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Tucows acquires Ascio as consolidation continues

by — Domain Registrars 5 Comments

Tucows acquires another reseller registrar.

Ascio domain name registrar logoTucows (NASDAQ: TCX) has acquired reseller registrar Ascio Technologies from CSC for $29.44 million.

Ascio has 1.8 million domains under management and 500 active resellers. Compared to Enom, which Tucows acquired two years ago, Ascio has fewer but bigger resellers.

By selling Ascio, CSC it focusing on its brand management registrar.

Ascio has a strong presence in Europe with a headquarters in Denmark and office in Germany. It’s also known for carrying lots of country code top level domains, which will help Tucows expand the number of TLDs available.

According to the release, Ascio had approximately $4 million in annual EBITDA. Tucows had already included the Ascio contribution in the latest financial guidance it provided last month.

Tucows says it expects cost synergies in the deal and this makes sense. The company is already rebuilding its platform to run both Enom and OpenSRS, Tucows’ other reseller registrar.

 

New .Com Winners & Losers

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

NameSilo jumps on monthly list.

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

The only notable movement was NameSilo, which jumped from #10 to #6 on the monthly report. It’s currently the 11th largest .com registrar. You can read an interview with NameSilo’s CEO here.

Here’s how registrars did in terms of new .com registrations.

1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 865,438 (893,103 in October)
2. Alibaba (HiChina) 312,227 (204,213)
3. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 175,148 (183,542)
4. NameCheap Inc. 157,607 (139,033)
5. Xin Net Technology Corporation 152,143 (135,590)
6. NameSilo (CSE:URL) 130,713 (68,758)
7. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 123,087 (130,915)
8. Web.com++ 97,702 (105,815)
9. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 88,236 (92,312)
10. United Internet^ (FRA: UTDI) 66,501 (71,257)

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

1. GoDaddy* 49,370,531 (49,222,603 in October)
2. Tucows** 12,659,835 (12,709,575)
3. Endurance+ 7,179,580 (7,240,990)
4. Web.com++ 6,732,478 (6,730,384)
5. Alibaba 6,192,801 (5,972,559)
6. United Internet^ 5,666,856 (5,675,949)
7. Namecheap 4,515,221 (4,452,551)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,792,514 (2,639,761)
9. Google 2,057,844 (2,005,816)
10. GMO 1,964,580 (1,975,188)

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
^ Includes 1&1, PSI, Cronon, United-Domains, Arsys and world4you

Tucows releases “Tiered Access” Whois request data

by — Domain Registrars 0 Comments

2,100 requests for Whois data so far.

Graph of Tiered Access whois requests at Tucows

Most Whois data requests are related to trademark infringement.

Domain name registrar Tucows (NASDAQ: TCX) released data today about requests for Whois information under its tiered access program.

The company started the program following the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Policy (GDPR) last year. At that time, Tucows masked Whois records for all domain names on its platform.

People could still ask for Whois data through an online platform.

The company, which has over 20 million domains under management, said it has received 2,100 data access requests since starting the tiered access program in May. 65% of the requests came from a single requestor.

While Tucows didn’t name this company in its blog post, it’s certainly AppDetex on behalf of Facebook, which flooded Tucows with requests timed around ICANN meetings.

Overall, Tucows provided data on 25% of requests including for 21% of AppDetex’s requests.

These numbers don’t tell the whole story. Only about 5% of requests were denied; the other 70% of requests weren’t fulfilled because the requestor didn’t respond to Tucows’ request for more information. So the majority of requestors that provided all the information Tucows wanted got data.

90% of requests came from commercial litigation. This includes the AppDetex requests.

Tucows points out that few requests came from security researchers. (That said, I believe most security researchers use Whois data in bulk to connect the dots, so requesting individual records is not feasible.)

The data don’t include ICANN Compliance requests. Tucows has not given personal registration data in response to any of ICANN’s requests but has been able to help ICANN investigations without disclosing this data, it said.

Tucows sold $3.2 million of domains to GoDaddy (and more from earnings call)

by — Domain Registrars 4 Comments

Tucows reveals portfolio sale price and data center plans.

Tucows logoDomain name, mobile and internet services company Tucows (NASDAQ: TCX) released earnings for Q4 and full-year 2018 yesterday.

In its pre-recorded commentary about the earnings, the company disclosed that it generated about $3.2 million from a bulk sale of domains from its portfolio in Q4. Elliot Silver reported on this transaction with GoDaddy in December. The two companies completed a similar transaction in Q4 2017 but for only $2 million. The 2017 transaction was for approximately 10% of Tucows’ domain portfolio excluding surname domain names.

It will be interesting to see if Tucows does another Q4 transaction this year.

Tucows CEO Elliot Noss made a couple of other interesting comments during the call.

First, the company bought land in Centennial, Colorado to build a data center.

Second, Noss said he’s more concerned about a recession in 2019 than in over a decade. He made the comment in relation to how the company handles share buybacks:

Today, we again announced an open market buyback program that will commence immediately. The program will allow us to repurchase up to $40 million worth of our shares over the course of the next 12 months. This year, more than any year since 2007, I find myself concerned about a possible recession. That potential will inform our thinking in terms of the program.

The earnings release is here.

Google Domains tops 2 million .com domains

by — Domain Registrars 6 Comments

Google’s registrar now the ninth biggest for .com domain names.

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

As forecasted, Google Domains has surpassed GMO to become the 9th largest registrar for .com domains. As of the end of October it had over 2 million .com domains under management.

Starting this month I’m combining United Internet’s main registrars to include more than just 1&1.

Here’s how registrars did in terms of new .com registrations.

1. GoDaddy.com* (NYSE: GDDY) 893,103 (868,031 in September)
2. Alibaba (HiChina) 204,213 (133,156)
3. Tucows** (NASDAQ:TCX) 183,542 (174,114)
4. NameCheap Inc. 139,033 (139,581)
5. Xin Net Technology Corporation 135,590 (170,284)
6. Endurance+ (NASDAQ: EIGI) 130,915 (143,179)
7. Web.com++ 105,815 (99,859)
8. Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) 92,312 (85,550)
9. United Internet^ 71,257
10. NameSilo 68,758 (88,409)

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

1. GoDaddy* 49,222,603 (49,079,269 in September)
2. Tucows** 12,709,575 (12,751,782)
3. Endurance+ 7,240,990 (7,335,322)
4. Web.com++ 6,730,384 (6,722,165)
5. Alibaba 5,972,559 (5,852,659)
6. United Internet^ 5,675,949 (3,688,497)
7. Namecheap 4,452,551 (4,405,568)
8. Xin Net Technology Corporation 2,639,761 (2,522,185)
9. Google 2,005,816 (1,953,943)
10. GMO 1,975,188 (1,979,668)

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
^ Includes 1&1, PSI, Cronon, United-Domains, Arsys and world4you