Demand Media to spin off domain business: 2013 Top Stories
Rightside will make some noise in 2014.
Demand Media has had its share of ups and downs since it was founded in 2006. 2013 was mostly a year of downs for its content business, which includes eHow and Livestrong.com, thanks to Google’s search engine changes.
But the domain name business is still holding its own, and it’s hoping to capitalize on the introduction of fresh top level domain names in 2014.
In February, Demand Media disclosed that it was planning to spin off its domain name business into a fresh public firm. That fresh firm will be called Rightside.
Rightside includes eNom, Name.com, NameJet, and United TLD. United TLD is the firm’s fresh top level domain business, which hopes to offer domain names ranging from .actor to .ninja. It also offers registry services to Donuts, the largest fresh TLD applicant.
Rightside will also manage the firm’s own sizable portfolio of parked domain names.
Having Rightside as its own publicly traded firm will help shine more light on the domain name industry and Demand’s (former) domain name operations. It will also provide good insight into the progress of a fresh top level domain operator as the fresh domains hit the web.
