Ever wondered what the impact of registry fee increases for a top-level domain have on registrations? Afnic’s Loïc Damilaville has recently published a paper attempting to analyse the impact Verisign’s increases in the registry fee for .com and .net have had.
In his analysis Damilaville, Survey and Market Intelligence Manager at the French country code top-level domain (ccTLD) manager, sets a number of KPIs over the five years to 2022 for both .com and .net – stock price, creation years, maintained names, deleted names, stock variations, creation variations, maintained variations, deletion variations, creation rate and maintenance rate.
Among his findings, Damilaville notes that while “revenue is faithfully following the gradient of the fee increases, and should reach $1.5 billion by 2024 or 2025” he also notes the “trend could be worrying if expressed in the following question: which should be protected, revenue growth or margins?”
Verisign may be one of the most profitable Nasdaq companies “will the Verisign shareholders, mostly hedge funds and corporate investors, prefer to maintain revenue growth or restore margins and thus profitability?”
“‘Customer acquisition costs’ are increasingly high,” notes Damilaville, “which could explain Verisign’s comparatively weak dynamic outside of North America: where .COM is not an ‘obvious choice’, the company does not seem to have chosen to invest the necessary resources to make it so.”
He concludes “the future performance of the .COM TLD will reflect the response of Verisign’s management to this thorny issue.”
To read Loïc Damilaville’s full report on the Afnic website see here for the English version and here for the French version.