The Rightside Challenge and the New gTLDs

Rightside, a publicly traded registrar/registry, released their quarterly earnings statement this past week and it made really interesting reading. What I found fascinating was the picture that was being played out in the domain sales space and how it reflected on the new gTLDs.

The Rightside share price (chart above) has suffered at the hands of investors as they struggled to come to grips with the new gTLD phenomenon. The slide down from a height of $15.85 per share as ICANN dragged its feet was momentarily bolstered by the April quarter results from actual release of a number of extensions. Right now, investors are still wrestling with the potential financial windfall from new gTLDs as the share price now languishes at $7.63.

It’s difficult for any business to try and communicate to all of the stakeholders the benefits of a strategy that may suddenly have an extended time horizon. This looks to be the case with the capital markets, Rightside and the new gTLDs…..but is there a glimmer of sunshine coming through the cloudy sky? Let’s begin to unpack this…

In the previous quarter’s report there were a couple of slides that really leapt out at me. The first one showed that back in Q2 2015, 83% of revenue was subscription based and that 74% of domain registrations were being renewed. It also helps that the average revenue per domain is continuing to trend upwards. These figures are underpinning a very healthy business that is continuing to grow quarter on quarter as the Rightside team executes the business plan.

According to the Q2 report the target revenue growth is 9-15% in 2015. I crunched some numbers and it looks like they’re currently (ie. Q3 2015) at about 13% above Q4 2014 so it looks like they are going to hit the top end of the growth target…..all good news for investors!

Despite the good news of hitting targets I thought that it would be a worth digging further into the numbers to see what was going on. If we are to look at the revenue graphs you’ll notice that both the Registrar and the Registry are very slowly trending upwards to the right.

The Aftermarket is actually pretty flat….which is surprising given the level of cash recently being injected by Chinese investors into the domain space. It will be interesting to see if there is an uptick in the Aftermarket space in the next quarters report.

Given the renewal rates, the registrar numbers weren’t too surprising. A large number of domains produces a lot of money in subscription revenues. What did catch my eye was the registry growth.

There seems to be a huge amount of money being pumped into the new gTLD space and yet the actual revenue numbers seem to be quite small. Yes, the business unit is just over a year old but even still, I would have thought that there would have been an initial kick up in actual revenue.

The second chart shows the quarter on quarter growth rates for the three business units. In this case the registrar is very flat and typically growing at around 2-3% per quarter….although this does aggregate up to 7.6% for Q3 2015 compared to Q4 in 2014. It’s only a smidge above the annual 6.5% growth rate for the entire domain registration space but shows that Rightside is slowly gaining market share rather than losing it.

The Aftermarket is more volatile with swings from 85% of the previous quarter to 116% since Q4 2014. The business unit is doing $7.8m on average for the three quarters in 2015 which means that it is 90.3% of Q4 2014 or exactly line ball if you compare the first three quarters of 2015 vs. the last three of 2014.

What is incredible is the change in growth rate for the registry business. There has been a sharp reduction in quarterly growth from a high of 250% to a current level of 26% per quarter. It is early days for this business unit and some volatility is expected. Consideration must also be given to these figures being off a low starting base.

This registry result would be a great result for an established business but it poses a number of questions about what is happening in the new gTLD space. More than half of the Rightside Q2 report was dedicated to explaining what new gTLD’s are to investors. This makes it very clear that Rightside is putting a LOT of eggs in the new gTLD basket.

For example, there’s even a slide that poses the typical investor hockey stick scenario. It essentially says, the whole world is the market for the new gTLDs….if only we get a small slice of this big pie we will win big time! I must admit that I really don’t like these types of slides as they come across as being quite silly (slides 13 and 15 of Q2 presentation – see below).

From the chart below the incumbents have not been able to secure the “new market opportunity” and it’s very unclear whether the new gTLDs are going to be able to either. As the market matures, I wouldn’t be surprised if the new gTLDs end up settling into a growth rate of around 6-8% per annum which means the aspiration of the “new market opportunity” will largely remain untapped.

The fuel for the new gTLDs to secure massive growth has to be found in the sales and marketing budget, in the case of Rightside its $2.6m for the last quarter. When we’re talking about changing human behaviour on a global basis I would have thought that this budget would have had to be much, much larger. The next couple of quarters will really provide a good solid picture of the new gTLD space and whether it’s going to take off or not…..it will be interesting to see.

The problem is that the markets want Internet companies to have mega-unrealistic growth rates that they can fall in love with. They want the next dropbox or snap chat that they can madly invest in and then dump after they’ve made a capital killing on the ride up.

Here’s the challenge for Rightside….it’s a good solid business with sustainable revenue into the future. No problem at all with that….BUT….it looks and feels like a mature long established company in the mining or industrial sector that is selling widgets to other businesses. Great business but really boring.

The impression is that Rightside has looked to the new gTLDs as the sizzle that would get the market excited about them….it’s early days yet but don't think this is going to pan out quickly enough for the company. Eventually, the investors will come in and hack the expense line to pieces (ie. fire lots of people) to get the profits up since their returns are unlikely to come from capital growth.

In my opinion, what Rightside needs to do is speculate by buying a few bleeding edge innovative companies. Off the back of their good solid revenues they need a nascent technology in the domain space that is uninhibited by growth constraints. A technology that doesn’t need to convert the masses or do corporate deals that take years to come through. This is the sizzle that will get the market excited enough about the share price so that investors will once again play the capital game.

I get the feeling that if the investors give Rightside enough time then the company could become one of the great flagship in the domain space. Only time will tell whether the management team will be sucked into the vortex of quarterly targets or are given the space to revolutionise the entire domain industry with a fresh sense of vision. This will be an exceptionally difficult task but given the team line-up there is a good chance they could pull something like this off.

Just to make it very clear, I’m actually still quite bullish about the new gTLD opportunity for domain investors. What I do believe is that it’s going to be a 5-7 year time horizon for any investment to yield reasonable returns. The Rightside numbers have reinforced this perspective and my personal position of “keeping my powder dry” and waiting for the most opportune moment to invest.

I should say that I do not own any shares in Rightside and would recommend that you seek professional advice prior to investing in any company.

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Michael Gilmour has been in business for over 32 years and has both a BSC in Electronics and Computer Science and an MBA. He was the former vice-chairman of the Internet Industry Association in Australia and is in demand as a speaker at Internet conferences the world over. He has also recently published his first science fiction book, Battleframe.

Michael is passionate about working with online entrepreneurs to help them navigate their new ventures around the many pitfalls that all businesses face. Due to demands on his time, Michael may be contacted by clicking here for limited consulting assignments.