Company will raise wholesale cost of .com domains by 62 cents.
Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN) today announced a 7% increase in .com prices to take effect on September 1, 2023.
The wholesale price for .com domains will increase from $8.97 currently to $9.59 after the incresae. This does not include ICANN’s 18-cent fee. Registrars mark the price up to cover payment processing, technical and support costs, and profit.
Under its agreement with ICANN and the U.S. government, Verisign is allowed to increase prices by 7% per year in the last four years of every six-year contract term. This will be the third hike of this contract term, and the company is expected to increase .com prices to $10.26 in 2024.
Domain registrants can renew .com domains for multiple years at today’s prices if they do so before September 1.
What a disgrace 🙁 Of course many registrars will again add some more on top of that.
Registrars are indifferent to registry price hikes since they simply add their margin to whatever the wholesale cost is. Higher wholesale costs actually make it easier for registrars to add some extra pennies, nickes, dimes and more on their markup.
So, registrars don’t have much incentive to support domain investors in keeping wholesale costs at Verisign and other registries down.
Now that Godaddy is a big registry itself, they surely have no interest in telling another registry such as Verisign not to raise their prices lest Godaddy’s registry business be told the same thing, and we all know they wouldn’t like that.
Registrars might even make some money on the dot com price hikes when domainers drop some of their marginal domains and registrars scoop up the winnings in their expired inventory auctions.
So, the dot com price hikes might be a net positive for registrars.
There’s no country for domain investors.
Domainers are being squeezed more and more every year by domain registrars and registries. We are being exterminated.
We are a dying breed.
Make hay while you still can
Domain investors are up against some powerful forces in the industry and they don’t have much support from within the industry to overcome that. They also don’t band together to defend their interests very well, either.
The Internet Commerce Association does a good job but it could do a lot ore with additional funding.
What was the ICA’s response to this price increase? Don’t think we saw or heard much from them?
Are you an ICA member? They’ve discussed it a lot with membership and explained what they did with regards to the contract that led to this increase.
They’ll probably do the same with .NET domains.
Verisign has been steadily raising prices on dot net domains too.
I will drop more and raise my prices.
Maybe. But the ICA needs to try to do more with what it has, including wielding the industry influence of its high-profile members and being more aggressive on the issues.
Still, many members are not big-portfolio domainers or even domainers at all, so those members don’t really care about wholesale price increases. Unfortunately, many ICA members probably don’t even care about the negative impacts of the unchecked power of companies like Verisign and Godaddy very much either.
The ICA is a positive voice, true. But in terms of effectiveness, sometimes it seems the ICA is not really tackling the core issues that impact everyday domain investors.