Peeking inside CentralNic’s annual note

Fresh TLD revenues not growing as fast as you might expect.

Domain name firm CentralNic (LSE:CNIC) noted its audited 2015 results today.

The firm noted (pdf) £10.4 revenue in 2015, compared to £6.1 million the year ahead of. Some of the jump is attributed to the buyout of Internet.bs, which contributed £3.3 million revenue in its first full year as part of CentralNic. In 2014, following it was purchased in June, it contributed £1.51m. Another chunk was thanks to higher sales of premium domain names.

The firm’s adjusted EBITDA was £3.2M and profit following tax of £0.9M.

As always with domain name firms, it’s notable to note that they have to recognize revenue over the life of a domain registration. That’s why billings/cash sales/cash flow are notable.

CentralNic had 2015 billings of £26.87m, a 172% increase over 2014.

Given that CentralNic is the registry behind .xyz and Radix’s TLDs, it is surprising to see that its wholesale division (which includes fresh TLD revenue) had revenue of £3.13m last year, only regarding £0.3 million more than the prior year.

Fresh TLDs operated on CentralNic’s platform hit 4 million in February.

This chart is particularly interesting:

This suggests that none of its fresh TLD clients generated more than £0.4 million for the firm last year. Remember, this is revenue, not sales. Still, it seems that CentralNic is charging its larger registry clients well under $1 per name, perhaps with very high discounts once they hit a certain threshold.

On the domain name resale/premium side, the firm disclosed that it right now owns regarding 37,000 domain names available for resale. Last year it pulled in £3.22m from selling premium domain names.