As many readers are aware, I’ve been traveling around the world these past couple of weeks. There’s nothing quite like being away for fourteen days and having only eleven nights accommodation to cause you to question your own sanity about the endeavor. Despite my lack of hotels I managed to jet into Austin and take in the conference that launches the industry each year…..NamesCon!

After checking into the conference hotel, I felt like I was welcoming a long-lost friend as I collapsed on the glorious, soft, wonderful bed. There’s one thing you discover when traveling fifty thousand kilometers in a flying tin can, the seats are hard and not that conducive for sleeping. The quilt felt like bliss incarnate as it wrapped around my exhausted body…..but then I remembered that I had a ParkLogic function that night.

It was with some reluctance that I clambered off the bed, got cleaned up and headed to the San Jac saloon for our small get together. It was a great time to meet a group of existing and potentially new clients as both Matt Herbert (also from ParkLogic) and I struggled with our jetlag. At the end of the night I resumed my horizontal position, closed my eyes and entered a deep sleep…..until 4am at least.

As per my normal routine I find myself in the Melbourne Qantas Club and about to embark on a two-week world whirlwind tour of the world. It sounds glamourous until you consider truly terrifying statistics such as being away for 14-days and only having 11 nights of accommodation booked.

On the bright side I was excited to hear that my flights will no longer be flying through either Iran or Iraq. This put a bit of a smile on my face as I thought of denying the republican guard a chance to play with their shiny new toys (ie. Surface to air missiles).

Being a bit of a geographic aficionado I then prayed that the flight would somehow miss the Ukraine as well. It wasn’t so long ago that a certain aircraft was downed by eager “freedom fighters” in their effort to defend what was “rightfully” theirs. So it will be with welcome relief when I enter European airspace.

This is one of the problems with a round earth. If you keep on heading west (like I’m going to be doing), you end up getting back to where you start. Now if the flat earth people were right then it may be possible to just bypass these crazy regimes…..in many respects, it’s a shame they aren’t right as it would make traveling from Australia much easier.

A few months ago, I had a stroke of genius. Rather than head from Melbourne across the Pacific to NamesCon I would prove all the "flat earthers" wrong and travel to Austin via the Atlantic Ocean. This would mean that I could then drop into Europe and the east coast of the USA prior to NamesCon and then exit out the west afterwards.

On paper this was all made perfectly logical sense but that was before I started putting the itinerary together. To give you an idea, the around the world journey will mean flying in seven different planes for fifty-six hours and this doesn’t include waiting times at airports etc. Oh, the joys of international travel….not!

Just of special note is the fact that I’m away for fifteen days but with only eleven days of accommodation booked. What does this mean? Pretty much that I’ll be the bleary-eyed guy in seat 74D that’s twisted into a pretzel as he tries and sleep in whatever airplane seat, he finds himself in.

So where am I headed?
Melbourne - > Frankfurt -> Cologne -> London -> Washington - > Austin -> San Francisco - > Melbourne

If you happen to be in any of those cities and would like to catch-up then don’t hesitate to reach out to me. You never know, we may be able to grab a drink together!

At this time of year, I like to take a few minutes to think about the state of the domain industry and what I personally managed to accomplish over the past year. In many respects, I’m finding that 2019 was tremendously positive for the different business domain business models this has setup 2020 to be a boom year.

Traffic Monetisation
At ParkLogic (I’m the co-founder), we are continuing to see good steady growth with one record month following another. This seems to be in contrast to what many investors have been experiencing with monetising their own domain traffic. I can only surmise that the technology that we’ve developed over the last decade is really paying big dividends.

One of the major projects we completed was the rolling out of a new DNS infrastructure that is not only faster and more flexible but will support the growth of ParkLogic in 2020 and beyond. In addition, we've expanded the team and if you’re attending NamesCon you will get a chance to meet Matt Herbert who is assisting with account management and development.

I keep on saying this…..like a broken record…..but if you leave all of your domains with a single monetisation company then you are leaving money on the table. We have over a decade of data to prove this is true so if you’re earning at least $250/month in traffic revenue then reach out to me if you’re interested in further information.

I’ve been reading with interest about the sale of the .org registry by the Public Interest Registry (PIR) to Ethos Capital. The value of the deal is just shy over $1.1 billion and if you are to believe some people, the deal was done in a cesspool of corruption and scandal.

What's in it for PIR? They are now funded to do good for the Internet in the long,long,long-term future without having to worry about running a registry. Could you imagine being on the board of PIR, facing the prospect of another round of extensions being released by ICANN and then having a billion-dollar opportunity fall out of the sky and into your lap? You would be crazy not to seriously look at it!

Now let’s think about the numbers for a second. A typical .org domain sells for $10 (to make the maths easy) and since they have roughly 10 million domains in the registry then .org generates a top line revenue of $100 million per year. Of course, this is shared with the registrar in a variety of different agreement structures but let’s imagine that it wasn’t.

By paying $1.1 billion for the business either Ethos Capital is possibly going to be looking for a long-term hold (ie. north of 11 years) of the business, plan on growing the number of domains or there is some other reason they purchased it.

Growing the registry is a long, hard road. The entire domain space grows by about 5% per year and .org is a small percentage of that. If they managed to grow by 200,000 domains (ie. 2% per year) it would be a miracle. This would only add $2 million to the top line revenue and doesn’t really change the ROI economics that much for Ethos Capital.