CentralNic grows revenue 70% in 2021

CentralNic saw its revenue grow by about 70% last year, a bit more than half of which was organic growth, the company said this morning.

The acquisitive company expects to report revenue of about $410 million and adjusted EBITDA of about $45 million when it reports its final numbers on February 28.

That represents year-on-year organic revenue growth of 37% and a 47% growth in EBITDA, the company said.

Acquisitions closed during the year include Safebrands, Wando and NameAction. Most of its recent growth has come from its newish domain monetization business.

CentralNic makes another registrar acquisition

CentralNic said today it has bought another registrar, Chile-based NameAction, in a $1 million deal.

NameAction has been around since the late 1990s and specializes in ccTLDs in the Latin American region, including offering local presence services for foreign registrants.

It sells gTLD domains too, acting primarily in the brand protection space, but does not appear to be ICANN-accredited in its own right.

CentralNic said the deal will immediately add $2 million to its top line and $200,000 to profits.

CEO Ben Crawford said in a press release that the deal is small but of strategic importance, giving the company a beachhead from which to expand into Latin America.

It’s the fourth acquisition announcement from CentralNic, which describes itself as an industry consolidator, this year.

CentralNic takes over a dead dot-brand

CentralNic has become the latest company to pounce on a dot-brand gTLD that was on its way to the dustbin of history.

The ICANN contract for .case was transferred to a London company called Helium TLDs, a CentralNic subsidiary, last week.

That company was previously called FANS TLD, and was the vehicle CentralNic used to acquire .fans from Asiamix Digital in 2018 before later passing it on to Hong Kong-based ZDNS International.

I believe something similar is happening here.

.case was a dot-brand owned, but never used, by CNH Industrial, which Wikipedia tells me is an American-Dutch-British-Italian company that makes about $28 billion a year making and selling agricultural and construction machinery. Diggers and forklifts and such.

CNH also managed .caseih, .newholland, and .iveco for some of its other brands, but these contracts were terminated earlier in the year.

The company had also asked ICANN to cancel its .case agreement, but that seems to have attracted acquisitive registry operators, and the termination request was withdrawn as I noted in September.

While terminating a dot-brand can often be seen as a lack of confidence in the dot-brand concept, selling off the gTLD to a third party rules out reapplying for the same string in future and can be seen as an even deeper disdain.

Now, .case is in CentralNic’s hands. I believe it’s the first dot-brand the company has taken over.

Rival registries including Donuts, XYZ and ShortDot have also swept up unwanted dot-brand gTLDs, stripped them of their restrictions, and repurposed them as general-purpose or niche spaces.

Bahrain to relaunch ccTLD globally

The government of Bahrain has announced that it is relaunching its .bh and البحرين. ccTLDs with a simplified, automated, standardized registration process.

The domains will be available globally, the local Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said: “The new process of registration is fast, simple, and secure cutting the time of registration from days to minutes.”

Names will be “available for local and international customers”, the TRA said.

It looks like Bahrain has switched its back-end to CentralNic, and will be operating a standard EPP system.

While launch dates, registration rules and participating registrars were not announced, the TRA did indicate that the launch would begin with a sunrise period for trademark owners some time in the fourth quarter.

Bahrain is small but wealthy island state in the Persian Gulf with about 1.5 million inhabitants. The number of current registrations in .bh is not known.

CentralNic says it’s making more money than expected

Domain all-rounder CentralNic this morning told the markets it thinks it will hit or beat expectations this year.

CEO Ben Crawford said in a statement this morning that at the end of 2021 the company expects to be “at or above” analyst estimates of $348.6 million to $355.3 million at the top line and profit of $41.1 million to $42.0 million.

For the nine month ended September 30, CentralNic expects revenue to come in at $280 million or above, with adjusted EBIDTDA of at least $32 million, up 66% and 45% respective on the same 2020 period.

That represents organic growth, normalizing the impact of acquisitions, or 29%, the company said.

While the company did not reveal the drivers behind its growth, in recent quarters the best performer has been its domain monetization business, which provides revenue from parking ads and traffic redirection.

It will report its results November 22.

CentralNic spends $6.5 million on traffic network

CentralNic this morning said it has paid $6.5 million to acquire “a publishing network of revenue generating websites”.

The company, which is seeing an increasingly large chunk of its revenue coming from domain monetization, said the network generates $2 million in annual revenue and $1.5 million in earnings.

The seller is White & Case, a 120-year-old international law firm, not exactly the kind of company you’d expect to own a bunch of random monetized domains.

Neither the size of the network nor the means of monetization were disclosed.

CentralNic said the network was already a customer for roughly half of its sites, so the acquisition will add about $1 million to revenue and $1.5 million to earnings, reducing annual cost of revenue by about $500,000.

While the company is best know for selling domain names, following recent acquisitions revenue from its fast-growing “online marketing” segment outpaced its traditional revenue sources, bringing in $96.4 million in the first half compared to $78.3 million in it two domain-related segments.

CentralNic expects H1 revenue of $174 million

A decade ago, CentralNic was scraping by selling domain names at the third level, and now it’s now on track to clear $300 million top line this year.

The domain industry consolidator said yesterday that it expects revenue for the first half of 2021 to be in the region of $174 million, which earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of $20 million.

Third-quarter revenue is expected to be about $90 million, which works out to 63% growth or roughly 25% organic growth, excluding the impact of recent acquisitions.

Organic growth was 16% for the first quarter 2021 and 9% for the full year 2020.

The company also said cash is up and debt is down.

It’s pretty good going for a company that, when it listed on London’s AIM market in 2013 had H1 revenue of about $2 million, based on not much more than its dubious business of selling 3LDs under the likes of .gb.com and .uk.com and a couple of low-volume ccTLD back-end contracts.

Since then, its acquisition streak has seen it branch out into registrars (where it owns a bunch, wholesale and retail, of various sizes, all over the world) new gTLD back-end services (where it runs at least 90 TLDs) and, more recently, domain monetization.

CentralNic gets into artificial intelligence

CentralNic has formed a business unit dedicated to big data and artificial intelligence.

The new Data and Artificial Intelligence Group will be headed by chief data scientist Pawel Rzeszucinski.

The company said that the group will be tasked with leveraging the “vast” amounts of data it generates as a registrar, registry, DNS resolution provider and domain monetization service.

CentralNic said in a press release:

CentralNic stores, manages, and is exposed to huge datasets that can be used for advanced analysis. Examples include; navigation data on tens of millions of daily DNS queries, ad-tech data on tens of millions of domain advertisements, site usage data on hundreds of millions of unique visits and millions of monthly clicks, and similarly extensive data on transactions and registrations.

These extremely large data sets lend themselves perfectly to AI and machine learning applications that can be used to provide a large array of initiatives which will benefit both the Company and our customers. These include; improved customer service, optimised business operations and decision making, enhanced marketing, reduced customer churn and automated detection of non-compliant customer activity.

There’s no mention of licensing its data to third parties, and the company notes that its initiatives will be compliant with current and future privacy rules from the public and private sectors, such as GDPR.

CentralNic trumpets organic growth as its registrars reverse shrinkage

While positioning itself as a consolidator for the last few years, CentralNic today boasted that it’s also growing organically by a healthy amount.

The company reported Q1 revenue up 48% compared to a year ago at $84.4 million. Organic revenue growth for the same period was reported at 16%. It made a loss after tax of $1.4 million, but adjusted EBITDA of $10.1 million.

CentralNic’s indirect segment, which includes its registry and wholesale registrar businesses, saw revenue up 24% to $25.4 million, led by the registrar. Organic growth was 13%.

The direct segment, which comprises customer-facing retail and corporate registrars and brand monitoring services, saw revenue up 29% to $13.7 million. Organic growth was also 13%.

That segment had seen a drag from the corporate segment in 2020 that was blamed on the coronavirus pandemic, but today CentralNic said “both the Retail business and the Corporate business have returned to growth”.

The company’s newest and already biggest revenue-generating segment is online marketing, which boils down to domain monetization services. Revenue there was up 76% or 19% organically at $45.3 million.

This was largely driven by PubTONIC, a traffic arbitrage platform it acquired with Team Internet last year. The service basically allows web site owners to buy redirect traffic from parked domains.

CentralNic wins .london back-end deal from Nominet

CentralNic today announced that it’s taking over back-end registry operations for .london.

It’s taking over from Nominet, which has run the technical aspects of the registry since 2016 when MMX dumped its registry business.

The contracted registry is London & Partners, the marketing arm of the London mayor’s office.

CentralNic is based in London, whereas Nominet, which runs .uk and .wales, is based in nearby Oxford. Original registry MMX was based in the British Virgin Islands.

.london currently has about 51,000 domains under management, down from a 2018 peak of about 86,000.