new gtlds WOW Mind+Machines makes huge cost cuts

[betthelot]

Today Mind+Machines faced reality and has decided the only way to get to a profit was to make huugggee cost savings. They own names such as .London .Work .Law
Its going to take at least 6 months for them to move all their back-end function to Nominet and have also passed all their retail accounts (registrar) over to Uniregistry. Uniregistry will pay a commission to M+M on renewals. Thats the end of M+M registrar business
This is a total U-Turn accepting that they cannot be profitable with the current structure and the 28 strings did not get enough domain sales to support the costs of a dedicated back end function and registrar function, that was burning $10m a year. The first 4 months saw them only sell on average 150 names a day.
Their results for 2015 will come out this month and they are going to look awful and this is a pre emptive strike to a sharesholders revolt.
What does this mean. A win to frank shilling a win to Nominet an acceptance that the new gTLDs are not going to be the gravy train that M+M thought.
M+M have been so lucky to lose so many contested strings, it has given M+M 40million USD in cash over the last 2 years, without that they would now be in dire trouble. Having no debt after making huge operational losses over the last two years, these lost strings have been a life safer.
As I have said many times on the M+M investors chat forum, M+M will not make a profit in 2016, for which I got banned but this is now reality. CentralNic also listed on the same stock exchange is way over valued at 89 P/E.


No doubt this is a turning point and they will start to make profit in 2017 but their sights have been set much lower and its going to be a long time before investors get their money back.
These are the two main points of the agreement announced today


1. reached an agreement for Nominet ("Nominet") to take over the technical back-end registry functions for up to 28 top level domains within the Group's portfolio;

2. signed an agreement for Uniregistrar, Corp., part of Uniregistry ("Uniregistry"), to take over MMX's loss-making consumer-facing www.mindsandmachines.com branded registrar operation.

 

[Recons.Com]

- Do you Mind Machines?
- Yes. They give me chills...

 

[disaac81]

More will follow, as I stated before, these gtlds need "entire cities" to register names in order to be profitable.

Some will survive and do well as they seem to have made a "connection" with domainers.

 

[brindle123]

Maybe people would reg more domains if they didn't have ridiculous prices.
I didn't realize they were a registry and registrar. That seems like a conflict of interest. They wanted to cut out the domainers and cut out the registrars. How is that working out for you M+M?

So will prices be higher when they switch over to Uniregistry? Uniregistry has to mark them up so you would think prices would go higher.

M+M lower your stupid prices!
.fail is $34.99
.hiv is $219.99
.luxury has a luxury price of $599.99

Who the F@&K is going to buy this crap at those prices...seriously!

Time to abandon ship stock holders!
They will continue to lose money and get low to no reg's at the prices they are asking.

Who is running this Mindless-Machine?

 

[Fancy.domains]

Maybe people would reg more domains if they didn't have ridiculous prices.

I totally agree on this. 90% of the somewhat successful new gTLDs are all somewhat reasonable priced.

I personally like .GLOBAL, .GREEN and .BIO as extensions, but because of the high renewal fees, I've decided to only renew 2 out of 6 names this year. If no interest is shown for the remaining two names within 1-2 years, I'll probably drop them as well.

Maybe they hope that middle-sized companies will protect their brands, even with these renewals?! If that's fact I think they'll have to re-think. Very few companies will register their company brands in all these existing extensions.

 

[betthelot]

Who the F@&K is going to buy this crap at those prices...seriously!

Interesting question because all the founders have been ousted by a board take over and now its run by a guy outside the industry, who is a marketing expert, Toby Hall, had nothing to do with the string applications.
He is focused on getting to profit and clearly understands growth alone will not do it so he is cutting their annual cost of 10million USD by 70%. But it means now they have to share the jam with Nominet and Registrars. They wont get to profit until 2017 when all the cost savings are realized. That profit is going to be alot less than originally forecasted and the stock price is still to reflect this.
Small note they dont own .HIV believe that is Uniregistry.
Watched this stock very closely fascinating how they are having to adjust massively because the market isnt there. They are selling on average less than 120 names in total a day with 28 strings. What 5 a day for each string! how can you run a business on that. I could go on but their best is .London but they don't own it they run it and pay the owner a privilege for doing so, little profit there, most sold is .work but they have been selling them for less that $2 each, so no profit there. Their best chance is .VIP launch in May in China. Their worse an IDN which means wedding in Chinese. IDNs don't sell in China, only to government for generics no one is going to want .购物.....

 

[brindle123]

.work but they have been selling them for less that $2 each,

where is that sale going on?

ntldstats is pretty sad when you look through them. The best sellers have inflated numbers. There are some with such low reg numbers that it seems hard to believe that they will be around for long.

 

[usernamex]

Mind + Machines direct had .work for $1.29 for quite a while, at least since Q4 2015 IIRC

I had looked into .work cuz I thought it would be neat to have a couple domains to register for 10 years so cheap and use for whois email and hosting root, then I found the issues they were having and bailed. The risk was too high compared to the cost, like it would be super cool to pay $13 for a domain for ten years, but I'd rather pay $90 and know I wouldn't have potential problems.

It also soured me on all the ngTLDs, there are a lot of inconsistencies and room for abuse with renew fees and changing terms. I agree the registry/registrar conflict is troubling.

Actually I am thankful I found out early before having a heyday of fun cheap regs

 

[betthelot]

where is that sale going on?

Many outlets NetworkSolutions 1&1 webnames.ca all less than $2

 

[betthelot]

ntldstats is pretty sad when you look through them. The best sellers have inflated numbers. There are some with such low reg numbers that it seems hard to believe that they will be around for long.

Its looking terrible but the investors will not hear anything against the board. I have tried but got booted of the platform. Just look at the last four months average is 150 names a day regged and 50 of those are .work at less than $2. Leaves a 100 names average profit $20 being generous as they do sell some premiums. So 2,000USD income a day roughly $750k a year against $10million costs. Disaster but they will go into profit in 2017 but their market value is about $100 million at the current stock price. Madness but try telling the investors, Ive left them to it.

 

[brindle123]

Its looking terrible but the investors will not hear anything against the board. I have tried but got booted of the platform. Just look at the last four months average is 150 names a day regged and 50 of those are .work at less than $2. Leaves a 100 names average profit $20 being generous as they do sell some premiums. So 2,000USD income a day roughly $750k a year against $10million costs. Disaster but they will go into profit in 2017 but their market value is about $100 million at the current stock price. Madness but try telling the investors, Ive left them to it.

Yikes. Those are some really terrible numbers. I don't know if they will turn a profit even in 2017 if those numbers continue. Even transferring the registrar work over to Uniregistry might not help that much. Unless there are no operating costs as a registry, which I doubt.

At some point some of the bad performing gtlds will have to get wiped out and dropped altogether. They will have to cut their loses at some point.

 

[betthelot]

Yikes. Those are some really terrible numbers. I don't know if they will turn a profit even in 2017 if those numbers continue. Even transferring the registrar work over to Uniregistry might not help that much. Unless there are no operating costs as a registry, which I doubt.

At some point some of the bad performing gtlds will have to get wiped out and dropped altogether. They will have to cut their loses at some point.

At some point their market value will drop by 70% and Daniel Negari will buy them cheap at around 50% of todays share price. Consolidation, whereby they will be mainly run by 3-4 big players and known only for spam, as they dilute the goodwill in these names to extract registration numbers at any cost. This wasnt the vision but the only play left in town now.