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Squarespace gets sweetened $7.2 billion takeover offer

Kevin Murphy, September 10, 2024, Domain Registrars

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.

Squarespace files to go public in New York

Kevin Murphy, April 19, 2021, Domain Registrars

Web site tools maker and registrar Squarespace has filed its papers for an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company is focused on serving small businesses by simplifying the process of building web sites. It sells domains as a value-added service, but it’s not its core competency.

In filing for its IPO, the company said its revenue last year was $621 million, up 28% on 2019. It had a net profit of $30.6 million, down from $58.2 million the previous year.

Squarespace said it has 3.7 million unique subscriptions, but it did not break down how many of those are domain registrations.

Squarespace has been an ICANN-accredited registrar since 2018, but it has historically acted as a Tucows/OpenSRS reseller. That dynamic changed a little last year.

It sold about 10,000 .com domains per month on its own accreditation in the fourth quarter. It’s accredited in many other gTLDs, but has yet to sell any domains there on its own IANA tag.

Celebrity cybersquatting to feature in Super Bowl commercial [video]

Kevin Murphy, January 25, 2017, Domain Registrars

Actor turned fashion designer John Malkovich is to feature in a Super Bowl commercial themed on cybersquatting.
The ad, for web host Squarespace, sees Malkovich complaining about the domain johnmalkovich.com belonging to some other guy by the same name.
In a roundabout way, this is also a commercial for Tucows, the newly-crowned second-largest domain registrar, which Squarespace acts as a reseller for.
Here’s the ad:

In reality, Malkovich owns the the .com of his full name. He sells clothes there.
However, he’s reportedly currently suing the owner of malkovich.com in France.
Clarification: a reader has asked me to clarify that using a domain in good faith isn’t strictly “cybersquatting”. Every DI reader already knows this, but apparently unless you spell it out every single time you risk incurring the anger of cretins.