By: RH
Most of the comments on blogs,forums and Twitter about the acquisiton of Name.com by Demand Media have been negative. Many worry that the culture of Name.com will eventually be muted and they will just be another registrar.
Some of the things I believe Demand Media must leave in tact are:
The creativity process at Name.com must be untouched, Jared Ewy and the gang must be allowed to continue to create the videos, articles and interactions on social media as they have before the acquisition.
Name.com should be allowed to continue to run their services on their platform and not to become a mini Enom, sharing the same technology and business practices.
Name.com and their "Domain Nabber" have been a very good service for those investing in .tv. They up until recently had no competition catching premium .tv domains. It would be nice to see that service left independent.
Expiring domains could be interesting as Name.com has its own service for expiring domains. I would love to see Name.com emulate Fabulous and let their expiring domains go to NameJet and give 60 % of the sale to the customer.
I spoke to Jared Ewy about the acquisition and he said, "So we'll still be the same place. Heck, even Bill's mom is still working
here. It's still the same group of geeks, but now with more resources
than ever before."
I want to congratulate everyone at Name.com and wish Bill Mushkin the best, Name.com was the first company to be an advertiser on Hybrid Domainer.
It’s an interesting acquisition. I think one of the main aims is to have a new channel to sell and market the Demand Media (and those from the Donuts partnership) new gTLDs when they come out.
Of course the history of other acquisitions that were just folded into eNom (BulkRegister) scares some customers, but for Demand Media it’s important to keep this channel intact.
At the risk of going of on a tangent:
I get the feeling that some of the new gTLD applicants other than Demand Media are not thinking enough about the channel and that it’s going to cost money to get into it. Most registrars have a 3-6 month development cycle in order to add TLDs and on top of that the registries want them to maintain pre-paid balances for each of them.