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MarkMonitor parent Clarivate going public through merger deal

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SPAC gobbles up Clarivate Analytics, the company that owns MarkMonitor.

Clarivate Analytics logo

Brand protection domain name registrar MarkMonitor will soon be part of a public company.

MarkMonitor parent company Clarivate Analytics is merging with Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) Churchill Capital Corp. Churchill raised $690 million in an IPO last September, the most raised in a SPAC IPO last year. A SPAC is created with the specific purpose of acquiring another company.

Private equity and asset management firms Onex and BPEA carved out Clarivate from Thomson Reuters in 2016. They will roll 100% of their existing equity in the firm into the deal.

Clarivate had $968.5 million in revenue in 2018, up from $917.6 million in 2017. 82% of 2018 revenue was subscription-based.

The deal gives Clarivate an initial enterprise value of approximately $4.2 billion. That values it at about 12x adjusted revenue.

Once the deal is final, Clarivate plans to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CCC.

New Amazon Alexa gadgets lead to profits for Verisign

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Amazon announced a bunch of products, which means it registered a bunch of domains controlled by Verisign.

New Amazon Alexa devices like the Echo Spot lead to defensive domain registrations.

Every time Amazon announces a new product its domain name team goes to work defensively registering domain names. So when the company announces six products on the same day it goes into overtime.

Amazon announced six new Amazon-Alexa powered devices yesterday including the new Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Spot, FireTV with Alexa remote, Echo Connect and Echo buttons. You can learn more about these devices in this week’s Internet of Things Podcast.

The company registered hundreds of domain names related to the new products. Some are specific to the individual products (AmazonEchoButton.com, AmazonEchoSpots.com, EchoPlusGuide.com) and others related to Echo Gadgets (AlexaGadgetAPI.com, GadgetsAPI.com).

Two companies win whenever Amazon registers these domains: Amazon’s brand protection registrar MarkMonitor and Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN), which runs .com and .net.

DomainTools shows that Amazon owns about 45,000 domains that are tied to hostmaster@amazon.com, and there are likely more registered under different names.

Elisa Cooper and Matt Serlin join new corporate domain registrar

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Ex-MarkMonitor employees join new corporate domain manager.

Elisa Cooper and Matt Serlin have joined Brandsight.

Two former employees of corporate domain name registrar MarkMonitor have joined Brandsight, a new domain name registrar targeting the corporate market.

Elisa Cooper and Matt Serlin joined the company that was founded by Phil Lodico earlier this year. It is officially launching its website today.

Both Cooper and Serlin are well known in the domain name and ICANN communities. Cooper left MarkMonitor in 2015 and joined intellectual property company Lecorpio. Lecorpio justed merged with IP firm Anaqua, so Cooper made the move to Brandsight. Serlin’s name is well known because he was listed as the contact on about 35,000 domain names that MarkMonitor registered on behalf of clients that wished to remain anonymous. He left MarkMonitor earlier this year.

Top 5 Domain Name Stories from March

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New TLD price changes dominated the discussion.

The first quarter of 2017 is now in the books, and the initial tax deadline in the U.S. is quickly approaching (yikes!). But before we think about taxes, here’s a look back at what happened in the domain name business in March.

1. Uniregistry price change – The top story last month was Uniregistry’s decision to drastically increase the wholesale prices of many of its new top level domain names. One will go up over 30x. GoDaddy subsequently stopped offering Uniregistry domains. Uniregistry is now backtracking a bit when it comes to already-registered domain names. I think New TLDs aren’t dead, but some business models won’t work.  In case you’re wondering, this is how much it costs to run a registry. You can listen to Frank Schilling discuss the price hike and his take on the state of new TLDs on this podcast.

The top five stories on DNW last month were all wrapped up in #1, but that would be boring. So here are numbers 6-9, but marked starting at #2.

2. Tesla registers domain names for UAW Union fight – This story caught steam (volts?) after a couple union folks tweeted about it.

3. A TLD registry just slashed its wholesale prices up to 97% – While Uniregistry increased prices, one TLD is taking the opposite approach.

4. 35,000 domains at MarkMonitor need to be updated soon – Matt Serlin is leaving MarkMonitor, which means a bunch of domains registered with his name as the Admin contact need to be changed.

5. Cool story about how a company bought matching .com for $40,000 – Inspired by Sumo.com’s founder, this company stuck with it and paid top dollar for a .com to match its existing .io domain.

Last month’s podcasts:

#129: The Internet of Things
#128: What you need to know from ICA
#127: Frank Schilling explains price hike
#126: In the .Clouds w/ Francesco Cetraro

35,000 domains at MarkMonitor need to be updated soon

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Registrant name will need to be updated after Serlin departs.

About 35,000 domain names at MarkMonitor use the company’s version of Whois Proxy. They are all registered in the name of Matt Serlin, DNStination Inc.

Names registered in this name belong to companies such as Facebook and Google.

The ownership records for these domain names will need to be updated soon.

Serlin recently posted on LinkedIn that he will be leaving MarkMonitor after 15 years with the company.

I’ve always found it amusing that MarkMonitor uses an actual person’s names on its customers proxy registrations. Who will be the next lucky employee at MarkMonitor to be affiliated with 35,000 domains?