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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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How Rightside sold itself

by — Domain Registrars 15 Comments

There were lots of twists and turns over the past year as Rightside sold itself.

Domain name company Rightside (NASDAQ:NAME) announced last month that it would be acquired by Donuts for $213 million.

This ended a long and winding road for the company as it began exploring strategic options last year. It has Donuts to thank for pushing this process forward.

Donuts started it by offering to purchase Rightside’s registry business for $70 million last year. The deal came to light in June 2016 after Rightside rebuffed Donuts offer.

According to an SEC filing, Rightside asked its bankers Barclays to look for potential buyers. Two buyers came to the table with indications of interest.

One was Party A, described as a “non-U.S. domain registrar and internet services company.” On September 12, 2016, it submitted a non-binding indication of interest to buy Enom fo $150 million.

The other was Party B, a “leading internet domain registrar and web hosting company”. On September 14 it submitted an indication of interest to buy Rightside for $11.75 per share. Five days later, it upped its offer to $13.50 but stated that it didn’t want to acquire eNom and the deal was conditioned upon a sale of eNom at the same time it acquired Rightside. Click here to continue reading…

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Tucows shifts expired domain name inventory to NameJet

by — Expired Domains 3 Comments

Move comes after Tucows acquired an interest in NameJet earlier this year.

Tucows, the world’s second largest domain name registrar, has stopped sending its expired domain name inventory to GoDaddy and will instead send it to NameJet.

Tucows just switched its expired domain partner to GoDaddy in September after previously using SnapNames.

It was the first time GoDaddy sold third party expired domain inventory on its platform. It subsequently added Endurance International Group inventory.

Tucows’ move doesn’t come as a huge surprise. The company acquired half of NameJet when it bought eNom. eNom has sent its expired domain inventory to NameJet ever since it formed the partnership in 2007.

However, the timing is a bit surprising given that Tucows’ deal with GoDaddy began less than a year ago. I would assume they had some sort of contractual obligations.

Paul Nicks, VP & GM, Aftermarket at GoDaddy told Domain Name Wire, “We wanted to be good partners. We’re grateful for the opportunity Tucows gave us when they chose GoDaddy as their first partner for expiry inventory. We believe Tucows saw great results and we feel confident that GoDaddy’s performance will speak for itself and that we’ll earn the opportunity to win back that business.”

Steve Barnes, Vice President, Retail & Aftermarket at Tucows said, “We feel GoDaddy was a good partner, and they’re a company that we’ll continue exploring ways to work with.”

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January data show why Rightside sold eNom: Namecheap

by — Domain Registrars 3 Comments

Namecheap made a wholesale switch to its own accreditation in January.

ICANN has published data from Verisign about .com activity in January, and it reveals a good reason why Rightside sold eNom to Tucows.

Namecheap.

Namecheap has always been a big part of eNom’s business. It has historically accounted for about a quarter of eNom’s domains under management.

Namecheap has registered its domain names through the eNom reseller platform. We didn’t have exact figures on its monthly volume, even though we knew it was big.

When new TLDs came out, Namecheap started registering many of these domain names under its own registration accreditation. Then, in January this year, it started registering .com domains through its own accreditation…and landed within the top five registrars for new registrations that month with over 100,000.

This means that Rightside (NASDAQ:NAME) was about to show a big drop in revenue in Q1 of this year. Apparently, it immediately moved to sell eNom.

It found a willing buyer in Tucows (NASDAQ:TCX). On stage at NamesCon, Tucows CEO Elliot Noss said he was aware that Namecheap was moving off the platform. But that doesn’t hurt the deal from Tucows’ perspective.

Namecheap negotiated very low rates because it was so big. If you measure your business on revenue growth (as Rightside does) then losing Namecheap is a big loss. In Tucows’ case, however, it hopes to add about $20 million EBITDA/year from the business. Losing Namecheap shouldn’t negatively impact that because it was so low margin.

Here’s a look at how the registrars fared with new registrations and transfers in January: Click here to see the charts…

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Two Tucows execs are leaving

by — Domain Registrars 3 Comments

CFO and CIO announced their resignations this month.

Two Tucows executives have recently notified the company that they are leaving.

Last week, Chief Financial Officer Michael Cooperman announced that he was retiring after 18 years with the company. He will remain an advisor to the company when he leaves April 1. Dave Singh, current Vice President of Finance at the company, will take over for Cooperman.

This morning, Tucows issued an 8-K announcing that Kenneth Schafer, Chief Information Officer, is also stepping down effective today to pursue another opportunity.

Meanwhile, shares in Tucows (NASDAQ:TCX) have been on an absolute tear. Shares closed yesterday at $50.10, up 40% on their opening price at the beginning of the year.

Tucows owns domain reseller platforms OpenSRS and eNom, as well as retail registrar Hover. It also provides mobile phone and broadband services through its Ting brand.

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