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How Verisign hit its Q1 growth numbers

by — Domain Registrars 2 Comments

Verisign called on China to deliver Q1 domain growth.

.Com registry Verisign (NASDAQ:VRSN) provides guidance each quarter for how much it expects its total base of .com and .net domain names to grow. The company hardly misses because it’s quite easy for the company to pull some levers to hit the numbers.

Consider Q1 of this year. Verisign forecasted 1.5 million to 2.0 million net adds for the quarter. The company was pretty far behind at the end of February, as you’ll see:

.Net Domains
End of Q4 2017: 14.95 million
Jan 14.79
Feb 14.75
March 14.73

.Com Domains
End of Q4 2018: 135.03 million
Jan 135.52
Feb 135.78
March 136.83

By the end of February, .Net was down 0.20 million and .com was up 0.75 million based on the official data Verisign provides to ICANN. That meant Verisign had grown the combined base by 0.55 million domains with one month to go, well below what it promised the street. (Verisign has many measures for domains under management, so the numbers here are off slightly from what the company reported to the street.)

What do to? Verisign can throw “marketing dollars” at registrars to move the needle. It can pay them to promote .com and .net domains. What really moves the needle is offering discounts if the registrar hits certain growth targets. Click to continue reading…

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O.com might be coming, along with other single letter .com domain names

by — Policy & Law 7 Comments

ICANN moves forward with Verisign plan to auction O.com domain name.

Single letter .com domain names are very rare. They aren’t just limited to the 26 letters of the alphabet; there are just three.

Verisign (NASDAQ:VRSN), the registry for .com, isn’t allowed to allocate any single letter .com domain names. Three .com domains were registered before this restriction: q.com, x.com and z.com.

CenturyLink owns Q.com, which was used by Qwest. Elon Musk (re) acquired X.com last year for an undisclosed amount. Nissan sold Z.com to GMO for $6.8 million in 2014.

That’s it, but this might change soon.

In November 2017, Verisign submitted a request to ICANN to allow it to release the O.com domain name. Verisign wants to auction the domain name and donate the proceeds to charity.

It likely picked this domain name because competition for it should be high. Overstock.com really, really wants the domain.

ICANN was concerned that allowing Verisign to auction the domain could be a competition issue, so it referred the matter to the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice. The DOJ declined to open an investigation into it.

So ICANN is moving forward. The .com contract would need to be amended to allow for the sale of O.com, and it has opened a comment period for the amendment.

What’s Verisign’s game here if it is going to donate the proceeds to charity? There are two possibilities that come to mind.

One is that Verisign is using this as a proof-of-concept and hopes to be able to sell other one letter .com and .net domains in the future and keep the proceeds.

Alternatively, if it never gets to keep the proceeds, Verisign could use the press from this domain (and future one letter domains) selling for a lot of money to solidify .com’s brand.

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VeriSign’s domain base grew by 1.91 million names last quarter

by — Policy & Law 0 Comments

Historically strong Q1 delivers for Verisign.

VeriSign (NASDAQ:VRSN) reported first quarter 2018 earnings after the bell yesterday.

The base of .com and .net domain names grew by 1.91 million during the quarter and 9.6 million new .com and .net domains were registered. This comes in toward the high end of Verisign’s predicted range of 1.5 million to 2.0 million net adds. Historically, Q1 is the strongest quarter for domain name registrations.

There were 9.0 million new registrations in Q4 2017 and 0.57 million net adds.

Verisign forecasts 0.7 million to 1.2 million net adds in Q2 2018.

On the investor conference call yesterday, Verisign said that it continues to work with the NTIA on the cooperative agreement, which expires in November this year. The NTIA has the option of extending the agreement or sunsetting it. For everyone in the domain industry, you should hope that the NTIA extends it. Remember, it was the NTIA that kept .com prices down in the 2012 contract renewal, not ICANN.

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Is .Com still king in China?

by — Uncategorized 7 Comments

Kassey Lee analyzes new data about domain name and website usage in China.

Is .com still king in China? How important is .cn? Is there any other extension worth watching in China? These are questions many domain investors may have in their minds. To answer these questions, I turn to the annual publication “China Statistical Report on Internet Development,” the latest of which was released last month.

The big picture first. China now has a whopping 772 million internet users but the figure represents only 56% of the entire Chinese population, indicating a lot of room for further growth. More internet users will drive more demand for products and services, which in turn will require more websites.

You can also look at it from the number of websites developed in China. The number has grown to 5.3 million but is still very small when compared with the approximately 90 million companies reported by the National Bureau of Statistics of China. This large gap may be due to companies not being online yet or running their business on ecommerce platforms such as JD.com. Eventually, these companies will want to move to their own website to gain complete control of their business. Therefore, we can expect real demand for domains to continue for a long time in China. Click to continue reading…

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Google is now one of the Top 10 .com registrars

by — Domain Registrars 4 Comments

Google Domains finishes 2017 among the top 10 domain name registrars for .com.

Google Domains is now a top 10 registrar for .com domains.

Google launched its domain name registrar in the middle of 2014. It grew quickly and is now among the top 10 registrars in the world for .com domain registrations as of the end of last year. It surpassed OVH in the latest official data from Verisign.

The data are from Verisign’s (VRSN) most recent official breakdown of domain transactions by registrar, which concludes December 2017.

There are four main reasons I believe Google Domains has grown so quickly:

1. It got a great ranking on Google for key terms. Go figure.
2. It can spend whatever it wants on Google Adwords. Take money from one pocket and put it in another.
3. Cross marketing between other Google products/services.
4. Brand trust and recognition.

One curious thing about Google Domains is that it only accepts one-year registrations.

In December, these were the top 10 registrars in terms of new .com registrations: Click here to continue reading…

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