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Wix now has 4.5 million paying subscribers

by — Services 1 Comment

Wix’s paying subscriber base inches forward in Q4.

Picture of stock ticker board with words "earnings announcement" below it

Website builder Wix (NASDAQ: WIX) reported Q4 and full-year 2019 earnings today.

The company posted revenue of $204.6 million for the quarter and $761.1 million for 2019. That’s up 25% and 26% year-over-year, respectively.

Collections, which is basically a measure of cash receipts, hit $226.7 million in the fourth quarter and $832.5 million for the year. That’s up 29% and 26% year-over-year, respectively.

Numbers were stunted by the strong dollar.

Wix’s paying customer base increased by 89,000 during the fourth quarter and measured 4.5 million at the end of the year. 5.8 million people registered to use Wix services during the fourth quarter. There are now 165 million registered users, so less than 3% of registered users are active paying users.

Looking ahead to 2020, Wix forecasts revenue to increase to $946-$956 million and collections to reach $1.02-$1.035 billion.

 

Your choice of top level domain can impact site performance

by — Services 6 Comments

Some have faster response times than others.

A Domain Name Wire reader recently notified me about a speed study that BunnyCDN performed. The content delivery network that helps speed up load times tested 42 top level domain names for their DNS resolution time. Here’s what it found:

Chart showing DNS resolution time

The top six performers—.biz, .buzz, .club, .co, .us and .in—use Neustar for registry services.

The next eight top level domains are Donuts’ domains, which seem to use Neustar’s DNS services as well. You’ll note other clusters, such as Verisign’s .tv/.com/.net.

BunnyCDN noted that part of the problem with some TLDs is that some of their nameservers performed worse than others. Also, the group found that response time degraded significantly outside of North American and Europe for some TLDs.

The content delivery network pointed out that DNS response time isn’t the biggest factor in a site’s performance, but I found the study and results interesting.

(Hat tip: Jorge)

Uniregistry marketplace features GoDaddy should keep

by — Services 15 Comments

Here are three features of Uniregistry’s marketplace that I hope GoDaddy keeps post-acquisition.

Uniregistry lets you category-target your parking keywords. GoDaddy should keep this feature.

Yesterday, GoDaddy announced that it is acquiring Uniregistry, the Uniregistry marketplace, and the Name Administration domain name portfolio.

In an interview with Domain Name Wire, GoDaddy VP of Aftermarket Paul Nicks said GoDaddy plans to retain much of what Uniregistry has built. Here are some things about the Uniregistry Marketplace that I hope GoDaddy keeps or builds into its own platform.

Keyword category-targeting – GoDaddy doesn’t have much of a domain name parking platform. And let’s face it, few of us are making decent money from parking anymore. That said, Uniregistry has a good parking feature that I use even when I’m not hunting for much parking revenue. It lets you set a category for the ads that should show on your parked page. Showing ads relevant to a domain name helps establish a legitimate interest in a domain name, which is a key defense in UDRP cases. Setting a category for the dictionary meaning of the domain avoids Google’s algorithm deciding to show trademark-related ads.

Buyer information – Right now, Afternic doesn’t tell you anything about who is inquiring about your domain names. Uniregistry shows you the IP/location and the prospect’s contact information. There are even handy links to search Google for the prospect’s email address or find their LinkedIn profile. This is helpful when negotiating.

Self-service or full-visibility features – There’s a fundamental difference between Uniregistry’s marketplace and Afternic. Uniregistry lets you handle leads yourself or send the leads to brokers, while GoDaddy takes care of everything for you. It would be great to have the Afternic team handle inquiries for you while also giving you visibility into what’s happening, which is possible with Uniregistry. If GoDaddy removes self-service capabilities, this could lead a lot of domain investors to take another look at DAN.com and Efty.

What other features would you like GoDaddy to retain or add to its platform?

DAN.com domain name platform raises series A funding

by — Services 3 Comments

Company will use money to accelerate platform roadmap.

Logo for Dan.com

DAN.com has raised a series A financing.

Domain name sales platform DAN.com has raised a multi-million-dollar Series A round backed by Airbridge Equity Partners.

The company did not disclose the exact amount of the investment. Airbridge will be a minority owner after the investment.

Dan.com founder Reza Sardeha told DNW that the money would be used to “invest in the future development of our marketplace, to introduce a fully integrated registrar to DAN users and to build the first real open distribution network of the domain industry.”

Sardeha continued:

Since we already have built a transactional engine that can handle automated domain transfers, the next step for us is to connect our network with our transactional engine to create tremendous value for all stakeholders in the market.

Having deeper pockets now, also allows us to keep our focus solely on product development & growth. We have an ambitious product roadmap as described in this earlier blog post and the raised funds allow us to execute all our plans in the coming 12-18 months.

The funds will also help us to accelerate making our vision a reality. We can now also introduce more frequent product and service updates as we’ll expand our team significantly in the coming period.

Dan.com was founded as Undeveloped in 2014. Its initial years were somewhat slow, but the company has made a name for itself in the past couple of years as domainers started to park their domains on for-sale landers rather than use traditional parking. The service offers low fees and accepts credit card payments up to $50,000, making it a useful service to quickly complete domain transactions, even internationally.

The company also launched a blockchain-based backend for transaction management. Last month it expanded its domain financing options.

I interviewed Sardeha for DNW Podcast #243 last year.

Verisign expects at least $1.125 billion revenue in 2020 even without price increases

by — Services 17 Comments

Company doesn’t bake price increases into guidance.

Verisign logo.Com registry Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) expects to generate $1.250 billion to $1.265 billion in revenue next year, even without price increases in .com, the company disclosed yesterday.

That compares to $1.232 billion in 2019.

The numbers could be better if Verisign enacts a 7% increase in the wholesale price of .com domains next year, as it is likely to do. ICANN has proposed allowing the company to increases prices beginning in 2020. Any price increase would take place later in the year, though, and the impact is difficult to measure without knowing when it will happen and how many domains will be renewed for the remainder of the year.

As part of the deal to enact price increases, Verisign is chipping $4 million a year into ICANN’s coffers. On the company’s investor conference call yesterday, Verisign CEO James Bidzos answered a question about what this money is for. Analyst Nick Jones of Citi asked for clarification on how this money will be used as if it will be used for special/additional projects.

Bidzos said “…ICANN’s core mission is security and stability and that’s where this funding is going…”