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Uniregistry makes Whois opt-in

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New Cayman Islands law forces Uniregistry to change Whois policy.

Domain name registrar Uniregistry is making the publication of Whois data opt-in for registrants.

The move is in response to a new Cayman Islands Data Protection Law. Think of it as the Cayman Islands’ version of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

Many of Uniregistry’s clients are domain name investors who want their information disclosed in Whois and they will be able to opt-in to doing this.

Technically, ICANN requires all registrars to provide a way for their customers to opt-in to have their information published in Whois but few have enabled this capability.

For domains with masked Whois records, Uniregistry will provide a form for people to contact the domain owner.

Most (but not all) other big domain name registrars began masking Whois data carte blanche after GDPR went into effect in May even though the law doesn’t cover non-EU citizen/resident data.

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Two thoughts from GoDaddy’s conference call yesterday

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GoDaddy execs comment on WordPress and the domain aftermarket.

GoDaddy logoGoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) released Q4 2018 and full-year earnings yesterday and held its investor conference call.

Two things in the call stood out to me.

First, the company discussed continued progress on GoCentral and its growth in managed WordPress.

GoCentral is GoDaddy’s homegrown website builder. It’s designed to be extremely easy for any type of business to start a website. I’ve tested the product and it’s definitely an easy way for a restaurant, mechanic, or any of hundreds of other types of businesses to create a web presence quickly and without the help of a developer.

On the call, GoDaddy CEO Scott Wagner noted, “Our Managed WordPress offering automates the entire process of starting and maintaining a secure WordPress website, which saves our customers literally hours of work, frustration and distraction.”

Later, in response to an analyst’s question, he said (quoted from SeekingAlpha transcript):

The biggest issues with WordPress, if you are working and using on it, are plug-in maintenance and overall security and just the level of time and attention that it takes to actually run that. Look, our managed platform, managed WordPress platform, totally automates and simplifies that process and we are making it easier and easier and easier. And so the feature improvement is both security layer, but more importantly, on app plug-in and theme updates to just make it super easy for performance and reliability. So I think you are seeing it not just for pros, but also for pros handing sites like that off to individuals or small businesses that are managing it for themselves.

I think that starting a WordPress website is something in which GoDaddy really shines. It uses onboarding wizards similar to GoCentral to get you started quickly. I’ve used WordPress since 2005 and, despite all the improvements in the platform, still find it hard to spin up a site with a good design. It’s much, much easier with GoDaddy.

Wagner noted that GoDaddy is now the largest host of paid WordPress instances.

One future opportunity for GoDaddy is to help companies make the leap from GoCentral to managed WordPress. GoCentral is a good product and will meet many companies’ needs. Over time, though, they might want to get the flexibility of WordPress. It would be very powerful to have a one-click migration from CoCentral to managed WordPress.

Dreamhost is doing this to a degree with its Remixer product. Remixer is a much simpler website builder, though.

The other thing on the call that caught my attention was CFO Ray Winborne’s comment on the domain aftermarket:

For the first quarter, we expect revenue of $705 million to $715 million, representing 11% to 13% growth versus the first quarter of 2018, as we began to lap the gains from changes in merchandising of aftermarket domain sales in early 2018.

This reconfirms that GoDaddy saw a marked improvement to aftermarket domain sales when it changed how it presented premium domains in domain search results. At NamesCon this year, GoDaddy GM Paul Nicks said conversions increased 30% with this change. It apparently had a material impact on GoDaddy’s revenue. I think there’s other low-hanging fruit here that GoDaddy can tap in 2019.

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GoDaddy tops $3 billion bookings in 2018

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Company crosses milestone as growth continues.

GoDaddy logoGoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) released Q4 2018 and full-year earnings today after the market closed.

The company crossed $3 billion in bookings in 2018, coming in at $3.01 billion, up 15.0% from 2017.

Revenue was $2.23 billion, up 19.2%. GoDaddy expects slower revenue growth in 2019, targeting 12-13%.

Domain name revenue in Q4 was $314.3 million, up 11.6% from $281.6 million in the same quarter of 2018. For the year, domain revenue was $1.22 billion.

The company ended 2018 with 18.5 million customers.

Subscriptions to web presence products, including GoCentral and managed WordPress, were up 40%.

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Tucows releases “Tiered Access” Whois request data

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2,100 requests for Whois data so far.

Graph of Tiered Access whois requests at Tucows

Most Whois data requests are related to trademark infringement.

Domain name registrar Tucows (NASDAQ: TCX) released data today about requests for Whois information under its tiered access program.

The company started the program following the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Policy (GDPR) last year. At that time, Tucows masked Whois records for all domain names on its platform.

People could still ask for Whois data through an online platform.

The company, which has over 20 million domains under management, said it has received 2,100 data access requests since starting the tiered access program in May. 65% of the requests came from a single requestor.

While Tucows didn’t name this company in its blog post, it’s certainly AppDetex on behalf of Facebook, which flooded Tucows with requests timed around ICANN meetings.

Overall, Tucows provided data on 25% of requests including for 21% of AppDetex’s requests.

These numbers don’t tell the whole story. Only about 5% of requests were denied; the other 70% of requests weren’t fulfilled because the requestor didn’t respond to Tucows’ request for more information. So the majority of requestors that provided all the information Tucows wanted got data.

90% of requests came from commercial litigation. This includes the AppDetex requests.

Tucows points out that few requests came from security researchers. (That said, I believe most security researchers use Whois data in bulk to connect the dots, so requesting individual records is not feasible.)

The data don’t include ICANN Compliance requests. Tucows has not given personal registration data in response to any of ICANN’s requests but has been able to help ICANN investigations without disclosing this data, it said.

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Executive changes at GoDaddy

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

Four notable changes at GoDaddy.

Picture of Fara Howard, Chief Marketing Officer CMO at GoDAddy

GoDaddy Chief Marketing Officer, Fara Howard

GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) announced several executive changes before the weekend.

Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer, is stepping down effective the end of February.

Arne M. Josefsberg, Executive Vice President, Chief Infrastructure Officer and Chief Information Officer, is retiring at the end of June.

The company promoted Andrew N. Low Ah Kee from Chief Revenue Officer to Chief Operating Officer as of February 25.

Finally, Fara Howard has joined the company as Chief Marketing Officer. Howard was previously the Chief Marketing Officer at Amazon Fashion.

Barb Rechterman, one of the earliest employees at GoDaddy, had been in the CMO position.

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