Registry revenue continues to climb, but it’s a slow march.
Domain name company Rightside (NASDAQ:NAME) reported earnings after the bell today. Its numbers show some progress, but other trends are worrying.
Q2 revenue was $54.0 million, up from $52.2 million in Q2 2015. But it’s down from the $55.1 million it reported for Q1, which was also down from the previous quarter. In other words, Rightside’s revenue has dropped two quarters in a row to start 2016. It’s true that seasonality in Rightside’s business usually makes Q4 the strongest, but revenue rose each quarter last year.
Registry revenue from new top level domain names and backend services increased from $2.6 million in Q1 to $2.9 million in Q2. That’s still too small of a number to make a big difference to the top line.
Total domains under management stayed flat at about 16.6 million.
On the plus side, Rightside is starting to see some momentum in select new top level domain names. .Live is proving particularly strong with $1.3 million in cash revenue so far this year. The company just sold two .live domains for $280,000.
Rightside reported a net loss of $2.5 million for the quarter with an adjusted EBITDA of $2.3 million.
Continuing to lose money is not acceptable
It won’t crash for a couple more quarters