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Wix adds 177k paying customer in Q3, revenue up 40% YoY

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Website builder is also getting into the payments business.

Wix (NASDAQ: WIX) released Q3 2018 earnings yesterday.

Revenue hit $155.6 million, up 40% year-over-year. The company added 177,000 paying subscribers during the quarter, bringing its total to 3.8 million. 5.5 million users registered with Wix during the quarter. Wix converts some of these registered users into paid subscribers over time.

Collections were $163 million. That’s up 36% year-over-year but just slightly from Q1 and Q2 2018.

Wix also announced the launch of Wix Payments. It has been trialing it in Brazil and will bring it to the United States next year. I suspect adding payments became necessary after payments processor Square (NYSE: SQ) bought Weebly, one of Wix’s competitors.

Here’s a Wix website builder review from my personal experience.

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A Geographic New TLD heads to the chopping block

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.Doha gets nixed, along with two dot-brand top level domains.

A handful of additional top level domain name operators have informed ICANN that they no longer wish to operate their new top level domains. But as a first, one of these is an operator of a geographic string.

Communications Regulatory Authority (CRA) has filed a termination notice for .Doha. It planned to use this domain name for government entities in Qatar but those plans never materialized.

Additionally, two dot-brand domain owners have asked ICANN to terminate their registry agreements.

First up is The Active Network’s .active. The Active Network is part of Global Payments Inc. (NYSE: GPN). To date, the company has only used the name for social media short links in the form
of get.active/. You could make the argument that another company might want .active as a generic TLD.

Zadco Company, maker of the famed Zippo lighters, also told ICANN it no longer wishes to own .Zippo.

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WIPO panelist: “not necessary” to make reverse domain hijacking finding

by — Policy & Law 2 Comments

Panelist cops out of finding RDNH.

A World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) panelist decided it was “not necessary” to make a reverse domain name hijacking finding on a dead-on-arrival cybersquatting dispute.

WEDIA SA of Paris, France filed the dispute against the owner of Wedia.com. The domain was registered in 1997 by a Japanese company that shut down the associated product line in 2013. Wedia SA appears to have started using the name in the mid 00’s.

Given the prior use of the domain and that it predates the Complainant’s use, the case was dead-on-arrival despite the domain owner not responding to the allegations.

But panelist Douglas Clark gave Wedia SA a pass. He noted that Wedia SA at least tried to contact the domain owner first (even offering money) and doesn’t appear to have been represented by outside counsel. Maybe so, but Wedia isn’t a small fish; it has €22 million in annual sales.

The domain owner didn’t respond so Clark didn’t have to answer to that party. He wrote:

Without evidence that the disputed domain name was registered in bad faith in 1997 (or that there had been a subsequent transfer in bad faith), the Complainant should have known that the proceedings were bound to fail. Nevertheless, the Complainant had sought to contact the Respondent prior to filing the complaint and made a reasonable offer of USD 3,000 to purchase the domain name but did not receive any reply from the Respondent. The Complainant appears to have prepared the complaint itself without taking external legal advice and does not appear to have been previously involved in UDRP proceedings. The Panel is, therefore, willing to give the Complainant the benefit of the doubt that it was not aware of the possibility of a RDNH finding. In the particular circumstances of this case, the Panel therefore determines that it is not necessary to make a declaration of Reverse Domain Name Hijacking.

 

 

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Google announces .Dev domain launch dates

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.Dev will be released in early 2019.

Google has announced launch plans for the .dev top level domain name.

Sunrise will start in January 2019. A Dutch auction early access period will take place in February, with general availability beginning February 28.

As with Google’s other recent top level domain launches, SSL will be required for .dev domains.

The closest comparison for this domain within Google’s TLDs is .app, which has well over 300,000 registrations at this point. Other Google domains haven’t done as well; they all have fewer than 10,000 registrations. I suspect .dev will land somewhere between the laggards and .app.

More information is available at Get.Dev.

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Reverse domain name hijacking in PetLife.com case

by — Policy & Law 1 Comment

Company goes after domain name that was registered before it started using the name as a brand.

A pet apparel and supplies company has been found to have engaged in reverse domain name hijacking over the domain name PetLife.com.

Pet Life, LLC, which uses the domain name PetLifeCentral.com, filed a cybersquatting claim with National Arbitration Forum. The company claimed that the owner of PetLife.com was cybersquatting because it isn’t using the domain name and has listed the domain for sale with prices as high as $100,000.

But the domain owner registered the domain well before Pet Life started using its brand. (The trademark it relies on is a figurative mark, too.) So it was impossible that the domain was registered in 2003 to target the as-yet-non-existent brand.

A three-person panel of Scott Austin, David Einhorn and Paul DeCicco made the finding.

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