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CentralNic boasts 29% organic growth through Q3, stock surges

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Company reports continued surge in the latter half of 2022.

Picture of stock chart with the words earnings report

Domain name and online advertising company CentralNic (AIM: CNIC) announced today that its organic revenue grew 29% through Q3 2021 compared to the same period last year. Adding in revenue from acquisitions, revenue is up 66% during this time.

The company says revenue through September was at least $280 million, compared to $168.5 in the first three quarters of 2020.

Organic growth accelerated in the third quarter; Q1 organic growth was 16% and Q2 organic growth was 25%.

CentralNic’s biggest acquisition win is likely Team Internet, a domain monetization company it acquired in 2019 for less than 4 times adjusted EBITDA. Internet advertising prices took off the following year as the pandemic pushed businesses online. (Revenue per thousand (RPM) for domain parking, including at Team Internet’s ParkingCrew, lifted significantly that year. The company subsequently acquired more online advertising platforms. While this has propelled the company’s growth of late, this type of revenue is generally less stable than that from domain registration, its core business as of a couple of years ago.

Shares are up about 8% today to 123.5 pence as of 8:20 am PDT. The stock has surged over 40% since the beginning of June.

.Club top level domain went MIA today

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.Club websites went down today as part of a DNS issue that has since been resolved.

Logo for .club domains has red dot and club in blue

The .club registry went down this morning, taking down all .club domains. The problem has been resolved.

The issue appears to have been with UltraDNS, a Neustar service. The UltraDNS system status page reported an incident starting at 10:30 UTC and ending at 14:15 UTC today. Details on the page suggest the issue primarily affected Europe and Asia.

Last year, GoDaddy acquired Neustar’s registry services business, making it the back-end provider for .club, .biz, .us, and many other domains. It then acquired the .club registry business itself this year.

The Neustar acquisition was a carveout. Neustar retained its UltraDNS DNS service.

In a statement, GoDaddy Registry said, “This morning there was a DNS service disruption impacting .club websites. The issue has now been resolved. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

It’s unclear why the issue only impacted .club, but it’s possible .club was provisioned differently since it was owned by a third party until recently.

I’ve reached out to Neustar to learn more and will update this story if it responds.

The real reason to not rely on Facebook for your business

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It has nothing to do with occasional downtime.

Facebook logo

I’ve seen lots of stories, tweets, and hot takes about yesterday’s Facebook outage. They point to the outage as proof that your business should have a website rather than relying on Facebook.

I think this misses the point. Anyone who operates a website has experienced the challenges of running a site. Facebook has better uptime than most webhosts. Anyone who uses WordPress can share an experience of being hacked. And creating a website on Wix or Squarespace is a lot more work than creating a Facebook page. For small businesses, the allure of Facebook pages in place of a website is that it’s easy, free, and requires no technical maintenance.

The real reason you shouldn’t rely on Facebook (or any other social network) for your sole web presence is that Facebook acts as a middleman between your customers and you. Your business is the product when you create a Facebook page. Facebook will only show your posts to a subset of your customers, and it wants you to pay to reach the rest.

Having a website gives you a direct connection to customers. Having a domain name gives your business credibility.

Businesses should consider making Facebook part of their marketing plan. But relying solely on a Facebook presence is a mistake, and it’s not because of downtime.

PIR (.org) names Rick Wilhelm new CTO

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Wilhelm comes from Verisign, where he was VP of platform management.

Headshot of Rick Wilhelm

Rick Wilhelm

Public Interest Registry, the non-profit that operates the .org namespace, has named Rick Wilhelm its new Chief Technology Officer. He replaces Joe Abley, who joined the company in 2019 but left earlier this year.

Wilhelm comes from .com registry Verisign, where he was Vice President of platform management. He has held previous positions at domain name companies Neustar, Network Solutions and CSC. He also served for nearly three years as a member of ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee.

PIR outsources its backend operations to Donuts but set out several years ago to build its own technical expertise for other systems. In a press release announcing the appointment, the company stated that the hire comes as it “builds out a technology vision and framework that mission-driven organizations can rely upon to serve communities and make the world a better place.”

Tucows picks up UNR registry and employees

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Tucows gets into the registry business with the acquisition of Frank Schilling’s technical registry and 10 employees.

Tucows logo

Tucows (NASDAQ: TCX) announced today that it is acquiring Frank Schilling’s UNR technical registry business and 10 of its employees.

Earlier this year, UNR auctioned its 23 top level domain names for more than $40 million. None of the top level domains have transferred to their new owners yet, but UNR Chief Growth Operator Shayan Rostam told Domain Name Wire this week that the assignments are under ICANN review.

Some buyers in that auction will likely continue to use the UNR backend, which Tucows is acquiring. This will give Tucows a toe into becoming a vertically integrated domain name company. Tucows owns reseller registrar platforms including Enom and OpenSRS, as well as retail domain outlet Hover.

Tucows did not disclose the deal’s financial terms and told Domain Name Wire that it is immaterial. At a minimum, I assume it will discuss the terms in its Q3 earnings release later this year.

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