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Frakes to lead Moniker
Kevin Murphy,
September 7, 2015, 07:22:35 (UTC),
Domain Registrars
Domain industry veteran Jothan Frakes has been tapped to take over leadership of troubled US registrar Moniker.
Frakes will take over from CEO Bonnie Wittenburg.
The news emerged during the DomainFest Asia conference in Macau, at which Frakes is a speaker, overnight.
Moniker will be his first CEO gig, but he’s a bit of a jack of all trades in the industry.
Frakes has previously worked for Sedari, Minds + Machines, Oversee.net and Moniker.
He was one of the technical evaluators for the new gTLD program, subcontracted to KPMG.
For the last couple of years he’s been a key figure behind the NamesCon and DomainFest conferences.
It might be a wise hire for Moniker — Frakes is well known and well liked in the domaining community, somewhere Moniker’s reputation has suffered horribly over the last year.
Its market share has been plummeting for years, but matters were exacerbated in June 2014 with a disastrous switch to a new registration platform that was uniformly despised (read these comments) and broke everything.
Frakes is not only in the plane, he’s everywhere!
Congrats.
Congratulations to Jonathan who deserves this.
I do wish you would avoid unfamiliar expressions like “tapped” though. Probably comes straight out of a US PR flack’s email.
It does have the potential for confusion though, given its other meanings . . . .
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tapped
Who’s Jonathan?
Moniker is still a disaster and Frakes, the likeable figurehead is not going to fix it. I’m relieved to have my names out of there and wager it goes under in 2016.
“somewhere Moniker’s reputation has suffered horribly over the last year.”
Haha, yeah, “somewhere”–it’s a mystery, rather murky, no one’s sure why? Haha, no, Moniker rolled out the industry’s WORST domain management platform. They still refuse to answer tech support calls. The interface is horrific. It’s just–terrible. The company, the platform, everything. Ruuuuuuun.
“the domaining community” is the “somewhere”
Until that horrendous platform is changed I would never go back to Moniker – they took what was one of
the best platforms for managing bulk domains to one of the worst.
Congrats to Jothan. Great guy with a lot of domain experience. He is always professional and keen to help. Big thumbs up and best of luck to him.
There really is no hope for Moniker recovering or completely fading away with that horrible, non-user friendly, bug-filled and extremely poor bulk operations platform still in place. However, there would be some hope but only if they restored the old excellent platform.