In a tweet shared late last week, Bill Glenn, VP of Marketing at Rightside, announced his departure from the company:
Today is my last day Rightside and @namedotcom. It’s been a pleasure and an honor to work alongside some very bright and amazing people.
— Bill Glenn (@williamwglenn) January 27, 2017
I reached out to Rightside CEO Taryn Naidu to see if he had any comment about Bill and/or other changes at Rightside. Taryn let me know the company is restructuring in light of the sale of eNom to Tucows. Here’s what Taryn had to say via email:
“Given the fact that we divested the Enom business, we had to do a restructuring of roles. We were going from around 250 people to about 125 people. Because of this, many people moved over to Tucows, some roles were eliminated due to the business being much different than before. Bill’s role was effected in the restructuring.
We’ve a great business and we’re excited about our market position and opportunity. Name.com and our Registry business are obviously at the forefront now. It is always difficult to make these decisions but because of this divestiture, we are realigning resources and areas of focus for 2017 and beyond. We have a strong channel marketing team, great sales organization and great businesses in our Registry and Name.com. Matt Overman, Scott Ryder, Matt Delgado and others will be taking on more responsibilities within the organization. They very capable and up for the challenge.
We appreciate the many contributions that Bill and others have made in helping Rightside become a leader in this industry. I wish them nothing but the best in the future.”
Following the Tucows deal, Rightside will focus on developing the market for the new domain name extensions. The company retained its ownership of Name.com as well as its new domain extensions and back-end registry platform.
Nice to see thieves losing positions at a BS company.
Thieves?
TL;DR – Bought a new domain from the Name expired auctions, informed someone there, they stole the domain from me and asked me to help promote the company and appear in a video.
I bought – News.social – via Name’s expired auction section. I paid $40 for for the domain name, and it hit my account. I was excited since I wanted a News.tld domain to build a local new aggregation website.
I checked the previous registrant, it was the Name marketing team. I’m a nice person, so I email the community evangelist there. I was wondering if it was an oversight by them. “You’re a good person. Better than most.” is part of the reply.
About a 1 week later I’m informed by a manager at Name/Righside that they took the domain out of my account. A clause in the registrar/registry agreement states with new gTLDs they can do this.
The community evangelist then calls me, leaves a message and says I can have News.social back, if I do a marketing video with Name/Rightside about the colossal F$@$-up.
Since they seem to want to work something out, I call back the community evangelist. I try several times during different times over 2 days. He NEVER picks-up the phone. He then calls at a really odd time and says, “I don’t pick-up numbers from Baltimore.”
WTF? I’ve had some BS told to me by web hosts/domain registrars but this takes the cake. Don’t pick-up numbers from Baltimore? Maybe he’s seen “The Wire” too many times?
Why can’t you be a man and just say, “Yeah we are not giving you this domain back and I don’t want to talk to you.
I decide I don’t need to be a donkey/horse with a dangling a carrot (News.social) in front of me
I have nothing against donkeys/horses at least they are honorable creature (unlike the people working at Name/Rightside.)
I had a positive review of Name, which I removed from one of my websites. The review had good SERP rankings and traffic.
I’ve transferred most of my domains out of Name and will NEVER do business with Rightside. Meaning no buying any new domain extensions. Will only build on .COM/.ORG and ccTLDs in the future.
Many of these new gTLDs will fail. Christa Taylor, DotTBA, says 53%+ of new domains are losing money. She does financial models for new gTLD registries so she knows.
If all these companies love new gTLDs so much why not switch your main site to one? Oh right, because they know they would lose business and SEO juice.
If Rightside and other gTLD companies treat good customers like this… how do they expect usage to grow? Do they think I’m not going to tell people about this?