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.Blog jumps from Nominet to CentralNic

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CentralNic wins another registry contract.

Logo for WordPress' .blog top level domain nameAutomattic, the company behind WordPress, is switching backend registry providers for its .blog top level domain name.

The company has used Nominet since the launch but will switch to CentralNic (London AIM: CNIC) later this year.

Nominet is the registry for .uk domain names. CentralNic is a diversified domain name company that has won many registry contracts with its flexible pricing.

Michele Neylon, CEO of domain name registrar Blacknight, noted that many new TLD operators signed contracts before they knew how big their zones would be. Now that they have a better idea, they might get a better deal from another backend registry provider.

He also pointed out that registry provider switches are a pain for registrars. I suspect registrars are getting used to these changes as the original contracts come up for renewal.

Digging into MMX and its earnings

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Top level domain seller has improved its revenue base but still struggles with its legacy.

Earlier today I wrote about Minds + Machine’s (MMX) first-half revenue. This afternoon I had the chance to talk to MMX CEO Toby Hall and dive into the company’s full earnings report.

Hall is confident in the company’s trajectory. The company forecasts that its renewal revenue will begin covering its full cost base within the next 24 months.

Renewal revenue is something Hall has been harping on since he took over as CEO of the company. He believes that investors understand subscription businesses and will reward the company if it creates a stable base of renewal revenue.

That’s clearly part of the rationale behind the company’s purchase of ICM Registry earlier this year. The company has a steady base of registrations and renewals across its TLDs, most notably .XXX.

MMX picked it up for about 9 times profit. It will help shore up MMX’s revenue base to help investors value the company. When Hall took over, the company’s market valuation wasn’t based on any fundamentals. Now investors are valuing it at about 15-17 times operating profit.

The steady base of revenue is helping MMX look at different opportunities. Hall is particularly excited about what the company is doing with the .Luxe domain and Ethereum Name Service. It remains to be seen how the Ethereum Name Service deal will impact registrations, but Hall looks it kind of like R&D.

The company is still struggling with some of the legacy of the company, though. In its published earnings report it gave details on a burdensome contract that it has already renegotiated once:

In 2016, the Company successfully renegotiated aspects of the given contract to reduce the then marketing obligations of $10.8 million to nearly half this amount under the condition that those marketing funds be provided directly to the commercial partner to manage. In addition, the Company negotiated that the runway on its 2017 minimum guaranteed commitment be extended from 12 months to 17 months to allow the revised marketing strategy to come into effect. To date, a significant portion of that marketing budget has been spent by the partner with minimal impact on revenues in the current year and no expectation of any material uplift in future periods. Accordingly, given recent performance, and expected future performance, the Company is now impairing the asset ($4.1 million) and is providing for a one-time onerous contract provision in the amount of $7 million, reflecting the future expected losses of $1.7 million per year above revenue for the remainder of the contract, based on flat growth of the asset. The provision reflects net future obligations (i.e., cash due above total revenue per annum), which will be paid from 2018 until the contract end in August 2021. The Company will seek to renegotiate a more equitable settlement given the losses incurred on this asset (c. $11.9 million) since the start of the contract, as a result of the terms agreed by former management.

Although the company will not disclose this partnership by name, it’s quite clearly .London. There are a couple of observations here.

First, broad marketing of namespaces isn’t moving the needle.

Second, the deal MMX inked with .London before new TLDs came out shows just how bullish the company’s founders were. That contract was a heck of a bet for such an early stage company. It turned out to be a very bad bet.

How fast should a new top level domain name grow?

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Without artificial stimulation, a new TLD should grow slowly.

Slow and steady is the name of the game for top level domains.

On this week’s podcast I interviewed Jay Daley, the interim CEO of Public Interest Registry (.Org).

We talked briefly about the organization’s foray into new top level domain names. Daley said:

“We need to recognize that a new gTLD, when it is operated in a good way, will have slow growth, and it will take some many years to get to a large size. That is pretty straightforward for when you examine the history of, say, .org or any ccTLD or any of the others.”

He noted that .org started with slow growth until it got traction. Of course, .org was aided by the growth of the web as well. Click here to continue reading…

Uniregistry tips hand with “Registry in a Box” trademark application

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Company wants to use “Registry in a Box” for registry services product.

Frank Schilling’s Uniregistry runs its own technical registry for its top level domain names such as .tattoo and .diet. It also provides these services to other top level domains such as Cayman Island’s .ky domain name.

Apparently, Uniregistry wants to up its game in this department. It just applied to register a trademark for “Registry in a Box”.

The intent-to-use application is for “Domain name registry services, namely, coordinating the registration of domain names on the Internet; providing an online computer database in the field of domain name registration information”. It was filed on September 10.

I wonder how this company feels about Uniregistry’s choice of name.

The registry business is extremely cutthroat these days with prices racing to the bottom. Frank has been looking ahead to the next round of top level domains, but that is many years away.

XYZ buys .Storage top level domain name

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XYZ gets its tenth top level domain name

XYZ, the company that runs the .xyz domain name, has added a tenth top level domain name to its stable.

The company announced this morning that it has acquired the .storage top level domain name.

Self Storage Co., a subsidiary of self-storage giant Extra Space Storage, Inc., assigned rights to the TLD effective April 18. Self Storage Co. owns the domain name Storage.com.

Instead of pricing certain domain names at a premium, .storage will be launched with all domains available at a fairly high price. XYZ CEO Daniel Negari told Domain Name Wire that the domain name will be priced similarly to .theatre.

A quick search of registrars this morning shows that .theatre domains are retailing for about $600-$800.

XYZ might not stop at ten top level domain names. On his blog, Negari wrote today:

We are still in acquisition mode with cash in-hand, and I am loaded for bear. Due to our intimate knowledge, experience and close partnerships with registrars, we are prepared to acquire more domain extensions.