly lacking, than due to her friendship with CEO Cameron Boardman.
The two had worked together in the Victorian state government, as DomainPulse uncovered.
Richards had been appointed a “demand class” director, meaning it was her role to represent domain buyers, rather than registrars, on the board. But critics doubted her credentials in this regard.
No reason was given for her resignation today. auDA simply said:

The auDA Board is seeking nominations, including from its demand class membership, for the Demand Class Director casual vacancy resulting from the resignation of Dr Michaella Richards.

Richards follows chairman Stuart Benjamin, who resigned at the end of July just a few days members were due to vote on an motion to oust him.
auDA has in recent weeks reversed its positions on a number of controversial policies after member outcries.

Comment Tagged: auda

Endurance losing founder-CEO next week

Endurance International, the parent company of registrar brands including Public Domain Registry, BuyDomains, Domain.com and BigRock, will see its founding CEO resign next week.
The company said this week that Hari Ravichandran will be replaced by Jeff Fox, most recently chair of customer relationship management software vendor Convergys, on August 22.
Endurance, which makes about 12% of its revenue from domain registrations, had disclosed Ravichandran’s plan to move on back in April, when it was characterized as an effort to move the company to the next stage of growth.
But it comes in the context, as the company has acknowledged, of an ongoing Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its 2015 acquisition of Constant Contact.
The SEC probe has been going on since at least December 2015.
Endurance is also facing flattening top-line growth — revenue of $292.3 million, up 1% on last year, in the second quarter — and deepening losses.
Fox was CEO of Convergys from 2010 to 2012. He is also principal of The Circumference Group, his own investment/advisory firm.

Comment Tagged: bigrock, buydomains, domain.com, earnings, endurance, Public Domain Registry

Google dumps Nazi domain in hours

Neo-Nazi blog The Daily Stormer found itself without a registrar for the second time in a day this evening, after Google cancelled its registration.
The company told BBC News:

We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service.

The cancellation came not many hours after GoDaddy, the controversial site’s original registrar, gave its owners 24 hours to find a new registrar.
That was in response to people on Twitter complaining that the Stormer had published an article attacking a victim of alleged right-wing domestic terrorism, which GoDaddy said broke its terms of service inciting violence.
The current Whois record for dailystormer.com indicates that it is still with Google, but in a clientTransferProhibited status.
That means it should not be possible to transfer the name to a third registrar, unless and until Google changes the status.
The domain still resolves, however, from where I’m sitting.
It might be that the Stormer will now find itself registrar-hopping and/or facing a period of downtime.

1 Comment Tagged: godaddy, google

GoDaddy kicks out neo-Nazi site after dead protester post

GoDaddy has given neo-Nazi web site The Daily Stormer a day to GTFO after it posted an article viciously attacking the victim of racially motivated violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.
In multiple tweets, the company said this morning that it had given the site’s owners 24 hours to move to a new registrar.

We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service.

— GoDaddy (@GoDaddy) August 14, 2017

The tweets came in response to those who questioned why GoDaddy continued to host the site in light of an article posted about Heather Heyer, who was killed while protesting white nationalists at a rally on Saturday.
A man has been arrested and charged with her murder, after allegedly driving his car into a crowd, injuring 19 others.
The article in question was a horribly vicious, cartoonishly misogynistic rant, by site founder Andrew Anglin, entitled “Heather Heyer: Woman Killed in Road Rage Incident was a Fat, Childless 32-Year-Old Slut”.
GoDaddy did not specify which terms of service the Stormer had breached, but its terms do include a prohibition against promoting violence.
The Stormer web site has a disclaimer on it stating it is “opposed to violence” and that it will ban any commentators who promote violence.
Within hours of GoDaddy’s tweets, a post appeared on the site claiming to have been written by notorious hacking collective Anonynous, which claimed the site was now under its control.
The post said that the site would be taken down within 24 hours and that quantities of material on the Stormer and Anglin had been obtained.
At this time it is not clear whether the site has really been hacked or is a hoax carried out by the Stormer itself, perhaps designed to make light of upcoming downtime.
The Daily Stormer’s domain has been hosted with GoDaddy since its launch in 2013.

1 Comment Tagged: charlottesville, daily stormer, godaddy

Tucows revenue rockets after Enom buy

Tucows saw its revenue from domain names more than double in the second quarter, following the acquisition of rival Enom.
The company this week reported domain services revenue for the three months ending June 30 of $62.8 million, compared to $28.4 million a year ago.
That was part of overall growth of 78%, with revenue rising from $47.2 million in 2016 to $84.2 million this year.
Net income for the quarter was up 29% at $5.2 million.
Enom, which Tucows bought from Rightside for $76.7 million earlier this year, now accounts for a little under half of Tucows’ wholesale domains business, the larger portion going through its OpenSRS channel.
Sales from Tucows’ premium portfolio rose to $968,000 from $885,000 a year ago.
Its retail business, Hover, did $7.6 million of revenue, up from $3.6 million.

Comment Tagged: earnings, enom, rightside, tucows

GoDaddy domains business grows 15% in Q2

GoDaddy saw its revenue from domain name sales increase by almost 15% in the second quarter, the company announced this week.
Its domains revenue was $263.3 million, up 14.6% on the same quarter last year.
That was part of an overall growth trend at the company, which saw revenue for the quarter up 22.3% at $557.8 million.
Revenue growth would have been a point higher but for currency fluctuations. GoDaddy now does about a third of its business outside its native US, helped a deal by its acquisition of Host Europe Group, which closed at the start of the quarter.
Net income for the period was $18.1 million, reversing a loss of $11.1 million a year ago.
Domains account for about 47% of overall revenue at the company.
GoDaddy said it had 17 million customers at the end of the quarter, June 30, adding about a million organically compared to a year earlier and 1.6 million from the HEG acquisition.
At the end of the quarter, the company had $591.2 million in cash and equivalents and debt of $3 billion.

1 Comment Tagged: earnings, godaddy, heg, host europe group

Gay.com, “worth $7 million”, donated to gay blog

The domain name gay.com has reportedly been donated for free to a gay rights group despite claims it is worth $6.9 million.
The Los Angeles LGBT Center said late last week that it is to take ownership of the domain, which will direct visitors to a recently launched blog.
The Center says it is the world’s largest provider of services to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
The donation comes from VS Media, which acquired the domain last year and seems to run it as a community hub slash dating site. It runs an adult webcam site called Flirt4Free.
Gay.com apparently gets 200,000 visits per month.
According to the Center, gay.com will shortly begin pointing to a blog currently published at VanguardNow.org.
Chief marketing officer Jim Key said in a press release:

We’ve only just begun to think about future possibilities for the domain. But for now, the traffic from Gay.com to our new blog will help even more people learn how we’re building a world where LGBT people thrive as healthy, equal, and complete members of society.

The company decided to give the domain away to a worthy cause and invited five major gay charities to make proposals, the Center said.
The $6.9 million valuation comes from a VS Media appraisal, but does not seem to me like a hugely implausible number.
Whois records do not show a change of ownership recently, but the domain has been using a privacy service for some time so changes may not be obvious.

Comment Tagged: gay.com

Grumpy campaign claims victory after auDA U-turns

Australian ccTLD administrator auDA has scrapped two unpopular policies following the ouster of its chairman last week, allowing campaigning domainers to claim victory.
auDA said it has done away with its member code of conduct and has reinstated its policy of publishing its board meetings’ minutes.
These were two of the key demands of Grumpy.com.au, a member-driven campaign orchestrated by domainer-blogger Ned O’Meara.
Grumpy had called for the unilaterally imposed code of conduct to be replaced by one created in consultation with members, and that’s what auDA is now promising.
auDA said:

A membership consultation process on a new Code of Conduct will be held, and a revised Code will be submitted to the 2017 AGM. A Code of Conduct for Board members will be developed as part of the next phase of governance work and members will have the opportunity to provide input prior to any final decisions.

The code banned members, under pain of losing their memberships, from harassing or abusing staff. But it also banned them from bad-mouthing the registry in public or via the media — effectively gagging criticism.
auDA also said it will reinstate the practice of publishing minutes. It had recently agreed to restore previously published minutes, but it appears than meetings in future will also be publicly minuted.
Reversing these two policies were two of four demands the Grumpy campaign had made.
Another, calling for the head of chairman Stuart Benjamin, was rendered moot when Benjamin, apparently fearing that he could not win a simply majority of votes, quit just a few days before a member vote was due to take place.
The fourth, which called for auDA to scrap its plan to build and operate an in-house registry infrastructure, also appears to be moot. The company now seems to be talking about outsourcing to a third-party back-end provider.
auDA had refused, citing legal reasons, to include anything but the vote of confidence in the chair on its agenda for last week’s special members meeting.
O’Meara, in a blog post Friday, welcomed the U-turns. He wrote:

Before a group of members ever took this massive step of calling a special meeting, we pleaded with auDA to sort these issues out. We were ignored; then rebuffed.
…
And here we are today – with every single resolution now resolved (hopefully) in the members favour.
That’s what you call a strategy that backfired spectacularly on auDA.

auDA also said that it has commenced the process of seeking out a new independent director/chair.

Comment Tagged: .au, auda