GoDaddy grows domain revs 10% in Q1

GoDaddy reported its first quarter numbers last night, which including an almost 10% increase in revenue from domain names.
The market-leading registrar reported a net loss of $18.3 million, smaller than the $43.4 million a year ago, on total revenue of $433.7 million, up 15.3%.
It broke out its revenue from domain names as $218.9 million, up 9.9% on Q1 2015.
Hosting-related services and business applications grew 14.4% and 47.4% respectively, to $160.4 million and $54.4 million.
The company raised its revenue expectations for the year to a range of $1.83 billion to $1.845 billion.

Comment Tagged: earnings, godaddy

A third of mayoral candidates using .london domains

Londoners are going to the polls today to select a new mayor so, as a Londoner, I thought I’d check out how many of the candidates are supporting the local domain name.
Turns out four of the 12 candidates have registered .london domains for their campaign sites.
The four are favorite Sadiq Khan (Labour), Sian Berry (Green), Peter Whittle (UK Independence Party) and Prince John Zylinski (damned if I know).
The remaining candidates, if they have dedicated sites at all, use a mixture of .com, .org and .net domains. Not a .uk to be seen.
Will this influence anybody’s vote? No. Has it raised the profile of .london domains? Probably.
Whoever wins the election will find themselves with a degree of control over the future of .london.
While the registry is basically managed by Minds + Machines, the ICANN contract is held by London & Partners, a not-for-profit promotional agency funded by the mayor’s office. The mayor is also a partner in the endeavor.
The M+M outsourcing contract was recently renegotiated in light of M+M’s financial woes, but details have not been made available.

2 Comments Tagged: .london, elections, mayor, Minds + Machines

Former GoDaddy VP apes Trump in Congressional bid

Former GoDaddy general counsel and apparent glutton for punishment Christine Jones is to run for political office for a second time.
She’s looking for the Republican nomination in Arizona’s Fifth Congressional District, she said in an email circular yesterday.
In a video announcing the candidacy, it seems pretty clear she’s taking a leaf out of the Donald Trump playbook by playing the “outsider” card.
“She’s one of us, not a politician,” a talking head says in a totally unrehearsed, unscripted and utterly convincing soundbite.

Much like Trump, she’s also touting the fact that she’s “independently wealthy” and therefore not as reliant on big donors to fund her campaign.
According to Jones’ web site, the most important issues facing Arizonians are border security, Islamic State, abortion (she’s anti-), an overly complex tax system and gun ownership (she’s pro-).
It sounds ridiculous, but this is what passes for mainstream politics in the US nowadays.
The incumbent in the Congressional seat she wants, considered safely Republican, recently announced his retirement, but Jones will face at least three established local politicians in the contest for the nomination.
Jones stood for the Republican nomination for Arizona Governor in 2014, but came third in the seven-strong field, with 16.6% of the vote.

5 Comments Tagged: christine jones, congress, godaddy

Donuts makes weird investment in startup

Donuts has made a surprising investment in a company that makes geolocation technologies.
The new gTLD registry operator announced yesterday that it has something called Donuts Labs, through which it will make “strategic investments” in “similar” companies.
Its first investment is in California tech startup GeoFrenzy, which operates in the emerging “geofences” space.
A geofence is a virtual perimeter around a defined geographic location.
Basically, GeoFrenzy has divided the world up into square-centimeter chunks and stores data about who owns these chunks in a registry database.
Using the GPS service you’ll find in all modern mobile devices, apps using the technology can figure out when you walk into or out of a registered, fenced-off area, triggering some behavior.
Such services are believed to have applications ranging from logistics to advertising. One example on the GeoFrenzy web site says that its database and software could be used to keep drones out of restricted airspace.
The terms of the deal with were not disclosed, but it’s surprising news for a couple of reasons.
First, Donuts appears to have cash to throw around on pet side-projects at a time when one would assume, as an early-stage company itself, it would be more focused on growing its fledgling new gTLD business.
Second, the press release makes out that there are technology synergies between the companies.
GeoFrenzy CEO Sean Eilers is quoted as saying: “Their expertise in managing a highly scalable registry and their experience with innovative DNS technologies makes Donuts an ideal fit as an investor and strategic partner.”
But to the best of my knowledge Donuts doesn’t have any experience managing a highly scalable registry. It outsources all of that kind of thing to Rightside, doesn’t it?
Donuts says it will be making more, similar investments in future.

1 Comment Tagged: donuts, geofencing, geofrenzy, investment, new gTLDs

.shop lawsuit falling to pieces

Commercial Connect’s lawsuit against ICANN appears to be on its way out, as ICANN claims the .shop applicant has “abandoned” the case.
The company sued ICANN in January in an attempt to prevent .shop gTLD being sold off via an ICANN last-resort auction.
It failed, and the auction raised a $41 million winning bid from GMO Registry.
It transpired that the company didn’t bother telling its lawyer that it had signed an agreement not to sue when it applied for .shop, and the lawyer jumped ship less than two weeks after the complaint was filed.
The lawyer told the court the waiver had been “buried among thousands and thousands of documents on a USB drive” and that he hadn’t noticed it before filing the suit.
In a court filing (pdf) yesterday, ICANN said that Commercial Connect had failed to secure a new lawyer, had failed to formally serve ICANN with the complaint, and had missed its April 25 deadline to argue against ICANN’s motion to dismiss the case.
For these reasons, it said, the case should be chucked.
Commercial Connect applied for .shop in 2000 and again in 2012 and has used every appeals mechanism and legal tool at its disposal in order to disrupt competing bids.
GMO’s .shop is currently in pre-delegation testing.

2 Comments Tagged: .shop, commercial connect, gmo, ICANN, new gTLDs

Verisign facing its own activist investor

While new gTLD registries Rightside and Minds + Machines have faced board-room challenges by activist investors in recent months, it seems industry heavyweight Verisign is contended with a similar problem.
John Chevedden, once described as an “economy class” activist due to his relatively small stakes, is attempting to give smaller Verisign shareholders the ability to propose directors for the company’s board.
Rather than attempting to gut the companies he invests in, he tries to make the odd incision into their corporate governance in order to give smaller investors a greater voice in their companies.
He’s filed a proposal, which will be voted on at Verisign’s June 9 annual general meeting, for a new “proxy access” bylaw.
Essentially, the proposal would allow an unlimited number of shareholders who collectively own over 3% of the company’s stock to propose two people for director elections (or 25% of the board, whichever is greater).
But Verisign’s current board is recommending that shareholders vote against the proposal, saying it’s “unnecessary”.
The company says that it plans to introduce its own proxy access bylaw that would be slightly different.
The Verisign alternative would limit the size of the nominating gang to 20 shareholders. That would mean that each individual investor would have to own much larger stakes, in order to pass the 3% threshold and nominate director candidates.
Verisign says Chevedden’s proposal, which does not limit the number of small shareholders involved, would be expensive and unwieldy to manage.
Chevedden reportedly has quite a decent success rate with these kinds of proposals.

Comment Tagged: activist, chevedden, verisign

Two more dot-brands self-terminate

The dot-brand dead-pool is now up to three gTLDs.
FLSmidth, which supplies machinery to the cement industry, and Emerson Electric, which also makes industrial machinery, have both decided that they don’t need their new gTLDs.
The affected gTLDs are .flsmidth and .emerson.
Both companies have filed cursory notices of termination with ICANN, indicating that they no longer wish to have a new gTLD Registry Agreement.
Neither company has yet received a preliminary determination from ICANN, a step that will lead to a month-long public comment period before the contracts are terminated.
In Emerson’s case, .emerson has not been delegated so there will be no impact on the number of TLDs in the root.
FLSmidth’s dot-brand has been live since September 2014, but the company never made the transition away from its .com.
While registry reports show that six domains have been registered, its latest zone file shows only the obligatory nic.flsmidth domain is active.
The first new gTLD to cop out was .doosan, the dot-brand for Korean conglomerate Doosan. It took over four months from filing its notice last October to the TLD being retired.

Comment Tagged: .emerson, doosan, dot-brands, flsmidth, ICANN, new gTLDs, termination

.web has an auction date

The .web gTLD will go to auction July 27, according to ICANN.
The organization released an updated auction schedule (pdf) on Wednesday night that also slates .kids/.kid for an auction on the same day.
Both auctions have confusing “indirect contention” elements, where two strings were ruled confusingly similar.
With .web, it’s lumped in with Vistaprint’s application for .webs, which lost a String Confusion Objection filed by Web.com.
Under ICANN rules, .webs is confusingly similar to to Web.com’s .web, but not to the other six .web applications.
This means that Vistaprint and Web.com basically are fighting a mini contention set auction to see who gets their applied-for gTLD.
If Web.com wins the auction for .web, Vistaprint cannot have .webs. However, if any other .web applicant wins, Vistaprint can go ahead with .webs.
Either way, there will be a .web delegated this year. Google, Donuts, Radix, Afilias, Schlund Technologies, Nu Dot Co are all contenders.
In the case of .kids/.kid, the one applicant for .kid — Google — won SCOs against DotKids Foundation and Amazon by default because both .kids applicants failed to respond to the complaints.
DotKids Foundation recently lost a Community Priority Evaluation, enabling the auction to go ahead.
Because Google is in contention with both .kids applicants, only one of the two strings will ultimately be delegated — .kids and .kid will not coexist.
The only other scheduled auction right now is that of .doctor, which is planned for May 25. Radix, Donuts and The Medical Registry will fight it out in this rather less complex battle.
It’s worth noting that if any of these contention sets unanimously choose to resolve their differences via private auction, none of the ICANN auctions will go ahead.

13 Comments Tagged: .doctor, .kid, .kids, .web, .webs, auction, ICANN, last resort, new gTLDs, vistaprint

Verisign has great quarter but sees China growth slowing

Verisign beat its sales expectations in the first quarter of the year, but leadership said rapid growth from Chinese registrants will now “normalize”.

The .com/.net registry last night reported net income up 21% at $107 million, on revenue that was up 9.1% to $282 million.
That’s based primarily on it selling 2.65 million net new .com/.net names during the quarter, at 7.1% increase on the Q1 2014 level baseline. It said it sold 10 million new names in the quarter, up from 8.7 million a year ago.
For comparison, Q1 2015 saw 1.51 million net adds across the two TLDs. Three months ago, the company had predicted net adds to be 1.5 to 2 million names.
It had 142.5 million names at the end of the quarter, 126.6 million of which were .com.
CEO James Bidzos told analysts: “We again saw activity coming from registrars in China that exceeded our expectations.”
However, he added: “At this point, we expect activity from registrars in China to normalize as we continue through the second quarter.”
When pressed, CFO George KIlguss elaborated (according to the SeekingAlpha earnings call transcript):

as we look at the trends, we’ve seen the demand that happened in the second half of the first quarter kind of ebb and flow. So we saw it come. It was pretty strong for a few weeks and then it came back to more than normalized path. So we don’t have a perfect crystal ball, but based on the trends that we’ve seen that we’ve been tracking, it seems to be back on the normalized path for that particular region, at least as what we’ve seen historically.

Verisign is currently negotiating for the renewal of its .com contract with ICANN, which may or may not enable it to raise its government-frozen registry prices in future.

Comment Tagged: .com, .net, china, earnings, verisign

The .web gTLD could go live in 2016

The new gTLD .web could be coming to the internet sooner than expected after two of the remaining barriers to delegation disappeared.
Following the withdrawal last week of an application for the plural .webs, an auction for .web could happen in the next couple of months, enabling a go-live date possibly in 2016.
.web, often considered the most desirable truly generic gTLD, has had a rough time of it in the 2012 ICANN new gTLD program.
There were seven applications for the string. Google, Web.com, Donuts, Radix, Afilias, Schlund Technologies, Nu Dot Co all applied.
The registrar Web.com (owner of Network Solutions, Register.com, et al) appears to be especially keen to get the domain, given that the string more or less matches its brand.
It perhaps should have been a straightforward auction shoot-out.
But, complicating matters, bespoke printing firm Vistaprint had filed two applications — one vanilla, one “community” based — for the plural version of the string, “.webs”.
Vistaprint runs a website development service called Webs.com. It’s the plural of the Web.com brand.
Web.com wasn’t happy about Vistaprint’s .webs applications, so it filed String Confusion Objections against both, arguing that .web and .webs were too confusingly similar to co-exist on the internet.
While there are now many examples of plurals and singulars living together (see .auto/s, .fan/s and .gift/s), the registrar won both of its SCO complaints, meaning Vistaprint’s two applications and the seven .web applicants were lumped together into the same contention set.
If two strings are in the same contention set, only one can survive to be ultimately delegated to the DNS.
Vistaprint appealed the SCO decisions, first with a Request for Reconsideration to the ICANN board (predictably unsuccessful) and then with an Independent Review Process complaint.
While the IRP was being mulled over, .web was in limbo.
The IRP was unsuccessful. The IRP panel ruled in October that ICANN had not violated its bylaws in accepting the SCO panel’s decision.
But it gave ICANN a nudge, suggesting that perhaps it could give Vistaprint leave to appeal the original SCO determinations via another mechanism.
In early March, the ICANN board proper decided that:

the Vistaprint SCO Expert Determination is not sufficiently “inconsistent” or “unreasonable” such that the underlying objection proceedings resulting in the Expert Determination warrants re-evaluation.

The board said that the .web/.webs contention set should be processed as normal; in other words: go to auction.
That removed the first barrier to the .web/.webs auction going ahead.
The second barrier was the fact that Visaprint had file two applications for .webs — one regular, one “community”.
By self-identifying as a “community”, Vistaprint qualified for the Community Priority Evaluation. A winning CPE means all competing applications — including the .web applications in this case — would be eliminated.
While the CPE process is far from perfect, I think the chances of Vistaprint winning would be pretty slim.
Perhaps Vistaprint agreed with me. Whatever the thought process, the company has withdrawn its “community” application. The withdrawal was reflected on the ICANN web site at the weekend, according to the little birds at DI PRO.
What this means is that the seven .web applications and Vistaprint’s remaining, non-community .webs application will be going to auction together.
It could be a private auction, where the proceeds are divvied up between the losers, or an ICANN “last resort” auction, where ICANN gets all the money.
Either way, the winning bidder is likely to pay a LOT of cash for their chosen string.
GMO Registry paid $41 million for .shop back in January. I’d be flabbergasted if .web wasn’t eight figures too.
If Vistaprint offers to pay more money for .webs than Web.com wants to pay for .web, Web.com will be eliminated from the race and Vistaprint will get .webs.
In that scenario, the remaining six .web applicants fight it out for control of the gTLD.
However, if Vistaprint loses against Web.com then all of the seven .web applicants fight it out at auction.
Depending on the identity of the winner and the timing of auctions and pre-delegation testing, it could slip into the root and possibly even become available before the end of the year.
That’s assuming no more surprises, of course.
UPDATE: This post originally incorrectly described the rules of the .web/.webs auction. It was updated with a correct explanation at 2120 UTC.

1 Comment Tagged: .webs. web, auction, cpe, new gTLDs, vistaprint, withdrawal