Company history
In the early 1990s, Tucows was hosted on university and public servers (much like Yahoo! and Google were in their early stages). TUCOWS' mission was to provide users with downloads of both freeware and trial versions of shareware. Internet Direct, owned and operated by John Nemanic, Bill Campbell, and Colin Campbell, acquired Tucows in 1996.[9] STI Ventures acquired Tucows in 1999.[9]
The company employed roughly 30 employees in Flint, Michigan, in 1998 with additional employees in Canada. For several years Scott Swedorski personally oversaw day-to-day activity in the Flint office located in the White House building on Beecher Road.
In 2000, Tucows acquired Linux Weekly News[10] (which was then "unacquired" in 2002)[11].
In 2001, Tucows was acquired by Infonautics,[12] which then changed its name to Tucows,[13] a business tactic called a "reverse takeover". On August 26, 2002, Tucows sold eLibrary and Encyclopedia.com, its search and reference services properties inherited from Infonautics, to Alacritude.[13] Internet Archive preserves a full copy of the Tucows Software Library,[14] with thousands of software titles both in the latest versions, as well as in older versions not yet available through Tucows.
In 2004, Tucows acquired Boardtown Corporation, a billing software provider based in Starkville, Mississippi.[15]
On August 19, 2005, Tucows went public,[16] after completing a secondary offering,[17] listing on the Toronto Stock Exchange as TC and the NASDAQ as TCX.
In January 2006, Tucows completed its acquisition of certain assets of Critical Path, an outsourced email services provider.[18]
In June 2006 Tucows paid $18 million to purchase Mailbank.com Inc, a company that owns over 17,000 domain names for common surnames, such as smith.net and brown.org. Mailbank generates income from ads on its websites (from domain parking) and also from customers who want e-mail accounts with their surname in the domain name.
On June 15, 2006, Noss disclosed that the portfolio of NetIdentity's domain names acquired by Tucows represents at least 68% of surnames in the United States and Europe, and that the cost of the acquisition was $18 million.[19] On February 19, 2008, Tucows announced that they were launching a "Personal Names Service" using their portfolio of 39,000 domain names. "The launch of the Personal Names Service marks the complete integration of the surname assets we acquired with NetIdentity into our wholesale channel", said Elliot Noss, President and CEO of Tucows.[20]
On August 26, 2006, Tucows won an eBay auction for the web calendar site Kiko.com. The company planned to roll Kiko's features into their existing email platform.[21]
On July 27, 2007, Tucows acquired ItsYourDomain.com (IYD), another privately held ICANN-accredited wholesale registrar offering domain services through a network of over 2,500 affiliates with over 700,000 domains under management, paying US$10.35 million.[22] ItsYourDomain.com managed 699,951 domains compared to Tucows's 5,919,987, at the time of the sale in July 2007 ItsYourDomain.com's monthly growth of 29,181 exceeded Tucows growth of 21,126.[23]
By June 2008, Tucows had a total of three domain name registration services called ItsYourDomain (IYD), NetIdentity, and DomainDirect. Tucows decided to discontinue these three services, and merge them into one new domain name registration service, called Hover . Hover is a simple domain name registration service powered by Tucows Inc, that started in July 2008. All IYD, DomainDirect, and NetIdentity customers are fulfilled by Hover.com.[24]
On November 6, 2008, Tucows announced that they were launching Butterscotch.com, an online video network with video tutorials to explain Internet technology, starting with 35 video tutorials and plans to reach 500 clips by Spring 2009.[25] On October 14, 2011, Butterscotch.com producer Sean Carruthers stated production had been shut down.[26]
In December 2014, Tucows launched RealNames, offering e-mail service using domain names acquired from Mailbank.com Inc.
On January 20, 2017, the company acquired eNom for $83.5 million, making Tucows the second-largest domain registrar in the world.[27]
The company announced in January 2021 it was shuttering its Downloads business, as it was no longer essential to the rest of the company's business, but had transferred all of its assets and content to the Internet Archive prior to its closure.[28]
