Recent Posts
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- ICANN 79: anonymous trolls and undercover lawyers
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- ICANN insists it is working on linkification
- Namecheap sues ICANN over .org price caps
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
- Airline gTLD crashes and burns
- First chunks of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook drop
- Epik to reveal its owners soon
- Another crypto firm to apply for a new gTLD
- Monster and Royce are NOT involved in Epik?!
- Nominet to overhaul .uk registry, turn off some services
- Russia blames DNSSEC, not Ukraine, for internet downtime
- Team Internet says revenue beat estimates
- Sold for over $20k, insure.ai and dog.ai back in .ai’s expired names auction
- .ai helps UDRP cases rise in 2023, WIPO says
- Freenom’s domains land at Gandi after termination
- .ru domains fly off the shelf as Western sanctions bite
- ICANN picks its first ever Supreme Court
- Lebanon’s ccTLD going back to Lebanon after ICANN takeover
- ICANN picks the domain it will never, ever release
- ICANN approves domain takedown rules
- Has Epik gone “woke”?
- First bits of new gTLD Applicant Guidebook expected next week
- ICANN bans closed generics for the foreseeable
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- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
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- ICANN drops the “man” from Ombudsman
- Have your say on police domain takedown powers
- Most registrars are shunning ICANN’s new Whois system
- Nominet to take over .gov.uk
- ICANN picks Istanbul for 2024 meeting
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- ICANN accused of power grab over $271 million auction fund
- A registrar is getting blamed for an Israeli war propaganda site
- Two more dot-brands bite the dust
- Google sells five-figure AI domain and six-figure .ing hack
- .blackfriday is still a bit rubbish
- Internet Naming Co acquires five more gTLDs
- Domain universe grows despite .com drag
New gTLD revenue cut by HALF in ICANN budget
The new gTLD industry is performing terribly when compared to ICANN’s predictions just six months ago.
ICANN budget documents published over the weekend show that by one measure new gTLDs are doing just 51% of the business ICANN thought they would.
The new budget (pdf) shows that for the fiscal year 2018, which ends June 30, ICANN currently expects to receive $4.6 million in registry transaction fees.
These are the fees registries must pay for each new registration, renewal or transfer, when the TLD has more than 50,000 domains under management.
In a draft budget (pdf) published March 2017, its “best estimate” for these fees in FY18 was $8.9 million, almost double its newest prediction.
That prediction lasted until the approved budget (pdf) published last August.
The budget published at the weekend expects this transaction revenue to increase 31.1% to $6 million by June 30, 2019, still a long way off last year’s estimate.
At the registrar level, where registrars pay a transaction fee regardless of the size of the customer’s chosen gTLD, ICANN expects new gTLD revenue to be $3.9 million in FY18.
That’s just 52% of its March/August 2017 estimate of $7.5 million.
Looking at all reportable transactions — including the non-billable ones — ICANN’s projection for FY18 is now 21.9 million, compared to its earlier estimate of 41.7 million.
ICANN even reckons the number of new, 2012-round gTLDs actually live on the internet is going to shrink.
Its latest budget assumes 1,228 delegated TLDs by the end of June this year, which appears to be a couple light on current levels (at least according to me) and down from the 1,240 it expected a year ago.
It expects there to be 1,231 by the end of June 2019, which is even lower than it expected have in June 2017.
I suspect this is related to dot-brands cancelling their contracts, rather than retail gTLDs going dark.
Revenue from fixed registry fees for FY18 is expected to be $30.6 million, $200,00 less than previous expectations. Those numbers are for all gTLDs, old and new.
Overall, the view of new gTLDs is not pretty, when judged by what ICANN expected.
It shows that ICANN is to an extent captive to the whims of a fickle market that has in recent years been driven by penny deals and Chinese speculation.
By contrast, legacy gTLDs (.com, .info, etc) are running slightly ahead of earlier projections.
ICANN now expects legacy registry transaction fees of $48.6 million for FY18, which is $200,000 more than predicted last year.
It expects registrar transaction fees of $29.5 million, compared to its earlier forecast of $29.4 million.
This is not enough to recoup the missing new gTLD money, of course, which is why ICANN is slashing $5 million from its budget.
Why on earth would they expect ntld revenue to rise 31% the following year? It will probably fall by that amount.
The new g’s are a shrinking market.
It appears the flood of available gTLDs wiped out any demand and now must find equilibrium before being profitable. Way too many options with no data to show that consumers will take to .anyofthem. For now I will hold a few I like but not going to dumpmy.money in some of these ridiculous gTLDs.
icann is a bureaucratic cesspool