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Namecheap and Tucows settle legal dispute

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

Transfer dispute was resolved in a legal settlement.

Namecheap and Tucows (NASDAQ: TCX) have entered into a settlement agreement to resolve a transfer dispute.

Namecheap, a former Enom reseller, sued Tucows (which now owns Enom) because it said that Tucows was dragging its feet over transferring millions of domain names to Namecheap. Tucows said it was just a matter of using the appropriate mechanism to transfer the domains.

Following a court order, Tucows transferred 2.65 million domains to Namecheap in January 2018. It then entered into a settlement agreement with Namecheap in September 2018, under which Namecheap agreed to pay an “administrative fee” to Tucows for services related to the transfer. Tucows transferred a further 0.24 million domains later that month. The company will transfer the remaining 0.4 million domains to Namecheap in the fourth quarter.

The net-net: Namecheap eventually got the names transferred the way it wanted and Tucows got at least some of the costs covered.

The settlement was disclosed in Tucows’ 10-Q filed with the SEC yesterday.

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Namecheap releases interesting data about domain registrations

by — Domain Registrars 3 Comments

Report looks and recent and historical data on domain registrations at the registrar.

Namecheap released a report today with data about its customers and their choice of top level domain names. The report includes data from the past ten years as well as more recent data incorporating new top level domains.

It can be difficult to compare registration data that doesn’t take into consideration the price of domain names; indeed, Namecheap excluded .xyz and Famous Four Media’s domains from some of its calculations.

Here’s what I found interesting:

1. .US was within the top three most-registered country code domains among Namecheaps customers from January 2017-June 2018. That’s not a huge surprise. The surprise is that it’s among the top three for registrants from Asia, Europe, Africa and South America in addition to the United States. It’s the #1 country code domain amongst Namecheap’s Asian customers. Perhaps promotions played a role.

2. Over the past ten years, June has been the most active month for domain registrations at Namecheap. November and October are #2 and #3, respectively.

3. Nearly half of Namecheap’s customers have registered just one domain with the company:

The full report is available to download on Namecheap’s website.

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Latest .Com Winners & Losers

by — Domain Registrars 3 Comments

How domain name registrars fared with .com in June.

ICANN has published the latest official data from Verisign (NASDAQ:VRSN) about the .com registry. This registrar-by-registrar report covers June 2018.

There was shifting among the top ten registrars for June in terms of new .com registrations. West.cn fell off the list when its volume fell from 61,649 to only 35,460. NameSilo, which just cracked the 2 million domains under management (across all TLDs) mark, was #7 with over 100,000 registrations.

1. GoDaddy.com* 866,819 (951,994 in May)
2. HiChina Zhicheng Technology Ltd. 203,536 (210,854)
3. Tucows** 192,056 (207,430)
4. Xin Net Technology Corporation 132,636 (125,152)
5. NameCheap Inc. 117,964 (125,428)
6. Endurance+ 117,369 (136,328)
7. NameSilo 105,228 (67,446)
8. Web.com++ 96,339 (109,876)
9. Google Inc. 89,914 (98,618)
10. 1&1 Internet 48,692

Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations as of the end of June 2018:

1. GoDaddy* 48,452,314 (48,305,409 in May)
2. Tucows** 12,835,741 (12,875,098)
3. Endurance+ 7,500,686 (7,592,640)
4. Web.com++ 6,737,824 (6,709,055)
5. HiChina 5,527,250 (5,426,366)
6. NameCheap 4,284,760 (4,243,582)
7. 1&1 3,731,057 (3,744,506)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,172,780 (2,076,944)
9. GMO 2,035,462 (2,064,482)
10. Google 1,782,920 (1,728,215)

Many domain companies have multiple accreditations and I’ve tried to capture the largest ones. See the notes below.

* Includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains
** Includes Tucows and Enom
+ Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain and Bigrock. There are other Endurance registrars, but these are the biggest.
++ Includes Network Solutions and Register.com

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Namecheap hits 10 million domains under management, Q&A with CEO Richard Kirkendall

by — Domain Registrars 6 Comments

Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall answers questions about Namecheap as it hits a big milestone.

Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall

Domain name registrar Namecheap announced that it has eclipsed the 10 million domains under management milestone. This comes after being named to the Inc 5000 with $109.1 million in revenue last year. I reached out to Namecheap CEO Richard Kirkendall to ask questions about the growth, the company’s history as a reseller and what it has planned for the future.

DNW: For a long time, you were a reseller, so it wasn’t clear just how big Namecheap was. Why did you decide to move your domains under your own registrar creds?

Kirkendall: I’ll start by saying that we’ve had our own registrar backend and our own accreditation for many years now. The sole reason we had continued to work with Enom was because of the partnership we formed with them over the years, and the extremely favorable terms they gave to us to stick around.

That being said, we were under contract with them, and once that contract ran out, we decided it was time to finally branch out on our own. Being on our own allows us to use our scale and leverage our size to work out better deals, and also to form partnerships that directly affect the value we are able to deliver to our customers.

Cutting out the middleman has also allowed us to build better technology, as well as directly affect how quickly and efficiently we serve our customers. It’s been a long time coming and we are excited by the road ahead.

What role have new TLDs played in reaching 10 million domains?

Kirkendall: The new TLDs play a role, but I wouldn’t say they are the only driver to our growth. As you’ve pointed out in some of your blog posts recently, we are one of the largest registrars when it comes to legacy TLDs such as .com and .net as well. Our growth is mainly being driven by our ever-expanding customer base, and that’s what is key here.

We have millions of customers on our platform, and that number continues to expand quickly. I would say, in terms of customers for a single domain registrar, we are the second largest retail registrar in the world. Our strategy from the get-go has always been to focus on many customers with a few domains, rather than a few customers with many domains. It is this same strategy that has allowed us to quickly scale across all TLDs – as we have a wide range of customers with different needs.

(Editor’s note: Namecheap is the 5th largest registrar for .com domains and the 2nd largest for new TLDs.) Click here to continue reading…

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Domain name registrars and .Com, by the numbers

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

ICANN publishes latest .com data.

ICANN has published the latest official data from Verisign (NASDAQ:VRSN) about the .com registry. This registrar-by-registrar report covers May 2018.

There was little change on the charts. For new registrations, NameSilo lept above West.cn for the month. On the top 10 total registrations leaderboard, Xin Net swapped places with GMO.

In May, these were the top 10 registrars in terms of new .com registrations.

1. GoDaddy.com* 951,994 (960,904 in April)
2. HiChina Zhicheng Technology Ltd. 210,854 (246,804)
3. Tucows** 207,430 (203,219)
4. Endurance+ 136,328 (153,352)
5. NameCheap Inc. 125,428 (127,855)
6. Xin Net Technology Corporation 125,152 (113,107)
7. Web.com++ 109,876 (103,385)
8. Google Inc. 98,618 (92,671)
9. NameSilo 67,446 (62,017)
10. West.cn 61,649 (74,741)

Here’s the leaderboard of the top registrars in terms of total .com registrations as of the end of May 2018:

1. GoDaddy* 48,305,409 (48,088,605 in April)
2. Tucows** 12,875,098 (12,932,547)
3. Endurance+ 7,592,640 (7,725,154)
4. Web.com++ 6,709,055 (6,713,143)
5. HiChina 5,426,366 (5,298,573)
6. NameCheap 4,243,582 (4,222,952)
7. 1&1 3,744,506 (3,760,259)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,076,944 (2,010,000)
9. GMO 2,064,482 (2,089,800)
10. Google 1,728,215 (1,663,836)

Many domain companies have multiple accreditations and I’ve tried to capture the largest ones. See the notes below.

* Includes GoDaddy and Wild West Domains
** Includes Tucows and Enom
+ Includes PDR, Domain.com, FastDomain and Bigrock. There are other Endurance registrars, but these are the biggest.
++ Includes Network Solutions and Register.com

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