Google sells its domain registration business.
In a surprising announcement today, website building platform Squarespace (NYSE: SQSP) announced that it’s buying Google Domains, Google’s domain name registrar. The purchase price is $180 million, and JPMorgan Chase Bank is providing financing for part of the purchase.
Read my analysis of this deal, including its impact on Squarespace, GoDaddy, and other registrars.
Google launched its domain registrar in 2014, originally calling it an experiment. It has since ballooned into one of the largest domain registrars, with approximately 10 million domains under management. Over half of those domains are .com. Google is the fifth largest domain name registrar for .com domains.
The company’s decision to divest this business comes as a surprise. It said the decision is “In keeping with our efforts to sharpen our focus.”
Google Domains is a big prize for Squarespace given its customer base. The company has focused on selling domains to end users, and Squarespace hopes to convert some of these people into customers of its site building and other tools.
Squarespace will honor Google Domains renewal prices for current customers for at least 12 months. Customers will remain on Google’s registrar platform during a transition period. Squarespace will also become the exclusive domain name provider for any customer purchasing a domain along with their Workspace subscription from Google directly for a minimum of three years.
SquareSpace is also a registrar. On a conference call today, CEO Anthony Casalena noted that the company has millions of domains under management. According to ICANN reports, about 850,000 are .com domains. Some of its domains are sold through resellers.
The deal is expected to close in Q3.
That’s a crazy overpayment
How do you figure?
.com renewal price about to be $9.59. So they make $2.41 per domain for the first year. That is 24mil first year minus cost of running business. Then no telling home many leave cause they chose to manage the domain under the Google brand, not Squarespace. People didn’t mind paying $2 extra from a brand they know. Gonna take a long time to get back that 180mil.
They’re counting on upselling customers on Squarespace
what will happen to google brand domain top level like .PAGE, .DEV, .APP etc? Square space don’t have these extensions now – they are selling for $20 per year and it’s expensive.
Google will most probably remain to be the _registry_ (not registrar) for these TLDs.
Google domains the APP extension is $14 USD see for yourself at this link https://support.google.com/domains/answer/7626954?hl=en#zippy=%2Cprice
These is a huge news. Domain registrarship now can be added to the famous “Killed by Google” collection. Google is known to kill sometimes even profitable businesses if it’s not lucrative enough or if they want to restructure their businesses in a slightly different direction.
Makes sense from the antitrust issues Google has been having in Europe.
Where do we go now? I have 65 Domain Names and need TFA and bulk updates for A records, DNS, etc.. Google had a primitive ways with non existence bulk updates.
Here are some alternatives under $12 bucks per year.
I found this which I would trust.
https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/products/registrar/ (FIRST CHOICE!!!)
Cloudflare Registrar will only ever charge you what we pay to the registry for your domain. No markup and no surprise fees. Security features like two-factor authentication, multi-user support, and a security-focused customer support team gives you peace of mind that your domain is safe.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?