CentralNic profits show change from domain registrar to advertising company – Domain Name Wire
Advertising revenue accounted for almost half of CentralNic’s 2020 revenue.
Ad revenue, mostly from parked pages like these, accounted for 46% of CentralNic’s revenue in 2020.
Cumulative domain name industry CentralNic (London AIM: CNIC) today released unaudited financial statements for 2020. The results show a significant shift in the way the company makes money.
CentralNic has three business sectors:
Indirect – Channel revenue from the reseller registrar (eg Hexonet), from the registry service provider (eg providing the backend for .XYZ) and running the country code .sk.
Direct – Revenue is generated from sales to end consumers such as small businesses i.e. retail.
Monetization – This includes domain parking from its acquisition Team Internet / Parking Crew, and most recently zero-click marketing and affiliate company CodeWise.
Monetization was only $ 1.875 million, or less than 2% of revenue in 2019. It was $ 112.073 million, or 46% of revenue in 2020. It was 39% of the company’s gross profit.
It was a good thing last year as domain monetization took off. The revenue per thousand (RPM) received by CentralNic for parked domains increased 36%, mainly due to the increase in rates from Google. The company attributes the increase to better quality traffic after the removal of some customers and the monetization of the company’s SSL pages. But I’ve heard that other parking companies also received big RPM increases from Google last year, so at least part of the increase was unrelated to CentralNic itself.
The increased reliance on ad revenue means CentralNic could grow faster, although revenue is not as predictable and stable as domain registration revenue.
Overall, CentralNic’s revenue rose 121% to $ 241.2 million last year. The company says that excluding acquisitions and a few other items, the company grew 9% organically last year.
Full results are available here.
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