As .com shrinks, China adds another 1.2 million domains

The Chinese are still registering huge numbers of domain names, just apparently not in .com, new numbers suggest.

The country’s .cn ccTLD grew by more than 1.2 million domains in the second half of 2024 even as .com shrank and new gTLDs grew, according to the latest stats from local registry CNNIC.

The registry said it had 20,823,037 .cn names at the end of the year, which is 1,261,030 more than it reported for the mid-year point and 721,546 more than it had at the end of 2023.

CNNIC publishes its statistical reports twice a year and the numbers often fluctuate wildly. It’s not usual for .cn to gain or lose millions in the space of six months.

It peaked at over 23 million names in June 2020 and has gone as low as 15 million a year later.

The CNNIC report also says that the number of .com domains registered in the country at the end of the year was 7,047,974, down by 877,515 on the 7,925,489 it had at the end of 2023.

Verisign has partly blamed weakness in China for .com’s decline in several recent quarters.

CNNIC also said that the number of new gTLD domains registered in China at the end of 2024 was 3,640,877, up a whopping 1,574,304 on the 2,066,573 it had at the start of the year.

So that’s roughly 2.3 million net new names across .cn and new gTLDs in 2024, as .com lost almost 900,000.

I humbly suggest price is the driving factor here.

If you want to speculatively or nefariously register junk domains you can reasonably expect to find a new gTLD selling for a buck or two on any given day, but Verisign has been increasing its .com prices every year since the pandemic passed.

Verisign has recently started offering promotional discounts to its registrars, an attempt to return to DUM growth, and it looks like it might be working.

.com could return to growth this quarter

Verisign might have some better news for investors and analysts when it delivers its first-quarter financial results — it looks like .com might have turned a corner and returned to growth.

The TLD has added over 540,000 domains to its zone file between the start of the year and February 20, a little over halfway through the quarter, according to the numbers Verisign posts on its web site.

While Q1 has historically been seasonally strong, in the same period of 2024 .com was down by over 63,000 names. Over the whole of 2024, .com’s zone lost 3.7 million domains.

The company recently introduced some registrar marketing programs that CEO Jim Bidzos earlier this month said he was encouraged by. Several registrars have been spotted selling .com first-years for as much as 50% off the regular wholesale price.

Two big registrars — GoDaddy and Squarespace — kicked off expensive ongoing campaigns advertising their web site building services at the February 9 Super Bowl broadcast in the US.

Since the broadcast, .com is up by 186,000 names.

Verisign is currently predicting its domain name base across .com and .net will shrink by between 2.3% and 0.3% for the full year.

Super Bowl a bit of a dud for .com?

Having two of its largest registrars advertising during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast doesn’t seem to have given Verisign’s declining .com flagship much of a boost.

According to numbers published on the company’s web site, .com has grown by about 30,000 domains in the last two days.

While that’s certainly not to be sniffed it, it’s well within the parameters of a normal day’s operation for .com. The TLD’s zone file shrinks more days than it grows nowadays, but five-figure daily upticks are not uncommon.

GoDaddy and Squarespace both took out 30-second spots during the Super Bowl. Both featured high-profile actors and had high production values, but neither mentioned domain names once.

GoDaddy’s focused on its Airo tool and Squarespace’s… goodness knows what that was all about.

Verisign CEO Jim Bidzos last week told analysts that the two commercials were a sign that its registrar partners are starting to focus more on customer acquisition, which should help .com return to growth.

More gloom predicted for .com

Verisign is predicting more shrinkage at .com and .net in 2025, despite a few notes of optimism from its CEO.

The company said last night that its two flagship gTLDs shrunk by a combined 3.7 million domains in 2024, a 2.1% decrease, as I flagged up a couple weeks ago, and that its growth this year will be between negative 2.3% and negative 0.3%.

The quarterly loss was around 500,000 domains. Verisign ended the quarter with 169 million domains under management.

CEO Jim Bidzos again told analysts that the shrinkage was partly due to weakness in China and partly due to American registrars concentrating on profit margins over customer acquisition.

Growth was positive in the EMEA region, he said, without quantifying it.

Bidzos said that marketing programs the company recently launched show early signs of adoption by registrars, and that he expects registrars to refocus on customer acquisition as part of a cyclical trend.

He pointed to the fact that two registrars — presumably GoDaddy and Squarespace — have taken out pricey Super Bowl TV ads this weekend as an encouraging sign.

He said that Verisign is “considering looking at” applying for new gTLDs next year and is “looking at the potential for applications”.

The company reported Q4 net income of $191 million, down from $265 million a year earlier, on revenue that was up 3.9% at $395 million.

For the full year, Verisign had net income of $786 million versus $818 million in 2023, on revenue that was up 4.3% at $1.56 billion.

Verisign has much to be thankful for as .com contract renewed

Verisign went into the US Thanksgiving weekend with a freshly renewed .com Registry Agreement that allows it to keep control of its cash cow for another six years with price-raising powers the US government admitted it is powerless to rescind.

The deal with ICANN does not change Verisign’s price caps — it will still be allowed to raise prices by 7% in four of the six-year term — but it does allow ICANN to raise the fees it charges by an amount linked to US inflation.

ICANN has already said it plans to increase its fees on all other gTLD registries, so it seems certain .com, which raises more transaction revenue than any other TLD, will get the same notice before long.

The deal means cost-conscious registrants have a bit of breathing space; Verisign is only allowed to raises prices in the final four years of its term, which runs from yesterday until November 30, 2030.

So, no more price hikes until September 2026. Due to the required notice period, designed to allow registrants to lock in renewal pricing, we’ll almost certainly hear Verisign talk about a fee increase in early 2026.

The US government, via the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, also confirmed that it has renewed its Cooperative Agreement, which is where the price caps come from, with the company:

NTIA recognizes concerns about current pricing and believes a reduction in .com prices would be in the best interest of the public. We also recognize that prices at both the wholesale level and downstream, including prices charged by resellers and substantial markups by warehousers, need to be addressed. That said, both parties must agree to any changes in order for the Cooperative Agreement to be amended. Over the past several months, NTIA and Verisign have engaged in serious conversations, but, despite our best efforts, we have been unable to agree how wholesale .com pricing should change.

So the status quo remains, at least regards pricing.

The ICANN contract also requires Verisign to act on reports of DNS abuse — malware, botnets, phishing, pharming, and some spam — for the first time, in line with the standard RA signed by all other gTLDs.

A side deal that sees Verisign pay ICANN a few extra million bucks a year and commit to cooperate on DNS security has also been renewed, with a strong implication that it will too become part of the contractual status quo over the coming year.

Americans are deserting .com

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.

Weak Q3 for the domain universe, Verisign reports

The number of domain names registered worldwide decreased slightly in the third quarter, according to Verisign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief.

The total of 362.3 million domains was down 0.1 million on the quarter. It would have been up had it not been for a 1.1 million decline in the combined .com and .net gTLDs, a pattern we’ve seen for the last several quarters.

.com was down to 156.7 million names from 157.6 million, while .net slipped below 13 million to 12.9 million, Verisign said.

Pre-2012 gTLD domains not including .com and .net were up 100,000 to 17.3 million and ccTLD registrations were up by the same amount to 140.1 million at the end of the quarter, the DNIB says.

New gTLD registrations were up 800,000 to 35.4 million, Verisign said.

Senator says domain industry “enables” Russian disinfo attacks

An influential US senator has accused major registries and registrars including GoDaddy and Namecheap of facilitating Russian disinformation campaigns.

Senator Mark Warner, the Democrat chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told registrars that “legislative remedies” may be required unless they “take immediate steps to address the continued abuse of your services for foreign covert influence”.

The threat came in letters sent to registrar groups Namecheap, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, NewFold Digital, NameSilo, and .com registry Verisign today.

Warner’s letters seem to have been inspired by Facebook owner Meta, perhaps the domain industry’s most prolific antagonist, and align closely with Meta’s views on issues such as cybersquatting and Whois access.

The criticisms also stem from a recent FBI seizure of 32 domains that were being use to proliferate fake news about the invasion of Ukraine and the upcoming US presidential election.

The Russian campaign, known as Doppelganger, used domains such as fox-news.in and washingtonpost.pm to trick visitor into thinking they were reading news sources they trust.

Warner tells the registrars (pdf) they have “ostensibly facilitated sustained covert influence activity by the Russian Federation and influence networks operating on its behalf”.

The main concern appears to be the lack of access to private information in Whois records. Warner’s list of industry sins includes:

withholding vital domain name registration information from good-faith researchers and digital forensic investigators, ignoring inaccurate registration information submitted by registrants, and failing to identify repeated instances of intentional and malicious domain name squatting used to impersonate legitimate organizations

Warner called for “immediate” action “to address the continued abuse of your services” as the US presidential election looms, and in its aftermath. Voters go to the polls November 5.

Verisign gets eight more years running the root

Verisign and ICANN have renewed their deal that sees Verisign run the DNS root, according to the company.

Verisign said the Root Zone Maintainer Agreement was renewed on October 20 for another eight-year term.

The RZMA is basically a technical services contract under which Verisign updates and publishes the root zone file (basically a list of TLDs and their nameservers) according to ICANN’s instructions. All the other root zone operators mirror that file.

It’s the first renewal since ICANN secured its independence from the US government in 2016, but Verisign and its predecessors have been managing the root since 1993.

The deal is separate from Verisign’s contracts to run .com and .net.

Some Guy wants to take over .com and .net

Some Guy has noticed that domain name prices keep going up and has offered to take over the .com and .net registries from Verisign.

The Some Guy recently filed a formal Request for Reconsideration with ICANN, asking it to overturn its recent decision to renew Verisign’s .com contract and award it to him instead. The RfR reads:

I seek to become a registry operator committed to making .COM domains more affordable and accessible to students, startups, and developers. The decision to renew Verisign’s contract hinders competition, limiting opportunities for more innovative registry operators like Asxit LLC to contribute to the digital ecosystem.

The request is accompanied by a 25-page, ChatGPT-odored analysis of why Asxit LLC would be a better .com registry than Verisign, which concludes:

The introduction of Asxit LLC as a .COM registry operator would bring significant improvements in pricing, innovation, support, and accessibility compared to Verisign’s current management. By focusing on affordable and flexible solutions, Asxit LLC aims to create a more inclusive and competitive environment for all users. This change would enhance the value of the .COM domain and support the growth of a diverse and innovative digital community.

In August, Some Guy with the same last name, who said he is a student at Liberty University in Virginia, said Asxit LLC should take over .net as well.

They’re not the funniest or craziest submissions ICANN has received over the years, but they might be worth a chuckle if you’re clock-watching on a Friday afternoon.

The sad part is of course that ICANN is now duty-bound to commit legal and board resources preparing a response to this request before throwing it out entirely.