Team Internet still expects over $160 million for domains business

Team Internet is continuing talks to sell off its domain name business and seems confident it could close a deal worth $160 million or more before the end of the year.

The company has been talking all year about disposing of its Domains, Identity & Software (DIS) division, recently saying it expected to be able to announce a deal “in the first half of Q3”.

With the rough deadline now passed, Team Internet said yesterday:

The strategic review is at an advanced stage, with discussions ongoing with a view to reaching a transaction in the near term, while the Board remains engaged with multiple parties interested in all or parts of the division. The Board reaffirms its expectation of a valuation materially exceeding USD 160 million; any agreed transaction is expected to complete around the year end. There can be no certainty that a transaction will be agreed.

“The deal will happen when we get the right value,” CEO Michael Riedl told analysts yesterday. “We can sell DIS only once, and that is why we are optimizing for price and not for timeline.”

The $!60 million figure is used because it was the company’s market capitalization on the London Stock Exchange when it first announced the strategic review almost a year ago. Today, its market cap is the GBP equivalent of roughly $140 million today.

From Riedl’s commentary, it sounds rather like the company has multiple parties interested in all or parts of DIS, but that selling off one chunk for a high valuation may scupper bids for the remaining chunks.

DIS operates in the registry, registrar and registry services provider parts of the domain industry.

As .web goes live, “.website” changes hands

Identity Digital’s 2026 acquisition spree has continued, with the registry taking over a gTLD that means “.website” but has remarkably few registrations even a decade after launch.

ICANN records show Jolly Host, an Identity Digital subsidiary, is now the contracted party for .网站 (or .xn--5tzm5g as it appears in the DNS), which is the Chinese for “.website”.

The original registry was Hong Kong-based Global Website TLD Asia, part of the DotAsia registry group managed by former ICANN director Edmon Chung.

Despite the apparent goldmine of such a common term, addressing a market as large as China’s, as of today .网站 has just 2,871 domains in its zone file, the most it has ever had.

The news comes just a few days after the fate of English-language .web was finally sealed, with Verisign getting its prize delegated after a decade of legal wrangling.

It’s the seventh gTLD contract Jolly Host has had reassigned to it since February.

Team Internet says domains business sale imminent

Team Internet expects to be able to announce the sale of its domains business in the next several weeks, coming at the end of a turbulent 2025 that saw revenue, and its share price, tumble.

The company — home to registry and registrar brands including CentralNic, BrandShelter, Moniker and domaindiscount24 — said of its Domains, Identity & Software (DIS) segment in a recent trading statement:

Discussions continue with selected parties regarding a potential disposal of the DIS segment, which the Board will pursue where it delivers fair value. While there can be no certainty that any transaction will be agreed, or as to its terms, the Board expects the outcome of the strategic review, including any agreement relating to a potential disposal of DIS, to be announced in the first half of Q3. Subject to customary conditions and regulatory approvals, the Board expects any resulting transaction to complete during 2026.

That suggests a deal could be announced anywhere from this week to mid-August.

Team Internet got badly burned by Google after the advertising giant changed the way it allows parking companies to monetize domains in early 2025. Its revenue per thousand page views was cut in half, down by 51% to $34 million last year.

The company is now talking about a legal case against Google (which it did not name directly), saying it is “pursuing a substantial damages claim against a major technology company, arising from anti-competitive conduct”.

In its audited 2025 results, announced Friday, the company said its DIS segment was down 4% to $194.6 million, with adjusted EBITDA up 10% at $21.4 million as it pursued a strategy of squeezing more profit out of each customer rather than pushing volume.

The Search segments, most affected by Google’s antics, saw its top line down 59% at $222 million, with EBITDA down 84% at $9 million. Overall, Team Internet saw revenue down 40% at $481.9 million, with EBITDA down 54% at $42.7 million.

The company also disclosed that it has had trouble meeting its financial commitments to its lenders, but that it has come to arrangement to have the banks forgive the transgressions.

It plans to either refinance or use the proceeds from the DIS disposal to service its debts.

Amazon sells three gTLDs to Identity Digital

Amazon appears to have offloaded three of its dormant gTLDs to Identity Digital, judging by ICANN records.

While no formal notices of registry contract reassignment have yet been posted, elsewhere ICANN shows the official registry for .circle, .got, and .jot is now Jolly Host LLC.

Jolly Host is a new Identity Digital affiliate that appeared last year and already took over the .onl gTLD contract from iRegistry a couple months ago.

.circle, .got and .jot are all greenfield namespaces. Unlaunched, they have no registered names beyond the mandatory nic.example domain. They are unencumbered by legacy dot-brand restrictions, which should make for smoother launches.

Amazon appears to have originally intended .circle to play somehow with its Circle brand of home parental control technology, but the 2012 applications for .got and .jot don’t give much of a description of its plans beyond boilerplate text.

The transfers are likely slightly bad news for Nominet, which is Amazon’s primary back-end registry services provider. Identity Digital runs its own back-end (appropriately, on Amazon’s AWS).

Sav.com owner takes over .radio gTLD

The .radio gTLD appears to have changed hands, with a young registry affiliated with Sav.com taking over the reins.

ICANN documentation shows that Digity, a company led by Sav CEO Anthos Chrysanthou, took over the registry contract for the gTLD last month.

The original registry was the European Broadcasting Union, the entity behind the popular Eurovision Song Contest (.eurovision also exists, but is not used, with the EBU using a .vote domain during its annual broadcast).

Digity is already the contracted registry for .case, a former dot-brand it acquired from CentralNic a few years ago.

Apparently intended to be repurposed as a namespace for the legal profession, .case is yet to properly launch and has just a few dozen domains under management.

.radio, by contrast, if not exactly thriving in volume terms, is actually being sold and used, with about 3,000 DUM at a price point of just under $400 a year at the low end.

Some registration restrictions and pricing variations apply, and the gTLD does not have particularly broad registrar coverage.

British readers may be interested to learn that one of the highest-profile .radio domains belongs to oddball former DJ and TV host Noel Edmonds.

Team Internet still in talks to sell off domains unit

Team Internet says negotiations to spin off its domains business are “progressing well” after a difficult 2025.

The company yesterday issued a trading update, saying that its 2025 revenue and profit will come in towards the top end of analysts’ expectations.

Those top-end estimates are for revenue of $541 million and adjusted EBITDA of $43 million. That’s compared to 2024 revenue of $802.8 million and adjusted EBITDA of $91.9 million.

Team Internet suffered last year, laying off hundreds, due to changes in Google’s advertising policies that made it harder for the company to monetize its domain portfolio.

It was already exploring exit options before the Google changes hit, but those efforts were resurrected in November. The company said yesterday that “discussions in relation to a disposal of DIS [Domains, Identity and Software] are progressing well”

Com Laude buys larger rival Markmonitor

Consolidation in the corporate registrar market continued this week, with Com Laude announcing that it is buying longstanding rival Markmonitor for an undisclosed sum.

Markmonitor is being spun out of Newfold Digital, which acquired it for $302.5 million three years ago, with Newfold saying it wanted to “simplify its portfolio” and focus on Network Solutions and Bluehost.

Both companies compete in the brand protection and corporate domain management space, managing domain portfolios and dot-brand gTLDs on behalf of high-value clients.

Markmonitor is the larger registrar by far in terms of gTLD domains under management, with over a million domains at the last count. Com Laude has about a quarter of that number on its accreditation.

Ben Crawford will remain CEO of Com Laude and Stu Homan will remain head of Markmonitor. The company will maintain its offices in Idaho, London, and Tokyo.

Just last week Com Laude said it was acquiring rival new gTLD consultant Fairwinds Partners. Expect to see Com Laude’s fingerprints on a lot of new gTLD applications next year.

Com Laude buys Fairwinds

Two dot-brand gTLD consultants are to merge in a deal announced today.

London-based Com Laude said it is acquiring Washington DC-based Fairwinds Partners for an undisclosed amount.

Com Laude said that it got more than 120 dot-brand gTLDs for its clients in the 2012 round, and that Fairwinds was the consultant on 133 applications back then.

The company added that it is “currently engaged to assist customers to obtain hundreds of TLDs in the 2026 round”.

Word on the street is that Com Laude is doing gangbusters recruiting dot-brand clients for the Next Round, and scooping up Fairwinds certainly won’t hurt in that effort.

Both companies help brands with their gTLD applications and then take care of the ICANN paperwork to keep them — alive but often dormant — for their lifecycle.

My records show Fairwinds has lost a few dozen gTLD-management customers over the last few years, and has acquired none.

The Next Round is due to open for three months of applications next April.

Google scuppers Team Internet acquisition after profit warning

A Norwegian private equity company has dropped its plans to acquire Team Internet after Google changed the way it handles advertising on parked domains, a key source of revenue for the company.

Oslo-based Verdane had a deadline of today to announce a formal offer for the company, but instead said it “does not intend to make an offer” because “there has been a material change of circumstances”.

While Verdane did not elaborate, there was a simultaneous announcement from Team Internet that Google’s recently announced changes to AdSense for Domains present a “challenge” that will harm its business faster than it can adapt.

Google said last week that as of March 19 it will start opting its advertisers out of AFD, the service domainers and registrars use to monetize many parked domain names. Advertisers will be able to opt back in, but are not expected to do so en masse.

Team Internet’s Search reporting unit made $72 million of its $91 million net revenue from AFD last year, which it expects to decline following the changes.

The company said it plans to instead monetize its domains using Google’s newer Related Search On Content product, which shows Google search results including paid results on the publishers’ own sites, based on the content of the page.

That presumably means Team Internet is going to have to populate its domains with spammy, low-quality and presumably AI-generated content, in order to trigger the RSOC contextual algorithm. Thanks, Google!

“The market development has been long-anticipated, though the announced acceleration is a challenge,” Team Internet told investors.

“It is anticipated that, during this transition period, contributions from AFD will decline faster than contributions from RSOC appreciate, meaning that the financial performance of Team Internet’s Search segment will see a trough in 2025 before it recovers from 2026 onwards and returns to the long-term pattern,” it added.

It expects adjusted EBITDA to more than halve for the year in its Search segment, from $57 million last year to between $20 million and $25 million this year. The company said its domains business, which includes its registry and registrars, should be unaffected.

But that domains business seems to be still up for sale. Team Internet said it has received “repeated approaches” for the domains unit and is carrying out a “comprehensive review of its asset ownership”.

Squarespace gets sweetened $7.2 billion takeover offer

Squarespace looks set to be acquired by private equity firm Permira in a sweetened cash deal valuing the registrar at about $7.2 billion.

The new $46.50 per share offer is an improvement over Permira’s initial May offer of $44 and represents a 36.4% premium over Squarespace’s share price the day before the takeover way announced.

Squarespace said the deal, which values the company at about $300 million more than the May offer, has been approved by an independent committee of its board of directors and is Permira’s “best and final” offer.

Squarespace has about 10 million gTLD domains under management across two ICANN accreditations, one of which is the old Google Domains, but is perhaps best known for its web site building services.

The company has previously said that going private will help it compete better in the small business online presence market, where it sees its competition as the likes of GoDaddy and Wix.