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Americans are deserting .com

Kevin Murphy, October 30, 2024, 14:09:11 (UTC), Domain Registries

Forget China, Verisign is now seeing most of its domain sales weakness coming from the US.

The company revealed in its quarterly earnings call last week that .com and .net were down by a combined 1.1 million names in the third quarter, and 850,000 of those losses were from American registrars.

CEO Jim Bidzos told analysts that the weakness was a result of US registrars concentrating more on making existing customers more profitable and less on acquiring new customers.

Registrars are raising prices and pushing more secondary market sales, he said. That’s great for the registrars’ bottom lines, but it doesn’t help Verisign shift product.

There were 169.6 million .com and .net domains at the end of Q3, Bidzos said. The Q3 renewal rate is expected to be about 72.3%, compared to 73.5% a year ago.

There was also weakness in China, he said, due to economic factors and regulation. China has frequently been blamed for sales fluctuations in previous weak quarters. Europe was actually up by 200,000 names, Bidzos said.

Verisign now expects domain growth of between -2.9% and -2.3% for the full year, narrowing its forecast from the -3% to -2% it predicted in July and the +1% to -1% predicted at the start of the year.

Higher wholesale prices means the company is still growing, however. Revenue was up 3.8% to $391 million and net income was up from $188 million to $201 million compared to year-ago numbers.

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Comments (2)

  1. Jothan Frakes says:
    October 31, 2024 at 8:32 am

    Aren’t folks scratching their heads and wondering of this might perhaps have correlation with the registry fees going up every year 7 to 10 %?

    It is like wondering why water is wet

    Reply
  2. Atlantic Names says:
    November 12, 2024 at 5:59 pm

    I feel like numbers like this don’t really mean anything as far as adoption goes.

    There are less $1 .com coupons being offered and also millions of really badly chosen domains that are being dropped and not being renewed. Even if 10% of .com and .net stopped being renewed, that still leaves millions of really bad domains.

    When I go looking through old domains I see things like:

    WelcomeToMyWebSIGHT.com,
    Welcome2MyWebSite.com,
    UrAtMyWebSite.com,
    Go2MyWebSite.com
    WelcomToMyWebSIGHT.com,
    WlcomeToMyWebSIGHT.com,
    and then 30-50 more of what the registrant believed were going to be common typos they needed to register to keep away spambots. Some of them even have them registered for 8, 10 even 15 years.

    Of course bad names like that existing don’t hurt me…until I have to weed through them when I am looking at expiring auctions or dropped names lists.

    Reply

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