Company forecasts a drop for Q4.
Verisign (NYSE: VRSN) expects the total number of .com and .net domain names registered at the end of the fourth quarter to be less than at the beginning of the quarter. In other words, more domain names will be deleted than are registered during the quarter.
CEO Jim Bidzos disclosed on today’s investor conference call that the company expects the total base to drop by 1.5 million to 2.8 million domain names during the fourth quarter.
In other words, this long and steady growth chart is about to go negative:
I’ve explained the reason for this predicted drop before. At a high level, new registrations in Q4 of 2015 were much higher than expected due to Chinese speculation. Those new registrations are coming up for renewal now, and many of them are unlikely to be renewed.
YamadaMedia says
If .com/.net are going to suffer registration losses next year because of the Chinese, new domains are going to get massacred. 🙂
F Carson says
Let’s be truthful here… The .net’s alone are taking a pounding and being dumped because of ignorant pricing strategies. You don’t jack the prices up the same time 2000 new extensions get launched. Bad management and poor logic from an industry already strained from intelligent leadership. Now they mix the com and net numbers together, which adds falsely to the narrative that new extensions are on the rise. The com is king, which will be made clearer when the secondary cowboys and used car salesmen start to fall off. Hold the GLTD’s accountable to stop publishing false adoption numbers based on illegitimate domain registrations being used to pad numbers.
christy io (@rxxxxi2i2) says
minimum 50% of domains are held by investors, so until end users become the majority of domain owners the figures will be skewed.