As always, Schilling has an eye on the future as well - hence another major new enterprise in Uniregistry.com - a domain registry operator that has applied to run its own new extensions through ICANN's New gLTD Program. Barring further delays at ICANN (of which there have been many) hundreds of new domain extensions will begin hitting the market in the next year or so and Schilling plans to be a key player in that re-shaping of the Internet landscape.

"The second defining event was the decision to extend all the systems and infrastructure we’ve been building to a pool of 600 customers. In ten years we never dealt with anyone, except ourselves. In April 2011 we made the decision to bring on a customer. 599 more followed. We have some small customers and we have some large ones, but all our customers have remarked that the depth and breadth of infrastructure we’ve built over the years is unlike any other in this industry. That’s not by accident. We built all that stuff for customer number one, me. Having arms-length customers has forced us to step up our game as a matter of principle, pride and respect. It sounds corny but the folks who join us trust us to help them. We have to do a good job and pay that trust back," Schilling said.

"Now, I’d love to ham-it-up and tell you what geniuses we are but the truth is, we just adopted a different business model – and as things turned out, there was a great deal of demand for that model. The model - and I’ve said it a few times ;) - is paying out much more of gross revenue than our competitors. As our business grew and we hit higher revenue hurdles, we paid out “that” extra money to partners too. If I showed you what we make on partners revenue it would likely shock you because its very low for an organization our size."

"There have been additional falloffs in the parking revenue side of the business in 2012 but our philosophy of paying out more to those who “make the traffic” has softened the blow for many who joined us this year. Higher payouts are good for our partners and clearly they are good for an industry that has struggled through a decline in recent years. The low net-income at InternetTraffic.com would leave us vulnerable if we didn’t have our biggest partner, me.  Having a large owned and operated portfolio of names has given us a daily incentive to keep evolving, because when we get it right, we ourselves are the biggest winner," Schilling said.

"I think our platform does a good job serving both our customers and our upstream ad marketplace providers, because both sides can see our intentions are pure and that we are just trying to do a better job," Schilling said. "Had we not started doing what we did - taking outside accounts, this industry would be in considerably rougher shape than it is today. Our arrival has caused layoffs and a lot of top line revenue discomfort for the legacy parking companies, but that discomfort has been felt at the domainer level for years. It bred incredible resentment as the parking companies blamed the revenue decline on the upstreams like Yahoo and Google, and while those upstream payouts did indeed drop, the parking companies themselves became a big part of the problem by becoming these bloated, over-employing, over-paid intermediaries. Some parking companies have hundreds of staff.  We have 6 and may grow to 10 or 15 with DomainNameSales. That is a lot more efficient and allows us to work on volume and much thinner margins."

"Looking back on the last year, I’m most proud that the transparency of our platform has helped to bridge some of the long-time misunderstanding simmering between domain registrants and upstream ad partners who’s platforms generate the revenue," Schilling continued. "To the upstreams we’ve tried to explain the difference in value of domain traffic and that there is a price to delivering traffic to their marketplace ($9-$10 per year in renewal costs for example). There are hosting charges and the work of keeping names lit and maintained is real. We’ve tried to show that clean operators can deliver high quality traffic without maintenance and headaches and problems. InternetTraffic.com has the lowest ad-traffic quality credits in the space because we demand that our customers run a clean show and we don’t permit naked-arbitrage."

"The landscape of sales marketplaces is similar to parking in that there is this historical group of platforms who grew very large (from an overhead and headcount perspective) selling names for commissions. These historical operators, have legacy systems and a culture and costs that are out of date, and frankly out of touch with their client base," Schilling said. "Like with parking, I am the biggest seller of names on our platform. I have always had an in-house sales team and in the past year that team has built a ton of tools and infrastructure to do a better job marketing my names. Other domainers and parking companies have built sales platforms from scratch or by using Salesforce, but no other operator with a large platform of names has done as thorough a job building a CRM system, coupled with a Sales/Marketing machine “and” a mobile platform as we have. As reluctant as I was to grandstand about our traffic business I will shout from the rooftops that our sales platform absolutely crushes what our competitors will give you to sell your names," Schilling declared.

"We constantly engage in marketing to follow up and explain the value proposition of a potential purchase to your buyer. You can set up the DNS system to engage in all kinds of follow-up using pre-formed emails. You can set up the system to pre-price your names to the buyer for BIN through Escrow.com or through our credit card merchant services. You can set up the system to ask for offers. You can set up the system to solicit negotiations. We have dozens of implementations and have set our best performing as defaults."

While making waves in the here and now with his domain monetization and sales businesses, Schillng is also poised for a big move in the registry operations field with Uniregistry.com - a move predicated on winning the right to offer a variety of new domain extensions through ICANN's New gTLD program. "Uniregistry will be a new top level domain name registry akin to Verisign, Affilias or Neustar," Schilling explained. "We look forward to making the namespaces for future registrants."

"Registries control the real estate to the right of the dot. Dot com, dot net, dot info, dot biz. These are namespaces which are operated by the companies I mentioned above. We plan to offer dot link, dot guitars, dot tattoo and a host of alternative strings, " Schilling said. "Uniregistry is purely a registry, not a registrar, so we do not plan to pursue the path of Godaddy or Enom offering retail registrations and hosting services. That said, unlike the three incumbent registries at the top, Uniregistry will offer a management interface akin to Nominet’s in the .uk space, permitting us to have a working relationship with the registrants in our namespaces. If domain names are the real estate of the Internet, then the registry is like the land title office. At Uniregistry we want to have an administrative relationship with the people who own the land, but we do not want to get into the business of “wheeling and dealing” in the land, offering construction services, etc. Those areas of expertise will be the provenance of the registrar (Godaddy, Enom, Tucows). We have created a new registrar called Uniregistrar to act as a lifeboat in case any of Uniregistry’s registrars fail, but this is envisioned as an emergency measure to protect registrants against the unthinkable," Schilling said.

As a guy who built his fortune on .com, many people were stunned when Schilling took such a big plunge into the new TLD pool - but he viewed the decision as common sense. "There is an old saying that numbers don’t lie and the numbers are staggering," Schilling said. "There are 7 billion (that’s 7000 million) people on the planet. In the next few decades, half that population will be online. In 30 years there will be more than 15 billion people. I am not of the belief that all those folks are going to die in famine and war. These people will stick around and the human spirit will find a way to feed, clothe and house them. There are only 200 million domain names registered today and anyone who has tried to secure a short generic or meaningful name, can attest that the pool of available names across most quality extensions is exhausted. We are going to need a lot more meaningful strings and a lot more generic phrases that registrants can buy for $6-10 a year. In today’s environment that last sentence just doesn’t seem possible. But with thousands or tens of thousands of top level names there will be a way to accommodate the registrants of the future. I am doing this because I want to make the names for the registrants of the future.  Many of my contemporaries do not want to do that. I have more than enough money to retire and live a life of leisure but “ships and men, rot in port”. I am doing this, because I want to be a part of the future of naming," Schilling declared.

Frank Schilling (front row, second from right) with some of his Uniregistry teammates

Schilling noted above that he operates all of his enterprises with an extraordinarily small staff for the amount of work that he and his team have tackled. For many businesses, getting and keeping the right people can be the biggest challenge of all. "You are absolutely right. That is definitely a problem," Schilling acknowledged. "The gutters of history are filled with the bodies of men who tried to bite off more than they could chew and didn’t have infrastructure and resources to help them reach for the brass ring. We’re all working very hard here, and we’re trying to do something to change our destinies."

"Uniregistry has an equity pool set aside for the staffers who got us there. I’ve been lucky to be a good communicator. I can share my vision well.  But the truth is, I have a team of people who support me and make me look good.  Ryan, Vern, Ying, Roy, John, Dan, Quintin, James, Heather, Bret, Amanda, MJ, Karl and others help me get there and make me look good. We have other contractors and companies who provide service and support to us as well. I do not take their sacrifices or commitment to me lightly. I will never, ever forget how these people and suppliers helped me and I intend to make them very rich. As rich as I possibly can. Their success reflects well on me," Schiling said.

"Don’t get me wrong, our people don’t just get a promise of something in the future. Our people make good money along the way as well. I try to pay more than people could make elsewhere because I don’t want folks to worry about money or have jealousy set in. I try to provide a fun work environment and I truly use every opportunity to show my staff (financially and emotionally) how important they are to me."

As I mentioned earlier, the way Frank has personally treated people, regardless of where they are in their domain journey, has brought a lot of love his way. While that would be a blessing for anyone, I also wondered if it added some weight to his shoulders in terms of not wanting to let anyone down who puts their faith in  his new services. 

"All the love is indeed a great responsibility," Schilling said. "I never take it for granted Ron - and I genuinely love everyone back. I see the good in almost everyone in this space. I really want the best for everyone. You can’t please every person though – A friend was watching me work the other day and commented that I was letting the guy on the other end of the phone-line treat me a bit like a doormat. I don’t suffer fools but I have a lot of empathy for my fellow man. I just feel like if you try hard for somebody it will work-out and come back to you. Not everyone I have dealt with loves me and I’m certainly no perfect angel, but I don’t really have a bunch of ulterior motives and I try to do everything I can to help the people in my life. You can’t fake that."

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