Tucows continues to grow domain business while mobile phone service Ting gets bigger.
Tucows’ total domains under management hit 14.1 million at the end of last quarter, the company announced on its investor conference call last evening.
That’s up 21% from the same time last year. New registrations declined by 12%, which the company blames on “general industry softness in North America and Europe and some one-time events”.
The ratio of transfers-in to transfers-out climbed to seven to one, a very strong number.
The company sold seven figures worth of domains for the fourth quarter in a row. The company also disclosed that it has about 1,000 domains it considers “gems”, and that it typically sells only “single digits” of these each quarter.
With regards to new top level domains, the company said that it pulled two of its six applications before this summer’s “big reveal”.
Tucows CEO Elliot Noss says he doesn’t expect much new TLD revenue until 2014, especially for contested TLDs. “If we are lucky, we may start to see some of the uncontested attractive names like some of the geonames clip out in the second half of 2013,” he said.
For the first time, Tucows drilled down into its numbers for Ting, its Mobile virtual network operator (MVNO).
Ting added approximately 3,000 new accounts and 4,500 devices during Q3. It now has more than 5,000 accounts and 8,000 devices.
It generated $900,000 in Q3 revenue from device sales.
Also, the company says it spends well sound of $100 on customer acquisition. It believes most big mobile companies spend $350-$400 (not including the cost of device subsidies), much of that on national advertising.
Ting, by contrast, focuses on action related marketing such as coupon codes.
Tucows will invest $1 million to $2 million in Ting this year and $1.5 million to $2.5 million in 2013.
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