Company is “cautiously bullish” about new TLDs over next few quarters, but I’m not the only one who doesn’t know what that means.
Domain name registry and telephone services company Neustar (NYSE: NSR) reported 4th quarter 2014 earnings yesterday after the market closed.
On the company’s conference call, CFO Paul Lalljie reported that the company pulled in about $2 million in revenue in the fourth quarter from new top level domain names, and much of that came from the .NYC launch.
The company had revenue of $252 million for the quarter, so new TLDs contributed about 8/10th of a percent to its top line.
Neustar CEO Lisa Hook cautioned that its contracts for new TLDs are not all variable, so tracking domains under management (DUM) might not correlate well to how much the company generates from new TLDs. Some contracts are fixed price, some have a fixed price with additional services, and others are tied closely to domains under management.
I suspect that .NYC is one of the more favorable contracts Neustar has from a revenue perspective, given that it is responsible for the entire program including marketing. It gets 60% of revenue from .NYC sales. For most domain names, it’s acting as just a technical services provider.
In an amusing comment, Lalljie said that their Head of Investor Relations says that the company is “cautiously bullish for the next few quarters as we think of these launches”, but Lalljie said he doesn’t really know what that means. I guess it’s a CYA way of hoping for the best, but not having much confidence in it.
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