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Table of Contents
16
We recently began devoting substantial, dedicated resources to growing our international presence. This led to the
establishment of our Customer Care center in India in 2012, the initial introduction of localized websites and products in 2013 and
the expansion of these localized products and Customer Care to 37 countries, 44 currencies and 17 languages as of December 31,
2015. Central to our international strategy is a philosophy of localizing our product offerings and deploying them through our
global infrastructure.
We built a team of more than 35 people to date who are responsible for the internationalization and localization of our core
product offerings as well as our Customer Care and marketing efforts. In conjunction with our localization efforts, we have added
on-the-ground regional teams and increased our country and regional specific marketing spend. These investments have enabled
us to successfully launch our business in select international markets. Our success in these markets has furthered our belief that
our international model can work in both established and emerging markets. We have taken a rigorous approach to managing the
level of investment we expect to make in each geographic market we enter based on a market tier approach. We expect to
continue to expand internationally, targeting additional markets in Europe, Asia and the Middle East over the next several years.
Competition
We provide cloud-based solutions enabling individuals, businesses and organizations to establish an online presence,
connect with customers and manage their ventures. The market for providing these solutions is highly fragmented with some
vendors providing part of the solution, and highly competitive with many existing competitors. These solutions are also rapidly
evolving, creating opportunity for new competitors to enter the market with point product solutions or addressing specific
segments of the market. In some instances, we have commercial partnerships with companies with which we also compete. Given
our broad product portfolio, we compete with niche point-solution products and broader solution providers. Our competitors
include providers of:
• traditional domain registration services and web-hosting solutions such as Endurance, Rightside, United Internet and
Web.com;
• website creation and management solutions and e-commerce enablement providers such as Shopify, Squarespace,
Wix and WordPress;
• cloud-infrastructure services and online security providers such as Rackspace and Symantec;
• alternative web presence and marketing solutions providers such as Constant Contact, OpenTable, Yelp and Zillow;
and
• productivity tools including business-class email, calendaring, file-sharing and payments such as Dropbox, Intuit,
Square and Xero.
We expect continued competition from competitors in the domain, hosting and presence markets such as Endurance,
Rightside, United Internet and Web.com, as well as potential increased competition from companies like Amazon, Google and
Microsoft, all of which are providers of web-hosting and other cloud-based services and have recently entered the domain name
registration business as upstream registries, and eBay and Facebook, both of which offer robust Internet marketing platforms.
We believe the principal competitive factors include: product capabilities meeting customer requirements, a secure, reliable
and integrated technology platform, cost-effective customer acquisition, brand awareness and reputation, customer service and
support and overall customer satisfaction. We believe we compete favorably with respect to each of these factors. For additional
information, see "Risk Factors."
Regulation
Our business is subject to regulation by ICANN, federal and state laws in the United States and the laws of other
jurisdictions in which we do business.
ICANN. The registration of domain names is governed by ICANN. ICANN is a multi-stakeholder private sector, not-for-
profit corporation formed in 1998 operating pursuant to a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Commerce
for the express purposes of overseeing a number of Internet related tasks, including managing the DNS, allocation of IP addresses,
accreditation of domain name registrars and registries and the definition and coordination of policy development for all of these