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MarkMonitor parent Clarivate cuts costs and revenue guidance for Covid

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Company will slash costs this year to keep earnings on track.

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Clarivate Analytics (NYSE: CCC), parent company of MarkMonitor’s domain name business, released earnings today.

Revenues were up 2.8% year-over-year for the first quarter of 2020, coming in at $240.6 million. The company had a net loss of $74.0 million but its Adjusted EBITDA number climbed 32.% year-over-year to $78.2 million. Adjusted net income was $25.5 million.

The company expects a revenue hit this year due to Covid-19 and is slashing costs to compensate. It has lowered its annual adjusted revenue guidance from $1.16 billion to $1.19 billion down to $1.13 billion to $1.16 billion.

It plans to cut costs $30 million this year due to Covid, on top of the $70-$75 million it cut in 2019. $5 million of the $30 million will be permanent savings. This should keep its adjusted measures on track to meet prior guidance.

Its guidance is predicated on the virus being brought under control by the end of Q2, a gradual lifting of restrictions/movement of labor in mid-to-late Q3, and a recovery starting in early Q4.

Part of MarkMonitor sold to OpSec Security

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Clarivate will retain the domain name business.

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Clarivate Analytics (NYSE: CCC) is selling part of its MarkMonitor business to OpSec Security.

OpSec Security is an anticounterfeiting and brand protection company. It will acquire the MarkMonitor brand protection, antipiracy and antifraud business from Clarivate.

This does not include the MarkMonitor Domain Management business. Clarivate is re-organizing its business into two groups, one of which will cover intellectual property and will include MarkMonitor’s domain business.

The portion of MarkMonitor that Clarivate is retaining will still do brand protection as it relates to cybersquatting, trademark detection, etc. However, it will no longer do anticounterfeiting detection and mitigation, antipiracy, and antifraud.

Clarivate will retain the MarkMonitor brand.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of the yar.

 

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.



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