Revenue up, but new registrations down from a year ago.
Verisign (NYSE:VRSN) reported third quarter earnings after the bell today.
The company reported revenue of $288 million for the third quarter, up 8.2% from Q3 2015. Net income was $114 million, up from $92 million in the same quarter a year ago.
Verisign processed 8.3 million new .com and .net registrations during the quarter. This is down from 9.2 million in the same quarter a year ago. The quarter a year ago was inflated by China’s sudden appetite for domain names.
After accounting for deletions, 0.9 million domain names were added to the total base of .com and .net domain names during the quarter. This was within the company’s target of 0.5 to 1.0 million.
It’s possible this number will swing negative in Q4 2016 as domain names registered by Chinese domain name investors come due for renewal. [Update: in fact, Verisign is predicting a drop.]
Joseph Peterson says
This time last year, volume of Chinese-style registrations went up. And these were the leftovers – inferior in quality to Chinese-style registrations from the previous quarter. So the exposure to deletions is not only higher in volume; the drop rate within this sector will be higher as a percentage too.