Donuts is rebranding.
The company which runs around 300 domain name extensions acquired Afilias back in 2020.
They’re now going to rename the entire thing “Identity Digital“, which is using the domain Identity.Digital
Here’s the new logo:
At one level I can understand that they’d want to come up with a new brand identity for the various companies that they’ve acquired over the last couple of years. But that doesn’t make the name change any less confusing.
Bear in mind that with all the various mergers and acquisitions over the past 10 years it’s been quite hard to track which company is going by what name and what the best contact point is.
Upside – I guess that makes my Donuts mug semi-collectible now!
I just hope they’ve the sense to redirect the various domains and email addresses etc., rather than forcing a hard cut over, which a couple of companies have done and which has led to headaches.
Will it make any difference to how the various domain extensions that they offer are perceived? Personally I doubt it.
And that’s the fundamental issue with a rebrand.
While it’s important to the company doing it and the potential impact, whatever that might be, might be felt further down the line, it’s going to be nigh on impossible to get anyone who isn’t employed by Identity Digital / Donuts / Afilias / Name.com to get excited about this announcement. The only thing that registrars will care about is if they need to update contact points, while the average punter probably didn’t know who Donuts or Afilias was to begin with.
But of course I’m a little cynical…
This is after all the same company that referred to upping prices recently as “optimisation”. They upped wholesale prices between 7% and 23% across 29 of their domain extensions earlier this year and insisted on calling it “a pricing optimization” which is horrible doublespeak.
