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Let’s meet in Montreal

by — Services 3 Comments

Let’s connect during ICANN’s Annual General Meeting.

Picture of Ferris Wheel in Montreal, Canada at dusk, with reflection in the water

ICANN’s Annual General Meeting is in Montreal from November 2-7.

ICANN66, this year’s Annual General Meeting, takes place in Montreal from November 2-7.

I will be attending and would enjoy meeting, whether to hear the latest about your company or to grab a drink. If you are attending, please drop me a line at andrew (at) domainnamewire.com. I will generally be available from Saturday afternoon, November 2, until Wednesday morning, November 6.

People in North America who can’t make it to Montreal will have another short trip to the next meeting, aka ICANN Spring Break ’20, which will be held in Cancun, Mexico in March 2020. The following year has two meetings in North America, with a return to Cancun and then the Annual General Meeting in Seattle in Fall 2021.

JPMorgan analyst cautions on domain growth

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Auty believes base of .com/.net domains missed his Q3 forecast.

Verisign logoJPMorgan analyst Sterling Auty lowered his forecast for growth of the domain base at Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) in Q3. He lowered his estimate from 1.62 million net adds to just 1.27 million based on zone data from Verisign’s website.

In the same quarter last year, Verisign’s official tally was 1.99 million growth of .com/.net.

Starting this year, Verisign no longer provides a quarterly growth forecast. It only gives an annual forecast. These forecasts are easy to hit because it can pull levers to push registrations. So you can expect full year growth to be within Verisign’s forecast of 3.0% to 4.25% on 153.0 million, or 4.59 million to 6.51 million for the year. Through the first half of the year, growth was 3.1 million domains.

My general observation is that many registrars are offering cut-rate .com registration prices on first-year registrations starting late last year. Verisign offers rebates and promotions to registrars that reduces the cost to less than its standard $7.85 fee.

Auty noted that a shortfall in new registrations could impact GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) and Wix (NASDAQ: WIX).

GoDaddy has been selling some of its valuable domain inventory lately. This sometimes happens toward the end of the quarter and boosts the company’s numbers.

Shares in Verisign and Wix are down about 2% today. Shares in GoDaddy are down about 5% at publication.

Take a look at Zapier

by — Services 0 Comments

Zapier is an easy way to connect the web apps you use in your business.

Zapier logoThis morning, domain name landing page/sales platform Efty announced that it now works with Zapier.

Zapier makes it easy to connect various web services. Even if you don’t use Efty, it’s worth reviewing Zapier’s integrations to see how you can use them in your business’s workflows.

For example, I’ve used Zapier to automatically take leads from Facebook Lead Ads and add them to a Mailchimp mailing list.

Some of the services Zapier integrates with are:

  • Gmail
  • Slack
  • Mailchimp
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Salesforce
  • Shopify

One fun integration with Efty would be to take a new lead and tweet it on Twitter. Something like: “I just received an offer for (domain), what do you think it’s worth?”

There are countless options to play with.

 

 

New TV commercial promotes .Ca domains to Canadians

by — Services 17 Comments

These cops will pour syrup on your laptop if you choose .Com over .Ca.

Still screen from CIRA ad for .CA domains shows four Canadian mounties with one of them pouring syrup on a person's laptop who is registering a .com domain

CIRA, the registry that manages Canada’s .Ca top level domain name, is running a new TV and streaming ad campaign to urge Canadians to choose .Ca over .Com. The campaign is called Don’t Be a Traitor.

The ads feature Canadian police (I believe they are “mounties” busting people choosing a .com for their web address. Here’s the ad:

Maple syrup on a keyboard? That sucks.

The .com domains featured in the commercial lead toa ctual websites promoting the campaign. The campaign also has its own domain, Choose.ca.

CIRA will run the ads only in the Toronto area from September 23 until November 17. It will also be featured on streaming services and in cinemas in the area.

(Queuing comments from people who think Neustar should do something like this for .Us…)

Google adds fresher data to Google Search Console

by — Services 1 Comment

Data now available in less than a day.

Screenshot of Google Search Console data selection showing "most recent date"

Day old search metrics now available.

Remember the good old days when you could see the actual search terms people typed to find your website? In real-time?

Google took that away many years ago, and then gave us Google Webmaster Central, later named Google Search Console. It shows you some search data in aggregate. It’s not as good as what you used to get, but it’s still pretty powerful.

The problem, until now, has been data delay. Finding out what search terms drove visitors a week ago isn’t as actionable today.

Now Google is improving this. You can now see data as soon as less than a day old. I checked this morning and I’m able to see yesterday’s search traffic.

The fresh data isn’t yet available for Google Discover traffic, which is becoming a big source of traffic for some websites. Discover currently provides more than half of my Google traffic.