.Com base inches forward, .Net prices are increasing.
Verisign reported earnings after the bell today, and the results for .com/.net aren’t that promising.
It gets harder to grow something as it gets bigger, but net adds across these two domain names slowed by quite a bit.
Verisign reported just 0.42 million net new ads during the second quarter. Last year in the same quarter it added 1.2 million domain names.
The good news for Verisign is that new registrations of .com and .net remain fairly strong. 8.5 million new .com/.net domain names were registered last quarter, compared to 8.7 million for the same quarter last year.
The number is down, but not by that much. The company predicts a rebound in Q3.
Even better, Verisign is invoking its allowed price hike on .net domain names. The price will jump from $6.18 to $6.79 on February 1, 2015.
Who needs to grow the zone when you can just increase prices 10% a year?
Verisign used to be able to do that with .com, too. The U.S. government stepped in to put a halt to that.
Most of the new TLDs aren’t even into general availability yet with awareness slowly picking up on the great shake up of the internet.
I expect this time next year to be brutal for Verisign with worse coming thereafter.
it’s 2018 and they’re still doing well
.LINK costs registrars $5.00 fully discounted – Uniregistry will not be increasing prices during its contract unless extraordinary inflation happens. Also there are infinitely more choices available as the zone only has 40,000 names so far. .CLICK goes to general-availability on Nov 7th at a registrar cost of $3.50 .. No price increases planned for next 10 years there either.
Verisign is dropping the ball HUGE. They have the rights to introduce a truly inclusive EVERYLANGUAGE.com to the World with IDN.COM and their silence is deafening.
Still waiting for full idn.idn implementation for idn.com
Hello Verisign, anyone home????????????? Hello???? Knock, knock???
So with falling demand, they’re raising prices. {blink} Supply? Demand? They’re related? Nahhhhh…
Raising .net prices 10% won’t hurt them compared to other new TLDs, sine *most* of them have much higher prices.
Let alone… New gTLD registrations were about 1.3 million last quarter. Add them to Verisign’s 8.5 million above, and you get 9.8 million total, of which 13% are already new gTLDs, even as they have virtually zero mindshare.
Really tough to see how the future looks bright for Verisign, at that point.
“Falling demand”?
When your car is accelerating, it may increase velocity by 8.7 mph during one quarter minute and then “only” increase velocity by 8.5 mph during the next quarter minute, going from (say) 50 mph to 58.7 mph and then on to 67.2 mph. Is that deceleration? No.
Likewise, when a registry like Verisign is accelerating, it might increase registration velocity (measured in “dpy”, domains per year) by 8.7 dpy during one quarter and yet “only” increase registration velocity by 8.5 dpy during another quarter. And yet that’s STILL acceleration. Forward momentum is increasing.
I understand the need by proponents of new TLDs to depict this as news of impending .COM doom. But, to do so, they’ll need to ignore increasing speed and continued acceleration while looking only at the third derivative.
What matters in a car is its speed. What matters to a registry is its net dollar-per-year income. That’s equivalent to domains renewed / registered per year (dph).
A car decelerates when speed declines. A registry decelerates only when the net domain renewal / registration number declines.
A car going at a steady speed is neither declining nor accelerating. A registry that maintains the same number of domains is moving forward at a constant pace. If Verisign exceeds this cutoff rate, then Verisign is accelerating.
Eventually a car reaches a limit — a terminal velocity. Maybe some day .COM will reach its limit and cease growing. If we assume Verisign continues accelerating but with gains in speed of 0.2 million new domains less each year (like a car accelerating by a little bit less each second), then it will take 8.5 / 0.2 = 42.5 years for .COM to stop accelerating and level off at some very high forward speed (in terms of annual registration rate). It will still be the obvious leader in the race.
These numbers do not support the idea that .COM is slowing down. They support the opposite. Simple math, folks.