Rightside

Rightside Responds to Donuts

Earlier today, Donuts published a press release announcing it made an unsolicited $70 million cash offer to buy all of the new gTLD domain name extensions owned by Rightside. In the release, the company also shared the letter its CEO Paul Stahura wrote to Rightside CEO Taryn Naidu.

In this morning’s announcement, it was made clear that this wasn’t the first time Donuts had made an overture to acquire Rightside’s new gTLD domain names. This afternoon, Rightside issued its own press release in response to the public overture from Donuts. In it, the company stated that it

Rob Gronkowski Announces Madden Cover on GronkNation.news

It’s not secret that I am a big New England Patriots fan. Obviously, that makes me a Rob Gronkowski fan, too. Any time I can write a domain industry article that mentions one of my favorite players (and one of the best players in the entire NFL), you better believe I will.

It was just announced that Rob Gronkowski will be on the cover of the popular Madden 17 football game. In fact, Rob mentioned this honor via his Twitter account yesterday evening:

As someone in the domain space, what I immediately noticed was

Negotiate With the Registry

Earlier this week, Rightside announced a promotion for new gTLD domain names from the company’s portfolio that it has designated as premium. The gist of the offer is that “when customers register an eligible Premium domain from participating partners at the regular premium price, the wholesale cost to registrars for renewing the domain will be $10.”

This offer is interesting, but something else in the blog post got my attention. The special offer excludes domain names the company has designated as “Platinum-level premium domains,” but the company shared some insight about those domain names that should be useful to people interested in buying the new gTLD domain names: “Rightside is always open to negotiating Platinum pricing.

There are almost always

Bill Glenn Talks New gTLD Domain Names

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I want to share a video of a 5 minute KGW interview with Rightside VP of Marketing Bill Glenn. KGW is the local NBC affiliate station in Portland, Oregon, and as you might suspect, the interview focuses on the new gTLD domain names.

While the interview will be of interest to some people who read this blog, what I found most interesting is the audience for this interview. As a domain investor, I am looking at domain names every day. I see domain extensions and automatically know the background. For the most part, the general public doesn’t have much of a clue about domain names let alone the new gTLD domain names.

Interviews like this are good for the growth and adoption of new gTLD domain names. I presume this interview cost Rightside nothing but they were able to speak to the audience and educate them about the new domain names. Even if there were only a handful of new domain names registered by people who watched the interview, the result is still positive since it didn’t cost them anything (I presume).

For some reason the interview is not embedding properly, so visit the KGW.com website to watch.

.Net Prices Increasing February 1

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Bari Meyerson-Kissel from Rightside shared an important reminder for people who own .net domain names. I also saw a reminder of the price increase on Namecheap’s blog: “VeriSign, the registry responsible for .net, is raising its annual costs for .net domain registrations, renewals and transfers.”

On February 1, 2016, the wholesale price of .net domain names will be increasing by $.67/year. This likely means that domain registrars will be passing along the increase to their customers. Depending on the registrar and the registrar’s current pricing schedule, the price that customers pay may increase as well. I would imagine that different domain registrars have different ways to account for the price change.

Domain investors who

Dublin.Pub: Smart New gTLD Case Study from Rightside

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If you attended the ICANN Dublin meeting or if you have been following along with the reports from the meeting, chances are good that you know about Dublin.Pub. If you have not heard about Dublin.Pub, go have a look. The website was created by Rightside in conjunction with Basekit and Tapastreet.

I wanted to learn more about the Dublin.Pub website, the partnerships with local pubs on related micro sites, and the objectives of launching Dublin.Pub. I reached out to Bill Glenn, Vice President of Marketing for Rightside, and he shared some information about this website and its purpose:

“The idea for Dublin.Pub was to connect a distributed ICANN community and bring them together in Dublin. It was also to show the beverage industry (and in this case specifically the local pubs in Dublin) the potential to make the social experience of their customers, much more accessible. Rightside partnered with Basekit and Tapastreet to help develop the website and incorporate social media and user generated content.”

Rightside’s Registry operations is based out of Dublin. Part of the Dublin-based team worked with local pubs to sign them up for the Dublin.Pub website and ecosystem. Each pub received its own unique .Pub domain name and microsite at no charge. The micro sites were set up to share photos, location information, and a bit of other basic information (have a look at Toners.Pub for an example).

Rightside promoted the

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