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My thoughts on employee turnover at Uniregistry

by — Domain Registrars 15 Comments

Here are some probable reasons you’re seeing visible turnover at Uniregistry.

On Friday, Konstantinos Zournas at OnlineDomain wrote about something people have been mumbling about on message boards for a couple months now: turnover at Frank Schilling’s company Uniregistry.

Konstantinos is correct. There has been quite a bit of visible turnover at the company. A lot happened over the summer, but there has certainly been turnover for a while. I have explained DNW to a couple marketing people at Uniregistry, only to have them leave a week or two later. (I hope that’s not correlated!)

I think there are many reasons for this.

First, I should state that I know for a fact that not everyone leaving Uniregistry has been let go. Some have left on their own volition. Others have been fired.

I also know that headcount at the company is at or near its peak. So the company isn’t laying off people as a cut-your-way-to-profitability plan.

That said, here are some reasons I think Uniregistry has had visible turnover lately: Click here to continue reading…

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CentralNic is on the premium domain hamster wheel

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

The premium domain hamster wheel will be in effect later this year.

CentralNic is on a hamster wheel with premium domains.

Domain name registrar and registry company CentralNic (AIM: CNIC) reported first half 2017 financial results today.

The company reported first half revenue of £10.59 million, up 18.5% from £8.93 million in the first half of 2016. But this was down from £13.20 revenue in the second half of last year.

While that might suggest the company is going to see a drop in revenue this year, never fear…CentralNic has a trick up its sleeve. It’s the premium domain hamster wheel.

The reason CentralNic had a stellar second half last year was that it sold off some of its premium domains. One customer paid £3.555 million for premium domains. Click to continue reading…

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Namecheap sues Enom and Tucows, demands transfer of 4 million domains

by — Domain Registrars 5 Comments

Namecheap says Tucows is dragging its feet on transferring domains registered through Namecheap when it was an Enom reseller.

Domain name registrar Namecheap is big, but until this year it didn’t show up on charts that rank registrars by domains. That’s because Namecheap acted as an Enom reseller, so it added to Enom’s numbers rather than its own.

Starting this year, Namecheap began registering new .com domain names on its own registrar accreditations and it generally ranks as the fifth largest registrar each month when it comes to new .com registrations.

Namecheap wants to transfer four million domains that Verisign offers (e.g. .Com, .net) that were registered at Namecheap while it was an Enom reseller from Enom’s accreditations to its own accreditations. In a lawsuit filed in Seattle this week (pdf), Namecheap alleges that Tucows, which acquired Enom earlier this year, is thwarting the effort.

The issue seems to revolve around if this transfer qualifies for a “Bulk Transfer After Partial Portfolio Acquisition”, or BTAPPA. This type of transfer was set up to transfer a bunch of domains between registrars in bulk. Click here to continue reading…

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The Latest .Com Winners & Losers

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

Latest data shows little change.

ICANN published the latest official .com transactions report from Verisign, which includes data by registrar for May 2017.

Little has changed in the top spots, with GoDaddy leading the way and Tucows, which now includes Enom, coming in second place.

Here are the top registrars in terms of new .com registrations for May:

1. GoDaddy* 930,127
2. Tucows** 190,589
3. HiChina 145,636
4. PublicDomainRegistry 124,470
5. Namecheap 122,598

Here are the top five registrars (open to the public) for net inbound transfers during the month:

1. HiChina +18669
2. GoDaddy +9,022
3. Google +7,816
4. TurnCommerce (Namebright) +6,199
5. MAFF Inc (XZ.com) +5,920

On the flip side, these five registrars saw the biggest net outflow of .com domain names due to transfers:

1. Tucows -13,170
2. PublicDomainRegistry -6,688
3. Fabulous -4,950
4. 1&1 -4,070
5. Domain.com –3979

*Includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains **Includes Tucows and ENom.

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Elisa Cooper and Matt Serlin join new corporate domain registrar

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

Ex-MarkMonitor employees join new corporate domain manager.

Elisa Cooper and Matt Serlin have joined Brandsight.

Two former employees of corporate domain name registrar MarkMonitor have joined Brandsight, a new domain name registrar targeting the corporate market.

Elisa Cooper and Matt Serlin joined the company that was founded by Phil Lodico earlier this year. It is officially launching its website today.

Both Cooper and Serlin are well known in the domain name and ICANN communities. Cooper left MarkMonitor in 2015 and joined intellectual property company Lecorpio. Lecorpio justed merged with IP firm Anaqua, so Cooper made the move to Brandsight. Serlin’s name is well known because he was listed as the contact on about 35,000 domain names that MarkMonitor registered on behalf of clients that wished to remain anonymous. He left MarkMonitor earlier this year.

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