Domain registration bills increasing.
Verisign announced that it is raising its wholesale price for .net domain names in February.
The current fee is $6.79, and this will jump 10% to $7.46 effective Feb. 1, 2016.
Verisign is able to increase the price of .net domain names annually. A 2012 contract extension for .com domains keeps that price fixed at $7.85 for the duration of the contract.
That means the wholesale price for .com is now less than long time competitors such as .biz and .org, which also get to bump prices.
Some of the new top level domain names are priced much lower (at least temporarily) that .com and .net, while most are priced at a significant premium to .com wholesale prices.
Verisign has about 15 million .net names registered. .Net is facing downward pressure thanks to new top level domain names. A 10% price hike should help it maintain .Net revenue.
Nuno says
.net are more difficult to sell, and with prices being raised 10% per year (nice inflation) many investors drop thousands of domains… however they don’t care because they keep raising prices for the remaining… Until that strategy stops working.
J Wilson says
This is such a stupid strategy, it is called pricing yourself out of the market. I have been a domain investor for years, I will often buy the net just to hold it but for many of the domains they have no commercial value at all.
Anyone who owns a trademark can get a domain on a competing TLD shut down, again people buy those domains just to prevent registration but they do not need to.
In the current economy with inflation and interest rate so low this is nothing other than greed and stupidity.
At a time when there is a plethora of alternative TLD’s they should be reducing prices not increasing them.
They may think the domains will be dropped and picked up by some other mug or they may think that if only 10% of domains are not renewed they are fine but this stund devalues the value of the TLD.
We dropped renewal of all our .BIZ domains, about 400, they are still in our tracker system and about 7 were re-registered. Now we do not even consider buying a .BIZ domain.
I think we will do the same thing with .NET, sell off what we can and let the rest drop.
The idiots that made this decision do not care, but when they lose their job, remember why.