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Dark horse NameSilo doubles size in 2018

Kevin Murphy, January 7, 2019, Domain Registrars

Domain name registrar NameSilo says it managed to double its size in terms of cash bookings and domains under management in 2018.
The Vancouver-based company said that in 2018 it added 1.27 net new domains, an increase of 106%.
Bookings were $20.1 million, up from the $11.1 million it reported in 2017, according to the company.
NameSilo now says it has 2.49 million domains under management.
That would be a whopping 500,000 increase on the end of September, judging by the latest gTLD registry transaction reports.
The registrar is now the 17th-largest gTLD registrar by DUM, bigger than old hands such as Register.com and Name.com.
And yet I think it’s fair to say the company is a bit of a dark horse. It’s certainly managed to stay under my radar until now.
You’d be hard pressed from its web site to figure out who runs the company or where to find them, despite what ICANN registrar contracts require.
But press releases show it went public, kinda, when it backed into Canadian investment vehicle Brisio Innovations Inc last year, in a deal worth $9.5 million.
It’s now listed on the Canadian Securities Exchange, an alternative investment market, with the rather catchy ticker “URL”.
Given the rapid DUM growth, one might suspect an over-reliance on bargain-bucket new gTLDs, but that does not appear to be the case. About three quarters of its names in September were in .com.
The company credits word of mouth for its recent growth successes, and there may be some truth in that.
NameSilo performed well each month last year in terms of net transfers, often in the five-figure range. It ranked fifth in those terms in September across all gTLDs, beating the likes of Google, NameCheap and AliBaba, with almost 15% of its 90,000 net new DUM coming from transfers.
Given the much larger number of attempted adds and grace period deletes NameSilo experiences every month compared to its similarly sized peers, I rather suspect a lot of its new business is coming in via drop-catching.
The company offers customers API-only access to its platform for drop-catching deleting domains, among other purposes.