In the news.
Punktum dk A/S, the .dk TLD registry, has notified customers of an ongoing wave of scam emails related to suspension. The registry is working to mitigate this attack; however, GCD recommends not taking any action on .dk-related emails unless they are accompanied by a note from the GCD CSM team.
Ensuring website security and privacy is crucial; an essential piece of that protection is having an SSL certificate. With GoDaddy Corporate Domains, you can now easily manage SSL certificates as part of the Brandsight platform. Users can purchase and manage multi-domain certificates, set up notifications for expiring certificates, and consolidate invoices. This new feature aims to simplify the management of SSL certificates for customers, providing a hassle-free experience.
ICANN unveiled its plans to commence the acceptance of applications for new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) in early 2026. The application process for new TLDs will adhere to a strict evaluation framework to ensure technical feasibility and prevent conflicts with existing TLDs. By opening new opportunities for businesses to secure unique and memorable domain names, ICANN aims to enhance online branding and support the growth of the internet ecosystem. This expansion will bring more options and should be considered when exploring future projects and strategies, from product names to dot brands.
Modern times have presented new challenges impacting the corporate domain name management space. At the same time there has been a gradual changing of the guard as domain management pioneers begin to turn over the reins to the next generation. In addition, legacy corporate registrars, which have led the field since the internet’s early days, are seeing increased customer demand for better technology and service, and newer registrars have come forward as attractive alternatives. And more change is coming, as we continue to wait for a definitive timeline for the next round of top-level domains (TLDs). The domain name industry is certainly in a state of constant flux, making it an interesting arena, albeit unsettling at times.
GoDaddy Corporate Domains streamlines domain portfolio management by deploying a suite of solutions tailored to a company’s needs. GCD provides distinctive features that simplify corporate domain duties, including consolidated billing, advanced security, global TLD coverage, and dedicated client services. Its innovative Brandsight platform offers data insights that companies can leverage to gain visibility into their domain use and determine the value or purpose of their domains within their operations.
Corporations tend to stay loyal to their domain name registrars, much like customers continue to use the same bank or phone company forever. However, since some corporate registrars have been around since the dawn of the Internet, many have undergone substantial changes since they were first hired and now focus more on their own bottom lines rather than keeping current customers happy. Still, customers stay with them year after year even if service steadily declines and rates go up. How can companies tell when it’s time to break up with their domain name registrar and go elsewhere?
The co-founders of brand protection agency SILKA share their practices for winning UDRP domain name disputes and recovering domains. Elisa Cooper of GoDaddy Corporate Domains reports.
IT professionals have an important seat at the table when it comes to managing a law firm’s portfolio of domain names. In fact, their participation in the process is critical. Domain names are essential to law firms because they, along with the websites and email accounts they enable, represent the firm’s digital identity to the world. However, legal IT is often spread thinly with other diverse responsibilities, including hardware, software, network, training, help desk tech support, partnerships, and more. Their overwhelming workload leaves legal IT little time to focus on domain-related issues. Therefore, the best strategy is for legal IT to focus on the most pressing domain management needs to ensure they are tended to sufficiently.
Today’s companies invest thousands, if not millions, in their domain name portfolios every year and many of their domains have priceless value to the organisation. However, corporate budgets are not unlimited, so it’s a constant struggle to make strategic decisions about the portfolio’s size and shape. Gaining a firm grasp of which domain names the company has—and why—is essential so that the company’s portfolio is fully optimised and right-sized based on the organisation’s priorities and budget.
In recent years, change has been more the rule than the exception for businesses due to enduring covid-19-related and security concerns. Faced with the stressful volatility and unpredictability of the pandemic and an ever-changing market, companies have become so preoccupied with damage control and responding to various externalities that many have overlooked areas of the business that seem relatively stable.
Organizations today are often the owners of hundreds or even thousands of pieces of real estate – and they may not even realize it. That real estate is digital, in the form of domain names. Every enterprise knows about their main corporate website, where most customers or other interested web users meet them. But they may not be aware of just how many .coms and .nets are in their digital portfolio.
The increase in online activity has led to corporations putting domain security high up the agenda, a new survey has revealed. Matt Serlin and Elisa Cooper of GoDaddy Corporate Domains examine the data.
Is it really 2022? Is it? Although many might view 2021 as another “lost” year due to the pandemic, filled with Zoom™ meetings, virtual conferences, working from home and restricted travel—there were a number of notable domain name stories which deserve to be highlighted.
Some of the biggest companies have fallen prey to cybersquatting or typosquatting. Big companies fight back against would-be trolls by purchasing a host of domain names similar to the real deal, so that they can redirect visitors to the right place. This is one reason major corporations end up owning vast portfolios of domain names – sometimes tens of thousands. They also implement programs to detect abusive registrations and take action to recover names where it makes sense.
Tegan Dover is information technology procurement manager at Red Ventures, which owns consumer brands and businesses such as Lonely Planet, CNET, ZDNet, TV Guide and Chowhound. In that role she oversees the company’s domain portfolio and has been the architect of its ongoing management and consolidation as the company has expanded in recent years.
In this guest piece, Elisa Cooper, head of marketing at GoDaddy Corporate Domains, speaks to Dover about her perspectives on working collaboratively with other stakeholders, best practices for domain consolidation, emerging security concerns, and challenges she has seen impacting Red Ventures and its business environment.
GoDaddy Corporate Domains has hired two new sales executives with deep industry experience. It’s a roundtrip for Tess Diaz. Diaz got her start in the domain industry at GoDaddy but left the company in 2012 to work for Media Options. There, she was the face of the Domain Sherpa show after Michael Cyger sold the show to Media Options. She left the company last year and briefly worked for Buckley Media. Brooke McCrory is also joining GoDaddy Corporate Domains. Her domain experience dates to 2000 when she started working for Network Solutions. She spent 17 years there (and at Web.com, which acquired Network Solutions) before leaving in 2017.
Managing domain names is not for the faint of heart. Its many complexities and challenges have only increased in recent years. In a study from 2020, about 50% of corporate domain name managers said that managing corporate domain name portfolios has become more difficult over the past year.
Companies know domain names are important to their businesses, but clarity is often lacking about who has ultimate responsibility for domains. As companies grow, more stakeholders become involved, including digital marketing, legal, and more. Confusion and disconnects from poor management are potentially costly and damaging to the organization.
Firms often own thousands of domain names. That makes good business sense: Marketing can use unique landing pages for different promotional efforts or campaigns. Company lawyers may even buy up similar—but incorrect—spellings of the flagship domain to avert fake product lines, unwanted complaints, or phishing attacks.
But it’s surprisingly easy to lose track of all those domain names—or leave them unsecured. Employees may register domains and forget to renew the registrations, for example. Or they may register domain names on their own and then leave the company.
To gain a deeper understanding of corporate domain name management across the world’s largest companies, CCD recently completed an in-depth analysis of the Global 2000. The Global 2000* is an annual ranking of the top 2,000 public companies in the world by Forbes magazine. The ranking is based on a mix of four metrics: sales, profit, assets and market value.** GCD leveraged their own Brandsight technology to conduct our analysis – and the results were surprising.
Keeping corporate domain name portfolios in tip-top shape requires more than just managing the registration of domain names in support of new brands, TLDs, and market expansion. It also requires periodic review to ensure that names are both secure and resolving, and that website visitors can consistently reach their destination, regardless of whether they’ve added the www, or have misspelled or fat-fingered names.
While GoDaddy has been focused for the last two decades on small and microbusiness customers, its entry this year into the corporate domains management space should not be dismissed — the company has one huge advantage.
Domain name registrar GoDaddy has launched a domain management solution for large companies, seven months after acquiring Brandsight.
GoDaddy Corporate Domains offers services including domain name strategy development and portfolio rightsizing
GoDaddy has announced that large companies are now able to manage their domain names via its new service.
GoDaddy Corporate Domains (GCD) promises to deliver a secure, intuitive and powerful domain management solution for enterprise-level domain name portfolios.
“Unpredictable” and “crazy” might not be the words that first jump to mind when you think about domain name management. But that’s how Matt Serlin and Elisa Cooper of Brandsight described the past 12 months for the industry which, like everyone else, is dealing with a pandemic and an economy in freefall.
Earlier today, GoDaddy announced an agreement to acquire Brandsight. To say that we are thrilled would be an understatement — we couldn’t be happier about it.
Over the past three years, the Brandsight team has leveraged today’s technology along with deep industry experience to build next-generation corporate domain management solutions that are redefining the market. Today’s announcement will help take our business to the next level.
Brandsight has a much different target audience, catering to very corporate large clients. The company offers tailored domain name management and brand protection services to its clientbase, and the acquisition should give Brandsight more resources and access to additional tools.
And so it goes, we are coming to the end of 2019, and that can mean only one thing. It’s time for another Domain Name Year in Review. And unlike years past, this year was a real doozy. So without further ado, here are the domain name industry’s top ten biggest stories for 2019.
As the Internet has grown, so too have the abuses that go along with one of the world’s most transformative technologies. For all of the positives the Internet brings, negatives like phishing, malware and child exploitation are a reality online.
As of December 9, 2019, 48 registrars and registries have signed onto the “Framework to Address Abuse.” This initiative was launched last month by a number of domain name registries and registrars, just prior to the ICANN meeting in Montreal. It addresses many of the most egregious abuses of the Domain Name System (DNS).
Domain names can be valuable assets, but many corporate domain name portfolios consist of non-resolving domains. In a recent survey conducted by Brandsight more than 91% of domain professionals said that ensuring domains redirect to relevant content was an extremely important or somewhat important goal. That said, it’s not uncommon for less than half of corporate domain name portfolios to point to live content. Sure, there are adult-themed domains or those registered anonymously for future use that purposely do not resolve, but those are the exceptions to the rule.
Muscle memory is a funny thing. We don’t even think about it really, but when we do the same thing over and over again, it just becomes second nature to us. This is how we’ve come to use WHOIS over the past two decades to get contact information for registered domain names.
If you wanted to see who owned a domain, you’d simply do a WHOIS search. I’ve probably done hundreds of thousands of them during my time in the industry. Well as of this week, a major step in the retirement of WHOIS officially took place.
As we move further into the summer months and the demands made upon domain professionals typically ease, now is the ideal time to review domain name portfolios. And technology solutions can greatly automate this process. Ensuring that portfolios are pared, appropriate levels of security are implemented, and domains point to relevant content are all key areas upon which to focus.
The ICANN community recently gathered in Kobe, Japan for its first meeting of the year and it was certainly a busy week for attendees. Much of the meeting centered around the work of the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) to address gTLD registration data.
Towards the end of November, the EPDP team published an initial report for public comment. It included a number of policy recommendations and highlighted open issues where the group had not been able to come to a consensus. In all, the draft report received over 50 comments from various parties providing important feedback to the group.
Hear predictions from 18 people from across the spectrum of domain names: domain registrars, registries, domain investors and more.
As expected, GDPR has had a major impact on the ability to access domain ownership information. And we did indeed see a number of M&A transactions over this last year. However, there wasn’t a lot of new .Brand activity. This is one prediction where I may have missed the mark — but hey, 2 out 3 ain’t bad. So with that, let’s take a look at some of the biggest domain news stories from 2018.
Matt Serlin is the former Chair of the ICANN Registrar’s Constituency and is currently a member of the Expedited Policy Development Process (EPDP) team on the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data. For the past several months, Matt has met at least 2 times each week with members of EPDP team.
A new survey published by corporate domain name registrar Brandsight has revealed that over half of respondents are struggling to manage their domain name portfolios.
The insight is part of Brandsight’s second annual domain management survey.
While there is no one ‘right way’ to manage domain name portfolios, domain professionals should consider these five guiding principles in determining what is best for their companies, says Elisa Cooper of Brandsight.
Twenty-nine of 33 open seats of the GNSO’s Expedited Policy Development Process on the Temporary Specification for gTLD Registration Data are now filled and their occupants known. The EPDP group is tasked with, in just a few short months, coming up with a permanent replacement for ICANN’s Temporary Specification for WHOIS in a post-GDPR world.
The Board of Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) struggled and sweated and with days left came up with a way to make the Domain Name System (DNS) and WHOIS, the master database of who owns what website name, compliant with the European Union (EU)‘s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
For years, corporate domain name portfolio managers have struggled with determining whether or not their portfolios were the “right” size. Managers of mature domain name portfolios have often felt that their portfolios were bloated, containing domains that were no longer needed. Conversely, domain managers of newer portfolios have sometimes known that gaps existed. Regardless, the question remains — just how many domains should a corporate portfolio contain?
On today’s show, Elisa Cooper of Brandsight talks about domain protection. She discusses corporate domain name management and how big companies have needs that are different from domain investors and small businesses.
Domain name software company Brandsight has released the beta release of its corporate domain management platform.
New brand management registrar Brandsight says it has started a beta test of its initial service.
A Saratoga Springs-based internet domain name registrar company, Brandsight Inc., has joined the Start-Up NY program and is partnering with SUNY Adirondack.
It’s been a busy few months here at Brandsight. For a small and young company, we have had a lot of initiatives closing out 2017 and entering 2018. By far, our biggest focus since launching the company has been on the development and release of our domain management product.
Given that it’s been a few years since my last domain name year in review, I’ve really enjoyed looking back at this year’s biggest domain name stories …
Both ivi.com and ktg.com have had UDRPs filed against them, and I have to say for anyone holding a valuable domain name, it’s a cautionary tale and one that should have folks paying attention to the outcome of each.
Several factors should be addressed when companies are considering whether to change the way they manage their domain name portfolios.
Why does all of the discussion around potential options for WHOIS in the era of the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) feel like déjà vu?
Domain management firm Brandsight has hired Matt Serlin and Elisa Cooper to fill senior positions.
Corporate domain management solutions provider Brandsight has hired two domain industry veterans to lead its client services, marketing and policy operations.
Brandsight, a provider of next-generation corporate domain management solutions, announced today it has hired Matt Serlin to lead Client Services and Domain Operations, and Elisa Cooper to lead Marketing and Policy.
Corporate domain name registrar Brandsight has hired Matt Serlin from MarkMonitor and Elisa Cooper from Lecorpio.
Two former MarkMonitor executives have teamed up with a Fairwinds co-founder to launch a new “next generation” brand protection registrar.
Two former employees of corporate domain name registrar MarkMonitor have joined Brandsight, a new domain name registrar targeting the corporate market. Elisa Cooper and Matt Serlin joined the company that was founded by Phil Lodico earlier this year.
In other news, we see 3 domain name veterans launch a new corporate domain name offering called Brandsight.com! (Yes, they own the sounds like Brandsite.com domain also).
With concerns about profitability drawing our attention, community involvement can easily get lost in the shuffle. Fortunately, leaders can take a few simple actions to rediscover their commitment to it — and make it a key part of the business.
Domain names have been at the forefront of the digital experience for 20 years. They provide the real estate for businesses to build their online presence and provide doorways for their customers to find them.
A question that has been asked for years, but which really does come first?
Press releases.